A medium nation’s worth of electricity!

I’m not in support of Effective Altruism as an organization, I just understand what it’s like to get caught up in fear and worry over if what you’re doing and donating is actually helping. I donate to a variety of causes whenever I have the extra money, and sometimes it can be really difficult to assess which cause needs your money more. Due to this, I absolutely understand how innocent people get caught up in EA in a desire to do the maximum amount of good for the world. However, EA as an organization is incredibly shady. u/Evinceo provided this great article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/

Man, that hits close to home. It’s a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it’s weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.

Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.

• but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way ** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years

At this point the real plot twist would be if a social media site turned out good.

Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare’s services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?

Y’all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.

And now they’re actually Open Source!

Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium’s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let’s not kid ourselves. They wouldn’t need to openwash if most of their stuff weren’t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

It’s incredibly frustrating to try and figure out how this grift works. The company is bleeeing money at high pressure. The more users they get, the faster they lose money. Even if you’re a true believer who thinks their product is useful and will be ubiquitous in the near future, there’s no way this makes sense as an investment.

It could be a greater fool scam, but if you’re goddamn Softbank, Microsoft, or NVIDIA investing hundreds of millions, surely you are the biggest fool already? Who’s MSFT gonna flip their share to? Scrooge McDuck? A G7 member government? God?

Or maybe they’re expecting to become so ubiquitous you can’t live without ChatGPT, at which point they will jack up the price (the good old MS EEE/Oracle Hustle). I suppose that would parse, but the novelty is already fading and public sentiment is at a downward slope. Even if you’re a true believer, you’d have to beat the competition first. You could also hope for a magician to come along and suddenly invent chips that are an order of magnitude more efficient, but you’d still need to pay another king’s ransom to have them designed, manufactured and sold to you (and absolutely not to your competitors).

How do they get away with these bonkers numbers? They’re somehow going to make 20 times more revenue in the remaining year than they have until now? They’re going to nearly double their earnings every year? They’re gonna fucking invest seven trillion in TSMC chip fabs? These numbers are made up by a nine-year old. My burger restaurant where we use natural diamonds as grill charcoal is gonna be worth inifite plus one zillion brazillion skibidillion dollars next year. Please invest in it.

Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.

For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.

I don’t really miss the “psychedelics make you a better person” narrative. Mostly it just seems like some people perceive themselves as more egalitarian or antifascist after taking psychedelics.

The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.

Trailblazing, more like scorched earth policy.

Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Glorified markov chains $5000000000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my investors are dying

Correct! A “tenant” is defiantly what the obsession with the written word is in relation to white supremacy.

And not for a lack of tough competition.

Coming soon, my debut light novel I (39M) Was Kicked Out Of My Party And Called A Podcasting Bro Because I Didn’t Want To End Homelessness In The United States Fifty Times Over And Still Have More Money Left Than The Entire Continent Of Africa, So Instead I Had Factories Build Me Plagiarism Accelerator Chips So My Company Can Lose Money Even Faster. AITA?

It’s an isekai story of a techbro reincarnated in a world that’s just like ours except he actually has that much money. Then again, that might become reality sooner than you think. If OpenAI keeps up their pace, they will make that $7,000,000,000,000 in just negative 1400 years!

I’ll do one more. The three biggest companies by market cap ever have been Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA, the record being about three and a half trillion dollars each.

https://www.investors.com/news/technology/apple-stock-first-to-close-above-3-5-trillion-market-cap/ https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/05/nvidia-passes-apple-in-market-cap.html

Sammy boy here is (allegedly) casually suggesting an investment equivalent to buying 100% of the shares of any two of the three most valuable companies in the world at their peak valuation. If you have that kind of money, you could just skip the pleasantries, buy TSMC entirely and build like five identical copies of the entire company.

TSMC suit: “And is the seven trillion dollars in the room with us right now?”

Found a good one in the wild

@[email protected]

Didn’t you know LLM stood for Limited Liability Machine

Can’t the OSs resize the image by itself? IIRC Windows 9x could already do that.

I always have my windows tiled or maximized so I just keep an epty black desktop background.

My wallpaper is white and subtly stripe patterned and it was in a surprisingly good condition when I moved in.