Right but the bubble of rightness you speak of is usually only assumed to include the company staff. Really powerful CEOs have their board inside the bubble too, or even public investors. But Elon thinks the customers work for him too. That’s really beyond the pale.

There’s so goddamn much to swear about in these fucking times we live in that I really respect anyone who can still hold their shit together enough not to.

Fuck you, Jack.

Musk sheepishly suggested that he didn’t mean “advertisers as a whole.”

“Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands,” he told ad giant WPP CEO Mark Read during an interview on Wednesday. “What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”

How is that “not cool?” I don’t understand how he can possibly object to a company spending their advertising dollars wherever they damn well choose to. He repeatedly makes it clear that he feels entitled to their budgets. There is zero basis for that. I truly cannot fathom how he can be so dense about this.

No need to get vulgar, there, chief. I’m just a satisfied customer who doesn’t understand why watching YT videos has to be such a deathmatch with their engineering team all the time. I’ll bet that the majority of people here get the value from YT that Premium charges for, and a sizable number of people here pay for some streaming service that they actually use less than YT. Yet because YT is a website with a free tier, the arms race of ad blocking / countermeasures is never ending. People wind up hating YT and talking about them like the third reich, when it’s really a service that all of us love and depend on. Shrug?

It has been cringe in the extreme to watch them debate whether they are giving their babyman chieftain enough billions to appease him.

I pay for YT Premium. It’s 100% worth it based on my very high usage of YT for entertainment and learning. Best streaming service bargain by far. Netflix’s pile of shitty self-made movies is a ripoff by comparison.

Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.

“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.

He realized that if you have a large number of people on remote control, you can do pretty well with Ponzi schemes.

Right? In all science fiction, artificial intelligence starts out better than us, and the only question is whether it can capture some idiosyncratic element of “being human.” Instead, AI has started out dumber than us, and we’re all standing around saying “uh what is this good for?”

I actually have a child, unlike some of the people downvoting you, and I agree with you. I’m not willing to watch my kid’s educational environment destroyed by smartphones all for the sake of some “but muh child” panic. My kid doesn’t even own a smartphone. Anyone want to tell me that I’m somehow risking their life? If there’s a shooter at their school, me knowing what’s happening in real time will not save their life.

As a footnote, the top commenter hinted that if someday we could solve the gun / danger thing, THEN we could remove smartphones. But the reality is that that panic will never be satisfied. There will never come a point when people say “I’m content that there are no dangers to my child during the day.”

Ban fucking phones in class. Maybe it’s just me living through my whole childhood without one just fine, but ffs people don’t even see how addicted to them we’ve become. Kids deserve a chance at at least a few years of life without that.

He’s trying to bring attention to his ongoing campaign to show that OpenAI are somehow evil crooks that cheated him and are going to destroy the world. He projects much.

It’s good to know that they have pretty good longevity. One thing complicating this is that panel technology has gotten better and better during that time. There’s a graph on Wikipedia plotting how much better the various types of panel have gotten since the 70s. A lot of them have doubled in output since the early 90s.

So on the one hand, these old panels are outputting 75% of what they started with, which is good. But on then other hand they are only outputting about 37% of what new panels could.

Not that we should throw old panels away. There’s plenty of sun to go around (though I guess the average homeowner only has one roof to use). It’s just interesting how fast the tech has improved and how that might factor in to some longevity calculations.

You don’t want to be sending current up into the grid while workers are repairing it during a power outage. If you just plug some shit into your bedroom outlet, that will happen. You need to disconnect your house from the mains. Whole house generators are old news, but no, your bedroom wall plug isn’t rated to power your whole house, and no, you aren’t just electrifying your own wiring if you try to do so. Whole house generators aren’t hard but they aren’t this easy. And you should be suspicious at how magically simple it sounds to just plug a dynamo into your wall to power everything. It’s the kind of thing we would love to be true because it’s so elegant but there’s a little more to it.

Unenforced is a little different than unenforceable.

Society is unfortunately still functioning where I live.

If you have no bicycle safe routes then sadly you should not be biking. Taking it onto the sidewalk not only endangers you in all the ways described in this thread, it also endangers pedestrians. Someone said they wouldn’t care about getting hit by a car coming out of a driveway, because that’s slower than a car on the street. Fine. But if I step out from my the huge bush my neighbor keeps on the boundary of our driveways, onto the sidewalk, and you crash your bike into me I’m going to feed it to you.

Years ago I worked at a bike repair camp in Burning Man. We got people’s bikes working again by the hundreds. The occasional dickbag would try to bring his gas powered scooter or whatever in and we’d send them packing. I remember one guy was like “I’ll just borrow your tools and do it myself” and he got thrown out.

There are lot of such toys on the market. They are electric. But they don’t resemble bikes in any way. I get the idea that they are mistaken for e-bikes when people ride them on our mixed use trails which are clearly marked for pedestrians and bikes only, not motor vehicles. People think anything electric is allowed. They are driving shit the same weight as a 125cc motorcycle in between pedestrians. And guess what? These vehicles go really fast so they are more dangerous than anything else on the trail, and they don’t mix into traffic well. The fools riding them are constantly weaving through passing everyone so they can GO FAST! WANNA GO FAST!

My city has amazing bike infrastructure: mixed use trails with no cars, bike lanes on all streets, tunnels and bridges over major thoroughfares (really it’s pretty insanely good and yes it’s in the US of fucking A).

People still ride on the sidewalks like morons. They ride the wrong direction in the bike lanes.

Bike infrastructure is essential but also not totally sufficient. You need a significant enough number of people using them that there is a culture for it and tribal sharing of knowledge around it.