Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I’m getting a lot of use out of something I don’t mind spending a little to support it. That’s all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.

AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn’t regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.

Yeah, this IPO will probably go just fine and a bunch of wankers will make a bunch of money. That’s what it’s all about, after all.

I suspect they’re looking into ways to keep their staff loyal, they’ll be considering things like controlling the supply of an addictive drug, implanting behaviour modification chips in their brains, explosive collars, holding their kids hostage. Shit like that. Because why else would anyone be loyal to these vermin?

I’d probably try something similar if I could, I’m not in the US though.

I’m guessing it’ll do pretty well, at least initially. There’s got to be a whole lot of investors out there who just want to get in on the new big tech IPO and still jump in. I’m not convinced the WSB crew will really move the dial. Yeah it’d be an amusing and salutary lesson if the IPO shits the bed but I can’t see it happening. I’m no expert tho!

They’ve had investors who were willing to pay into a loss-making company. Could be that they sold investors on the idea that it will be profitable at some point in the future but it needs to be funded while it grows. Could also be that the value they see in it is not just financial - the ability to influence opinion, harvest data, stuff like that.

Why on earth would they give those sweet pre-IPO shares up to the unwashed masses if they thought there was even a remote chance the IPO would at least break even?

I suspect it’s because they’re worried that their users are going to short them and encourage others to do the same, so they’re trying to get them involved and committed. They don’t want WSB causing shit. My guess is that the share prices will do pretty well, at least initially. There are plenty of ignorant investors who want to get in on the next big tech stock. Just a guess though, I don’t know enough about this stuff to invest in stocks myself.

Yeah, my parents didn’t have money for expensive toys either. I had a small transformer that I swapped off a kid at school for all my marbles (including the large steel bearing). It transformed from robot into tape cassette and I thought that was just cool as fuck.

When I was a kid in the 70s, a lurker was a turd that had failed to flush away properly. As in : “Dad left a big beefy lurker in the toilet again.” How language changes.

Yeah, and you can’t use karma as a good metric for determining relevance or accuracy. I contributed ten years of mostly fairly good quality posts but my highest rated was a joke about gangbangs.

Yeah, I just had an email inviting me to participate in the IPO. I’m not a US resident though so that won’t be happening.

I wonder if his assets include infowars? Would be another nail in coffin of his hopes if the families gave it to the knowledge fight guys. Funny as fuck, too.

I’ll admit I was a bit taken in by the image his PR people created, a few years back before he decided he didn’t need them. I think I wanted to believe in the benevolent billionaire bullshit, that maybe a rich person wanted to do some good in the world. Dumb fuckin me, won’t be making that mistake again.

I’d completely forgotten that we all discovered the president has a nasty little mushroom dick. I’d actually manage to put the image of that man’s malformed cock out of my mind. You just reminded me. Bastard.

I mean, people paid to attend trump ‘university’. There are always plenty of fools who will buy stupid shit. I kind of feel sorry for the students though. Most people are pretty young at university age and many are still forming their perspectives. Getting away from home and meeting new people is an important part of this. Plenty of people from conservative families go away to uni and start to see that they’ve been brought up on bullshit. This is an attempt to stop that from happening - the ‘anti-woke’ shit will attract more conservative students which will reduce the chance that any of them will encounter different views and cultures so they stay in their ignorance bubble. Don’t want little Johnny or Jane coming home from school an anarchist! It’s sad for the students though who will come away in massive debt with a useless degree and have less opportunity for healthy change.

now AI will be trained on your craziest “private” conversations

I have no idea what horrible thing this will do to an LLM but I’m kind of curious.

AI just lowers the barrier required for people to be able to express what’s in their mind

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with people being about to express themselves, but that’s not necessarily art. With art the barriers are things like talent, creativity, and hard work. Lowering those barriers mostly creates rubbish. Typing ‘Make a pic of an x fighting a y and make it look cool!’ doesn’t make anyone an artist.

Bank errors in your favour do happen, or at least they did - one happened to me maybe twenty five years ago. I was broke and went to the bank to pay in my last £30-something of cash to cover an outgoing bill. Stopped at the cash machine outside my bank to check my balance was sufficient now, and found that the cashier had put an extra 4 zeros on the figure I’d deposited. I was rich! I was also in my early 20s and not thinking too clearly I guess because my immediate response was to rush home to get my passport with the intention of going abroad and opening an account into which to transfer the funds, never coming back. I checked my balance again at another machine closer to home and the bank had already caught and corrected their mistake. Took them maybe thirty minutes.

After a bit of occurred to me that I was lucky really, because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing and the funds would have been traced very easily and I’d have been in deep shit.

But yeah, anecdotal, but shit like that did happen. I assume it’s more rare these days as fewer humans are involved in the system, and fewer people use cash.

Yeah great innit? I always used to be a reader and I’ve been rediscovering old favourites and reading a bit of new stuff. I have limited screen time after work and life etc but I’ve also been doing the same with films. And there’s a load of games on my list too. I’m not saying reddit was a waste of time, but I’d spend an hour or two a day on there, was constantly in ongoing conversations with a bunch of people. Lemmy is much less so. Social media is good n stuff, I’m gonna stick with Lemmy for a bit - but yeah, books etc :)