greenskye

If you don’t like Firefox mobile is there another ad blocking mobile browser that you’d suggest?

I mean I have seen people unironically claim the second scenario. And people seem to forever be attempting to claim 20+ year old women as ‘children’ whenever they are dating older men as well. Which, sure call the dude out for being gross, but don’t try to rob an adult of their own agency. That always came off as weirdly sexist against women to me. Like a grown woman couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted to make her own decisions. Which just felt like yet another way to control women, not actually protect them.

I always preferred the ‘Friendship is Optimal’ version. It’s a my little pony fanfiction in which a video game based on the franchise featuring AI achieves the singularity and creates a sort of digital afterlife. Humans can be uploaded, but the process is destructive, resulting in their real body’s death.

The afterlife created for them is uniquely calibrated to provide maximum contentment. Each space features a small number of other people (some real, some NPCs) following Dunbar’s number to ensure our minds can care about them. The people chosen are calibrated to mesh well with your personality.

It features interesting things for us to do, with enough challenges to keep things fresh and engaging, but not so many as to overly frustrate us. Basically it turns our experience into that of an idyllic version of reality.

That’s about as close a description of ‘eternal bliss’ as I can fathom except for the fact that by nature it’s not 100% bliss all the time. It’s just living in a world where you matter, can surround yourself with loved ones you gel with and can pursue your passions endlessly in ways that are personally rewarding to you. Even then I’m not sure how it’d actually keep working after a few thousand years or so.

It’s weird they’re pulling this card this early. You fully expect it to be a thing at some point, but you also wouldn’t expect it to happen until you had no where else to go and couldn’t relatively easily just replace it with a local option.

Did they become so stupid they can’t even pull off enshittification properly anymore?

I’d be more ok with this if the expensive specialists on board were actually making bank instead of really low wages.

Personally I don’t actually want physical media anymore. I just want digital media to actually be something I own.

Fox used to be known for this. Launching a lot of new shows and then axing them if they weren’t an immediate smash hit.

Isn’t Pokemon like… The biggest IP ever? Way bigger than Star wars or marvel or pretty much anything else? Not sure they’re actually hurting. At all.

There are also competing digital market spaces. You can only buy through Sony on PlayStation.

My wife’s workplace tried to have them do dream journaling and then had them come back and report back to the group on what they dreamed about. This is a fortune 500 company that you’ve absolutely heard of before.

Laundry machines and dishwashers are still some of the highest manual labor required as far as home appliances go. Load, unload, fold, put away, clean the lint trap, etc.

Compared to a robot vac that just does it’s thing on a schedule while you occasionally empty it’s dock and clean the filters, it’s not nearly as ‘automated’.

huge percentage of profit that theaters get for the first few weeks of a film’s release.

This is backwards. Theaters actually get very little percentage early on in the release and only get more later. Most early profits go to the film studio/publisher. Or at least this was how it worked ore-Covid. Maybe it’s different now.

Also, I worked in a big box store for years, and the situation you described was not the norm at all. There was maybe one or two shelves where that product wasn’t owned by the store itself. And those ones were loaded separately by that other company’s staff.

Maybe it’s more regional, but I work in this space. My company has these deals for our product and we work heavily with companies like Walmart, CVS, Target, etc. We’re in almost 100,000 stores and that’s how all of this works. We regularly interact with companies that facilitate these kind of set ups. Soda, candy, Pokemon cards, greeting cards, etc are all products that operate this way.

SBT (scan based trading) reduces the stores risk, by not having a large amount of capital tied up in product that hasn’t sold yet. It’s hugely popular in the spaces I’m familiar with at least.

Brother took me to a casino for my 21st birthday. I did a bit of research, so I only took in $40 and left my atm card at home.

I wanted to play the cool looking slot machines. Brother convinced me that roulette was going to be way more fun. It was a busy night, so it took almost an hour to get a spot at the table. And the minimum bet was $10. Roughly 3 min after finally getting to bet, I’d lost all $40, having not won a single time (even my bets on the colors failed).

It was so utterly disappointing, especially when the next person in our party got to the table and managed to keep their bets going for over an hour and left with a few hundred extra $ that night. Most of the night was me just standing around bored out of my mind.

I’m very thankful for that early experience. Later experiences were better, but also far more tempting. I attribute my ability to resist the temptation largely to how shitty that first night was.

I mean it varies. That definitely exists, but that’s not the only way (or even the majority way).

For one thing, most big box stores don’t actually own the product on their shelves. They basically rent shelf space to the supplier and only when the product is purchased do both sides get the cut. Walmart can’t arbitrarily lower prices on some (most) items because it’s literally not theirs.

This set up greatly simplifies a lot of the retail flow, so it’s more and more common (at least in the US). It’s mostly smaller stores that are ordering in product and in that case your example is correct.

Steam effectively does the same thing. They offer to list your game and then only get paid when it sells (minus some overhead fees). They aren’t pre-purchasing copies to do with what they want. And part of that contract is that they will list your game, but only if it’s the lowest price or tied for the lowest price. Otherwise you’re free to go elsewhere.

Which is again, because being available on Steam provides value itself and they aren’t interested in helping you cut them out the profits by undercutting the price you listed it for there. Which, explicitly is just an attempt to get the benefit of Steam without paying Steam’s fees. Otherwise all of these games would just never list on Steam at all. Nobody is preventing that. If they allowed this, more and more people would behave like people do today with bookstores, where they look for a book at the store, but walk out and buy it on Amazon instead.

This is a pretty common tactic in retail spaces. Walmart also won’t let you sell the same product that you’ve contracted to put on their shelves elsewhere for cheaper.

The general idea is that you are benefitting from Walmart’s market dominance for exposure and advertising. You can’t get that benefit and then encourage consumers to buy it elsewhere by listing it for cheaper than Walmart sells it for.

You can agree or disagree with that approach, but it’s not unique to Steam and it’s so far generally been held up as reasonable.

You’re forgetting the part where there are 6 boar spawns that respawn every 2 minutes and there are 15 people waiting on the next spawn.

Spouses yes, but only because things are generally in both names. Children no. They’ll try to lie and say it is, but it’s not.

I lost most of my faith in humanity with COVID. I lost all of my faith in my countrymen in 2024.

In 2025 I found out that even losing your faith in everyone still isn’t rock bottom. There are still somehow ways they can disappoint you even further.

Not sure what 2026 will bring at this point

I’m not totally up to date with AI, but are we even capable of running our current AI tech in a fashion similar to humans? My exposure to AI is so l stuff like chatbots, which don’t do anything until a user interacts with them. They aren’t sitting there thinking on their own. They aren’t proactive in any way.

My understanding is that it would be astronomically expensive to run one constantly with constant input. And I’m not aware of any of them even trying to run like that.

Are they doing anything like that?