It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

Yeah exactly. I’m not a biologist but I am aware that horseshoe crabs are harvested for their blood and its unique properties. How much evolution (in the last 450MY) have they undergone in terms of their immune system and other microbiological processes? We may never know but I think it’s quite a stretch to assume “none!”

The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.

How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.

Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.

Travis has an excellent video about the brown recluse. It goes into rather excruciating detail! He even covers the story about all the false attributions, including a map which shows how it comports with the spider’s range. Interestingly enough, people who live inside its range are much better at correctly recognizing the spider!

Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.

What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…

No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.

The main users of Canada Post are businesses anyway: junk mail. I get maybe one actual letter from a non-business per year. I doubt my experience is out of the ordinary. Subsidizing Canada Post out of tax revenue would just be subsidizing those businesses that use it to flood our boxes with fliers and coupons.

If we’re going to subsidize it then we should probably move to weekly delivery, rather than daily, and stop delivery of junk mail altogether. But that would cost a lot of postal worker jobs, which seems to be the main purpose of keeping Canada Post in existence.

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.

Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.

We can’t even get our own news on Facebook anymore!

Anyway I think a much bigger problem is the death of local newspapers which has caused people to ignore local politics even more so. Some of our biggest problems in society (housing, lack of community, alienation and depression) can be traced back to terrible decisions made at a municipal level.

I had actually heard about this game but didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s the first game ever published by Panic. This is a company previously known for exclusively publishing Mac software (mainly general utilities such as text editors, FTP clients, etc). I’m not surprised that the game is selling poorly given their lack of experience with game publishing.

The game looks very pretty but tactical RPGs are a niche genre. To market this game they need to get out there and get it in front of people who like these sorts of games. That means getting on forums and talking to people as well as sponsoring Twitch streamers who normally play these sorts of games.

Ever so, it’s a tough gig. I’ve seen streamers and YouTubers cover a lot of these sponsored games and many of them still flop because they just don’t interest the audience very much.

McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. I googled them all with the word brioche and there was news for all of them.

Thank you. Brioche buns are an abomination used by the fast food industry to trigger sugar reward signals and make their burgers just a bit more addictive. They’re not used with any good intentions whatsoever.

Even if you take only 10% of Canada’s land area, that still exceeds the land area of 160 other countries in the world, including many with far larger populations such as Pakistan (6x the population of Canada with less than 9% of the area). By the way, Pakistan is a highly mountainous country with more than half of its area covered by uninhabitable mountain ranges and deserts.

You didn’t address my points about investing at all. I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that governments are fighting against the construction of new subdivisions in order to protect the property values of existing single family homes. It’s not about stigma, it’s about the fact that too much of the upper middle class’s wealth is tied up in real estate and the government is terrified of jeopardizing that!

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land area. There’s no reason we should have a housing crisis, yet we do. The answer is to build more houses. A LOT more. And that will make all the other issues go away.

Yes, even those hated real estate speculators. They’ll stop investing in real estate when the value of their investments goes down because of oversupply.

We should also be looking to incentivize investment in the stock market. When people invest their money in unproductive real estate instead of productive stocks and bonds it makes the economy sick. It leads away from innovation and employment and towards unproductive rent-seeking, AKA Neo-feudalism.

The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.

I don’t follow those creators!

The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.

I remember hearing somewhere that people are more likely to tailgate someone on a bicycle if they’re wearing a helmet rather than not! That’s crazy to me!

It’s not just lumber. It’s cement, shingles, drywall, bricks, nails, screws, floor tile, cabinets, carpet, electrical, plumbing, lightbulbs, ventilation, heating, cooling, landscaping, exterior decor…

There’s thousands of different materials and parts that go into a house! Lumber is just the tip of the iceberg. Are you going to have the government run all of those industries? How do you deal with corruption?