It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…

I have been more excited about this game coming out than any other one in recent memory. The first game, while not being a great technological achievement, captured the vibe of the ttrpg really well and it’s one of only a handful of games that I not only completed but did so multiple times. The haunted hotel to this day remains the scariest game component I’ve played, and I’m a regular player of horror games.

I was so disappointed when they bogged down and went into development hell. I finally wrote them off because I’ve seen that happen enough times that I figured they just would never ship.

I was excited by the news that another company was taking it over, but the game narrative changed so dramatically that it’s really turned me off. I’ll do a wait and see on it once the reviews start coming out, I suppose, but it’s not something I’m excited about anymore.

If they work on the steam deck, I’m going for it. University lan parties in the computer labs with smuggled in beers while playing Warcraft were fantastic.

That is, until they figured out that the one winning strategy was to play Orcs and get blood ogres asap, then just swarm with them. After that, the entire game hinged on the fastest clicks and where you landed for your starting base.

I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.

This is an actual OMG moment.

The next Y2K style problem will happen on this date, January 19, at pi o’clock in 2038. I was really hoping he’d get to see that.

He was ironically taken too soon.

Followed by Ke2!! of course.

Fair point. I never tried the original switch. I only bought one once the OLED came out and everyone was raving about it, despite the fact that Nintendo didn’t give it the full 2.0 treatment. I had packed away my pc for a move and just never got around to unpacking it, and wanted something to play on. When I saw it had games like Diablo and Disco as well as Mario Cart, I decided to pull the trigger.

I ended up liking it enough that I went out and got the deck to try to work through my games backlog. Because of steam sales, I have dozens of games I’ve played for less than a couple of hours and some I’ve never even opened.

Of course, right after buying it I ended up buying Stray, BG3, and a couple of others, and still haven’t made progress on my backlog…

I don’t use screen protectors and have rarely noticed an issue, even on phones. I do use a phone case partly for the occasional drop accident, and partly because the phones today have such a low friction coefficient that they’re a pain to hold or place on a smooth surface. I considered ordering one for the deck, but when I travel it’s in a case and when I’m at home it’s not being used as an air hockey puck, so I decided it didn’t really need it.

When the OLED Switch came out, I ordered one as soon as they became available. It was my first handheld, and the advice at the time was that you didn’t need it if you already had one, but if you didn’t the OLED was the one to get. I enjoyed the switch, and ended up buying a deck not long after that.

I’m going to treat this update to the same advice that they made for the switch. Since I already have one, and since the internals are essentially the same, it doesn’t make sense to update after less than a year, and it’s not worth the hassle of trying to sell the old one.

What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.

To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.

Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.

I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.

Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.

On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.

The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.

They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.

Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.

If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.

I’d guess there’s a few reasons.

Threads was able to be pushed through other large commercial platforms, and onboarding was trivial for anyone coming through the portal.

Mastodon lacks that kind of exposure and the onboarding process of choosing an instance makes it feel more confusing.

As a result, Threads starts off with a network effect that is quite a bit more advanced than Mastodon’s. It has more high profile users that maintain an active account. It also claims to want to join the fediverse, which makes users think that they can easily onboard with Mastodon in the near future.

It really sounds like you’re looking for an LLM text generator. I prefer using direct NLP for many NLP related tasks, but I think what you’re describing is directly related to what LLMs do.

Of course, neither the NLP approach nor the LLM ones will benefit from a feedback loop of successful versus unsuccessful resumes. Advertisers and spammers can generate a thousand variations of the same message and throw them all out onto the internet, then just reinforce the successful ones and drop the others. That works because there’s a single ad shop and hundreds of millions of users who don’t get together to compare their Temu ads. You, on the other hand, are dealing with a handful of employers, and each of them may have different criteria. A resume that gets you a job coding at a bank is t the same as one that will get you in the door at Apple or Google. You’ll have to reinforce with mostly gut feeling or the help of friends.

Do sonic tanks have one mapsquare greater range than turrets, making choosing House Atreides an I Win button?

It’s been about 30 years since Dune 2 came out.

I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.

That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.

I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”

That’s exactly the kind of bug I’ve come to expect from their games. It’s usually a couple of patches in where they figure out that you bumping into your companion should get them to move, or you having the ability to tell your companion to move.

I couldn’t count the thousands of hours I’ve logged on Bethesda games, but they’re the reason I have 200 gigs of save files every time I play an RPG.

I’m waiting until a patch comes along that addresses performance on the steam deck. I am pretty flexible when it comes to graphics quality and frame rates and such, but the current reviews are not looking playable.

As a point of reference, I played hundreds of hours of Daggerfall with all the joys of getting stuck in a wall only to be killed by guards, and jumping over a pit in a dungeon only to fall into the Abyss Between Worlds. I’m a TES fan from the early days and I know how bad they can be on release. I just have a lot more to do in BG3 before I feel pressure to try something new.

Yeah, my client crashed when I was trying to edit it. Thanks for the reminder!

There should be a full write up from a lawyer - or, better yet, an organization like the EFF. Because lemmy.world is such a prominent instance, it would probably garner some attention if the people who run it were to approach them.

People would still have to decide what their own risk tolerances are. Some might think that even if safe harbor applies, getting swatted or doxxed just isn’t worth the risk.

Others might look at it, weigh their rights under the current laws, and decide it’s important to be part of the project. A solid communication on the specific application of S230 to a host of a federated service would go a long way.

I worked as a sys admin for a while in college in the mid-90s, and it was a time when ISPs were trying to get considered common carriers. Common carrier covers phone companies from liability if people use their service to commit crimes. The key provision of common carrier status was that the company exercised no control whatsoever over what went across their wires.

In order to make the same argument, the systems I helped manage had a policy of no policing. You could remove a newsgroup from usenet, but you couldn’t any other kind of content oriented filtering. The argument went that as soon as you start moderating, you’re now responsible for moderating it all. True or not, that’s the argument made and policy adopted on multiple university networks and private ISPs. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a company like facebook or reddit which have full control over their content. We’re talking things like the web in general, such as it was, and usenet.

Usenet is probably the best example, and I knew some BBS operators who hosted usenet content. The only BBS owners that got arrested (as far as I know) were arrested for being the primary host of illegal material.

S230 or otherwise, someone should try to get a pro bono from a lawyer (or lawyers) who know the subject.

Edit: Looks like EFF already did a write up. With the amount of concerned people posting on this optic, this link should be in every official reply and as a post in the topic.