Dream Factory by Greg Egan | Hacker News Reader

Dream Factory by Greg Egan

clarkesworldmagazine.com

25 pointsokasaki7 comments

Pretty good. I didn't really understand what their hacked app did or how it got the implants banned. Maybe it requires closer reading to figure out than I had time for?

I also think that there is no way a YouTuber with 600k subscribers would sell an endorsement/review for 50 dollars. I would expect a figure in the low tens of thousands of dollars for that kind of thing.

Same, I re read that section and still didn't grok it.

Re: fees, I have some family members with millions of TikTok followers -- they're not making much money.

Just napkin math - guessing that a typical YouTuber gets between half and double their number of subs as views on a video. Obviously it depends a lot on the video and YouTuber - but, again, napkin. 300k - 1.2m views on this video you are paying 50 dollars for. Conversion is between 0.1% and 1% (I think this is pessimistic given content type). It's worth 2 dollars to them?

Low end the value is 300000 * 0.001 * 2 = 600. High end value is 1200000 * 0.01 * 2 = 24,000.

A channel this size is likely someone's full time job. The professional running this channel is going to give something worth tens of thousands of dollars away for 50 dollars? I don't believe it.

Guessing this is set a low triple-digit number of weeks in the future. Plenty of time for YT/TT values to fray and shift.

I believe the hacked app itself did nothing more than freeze the cat's bluetooth if installed. However, the video they also published suggested the hacked app would enable the kind of behavior BLTZ was promoting, meaning no one would want to admit using the app except for journalists who'd then discover it was malware. From there, the political machine takes over to ban the implants to prevent the clear, cruel impact caused by both the mythical and real applications.

hm.. it's spelled out pretty explicitly

> Better Living Through Zoophilia. His long loony screed praising the utilitarian benefits of genetically engineering animals that would enjoy having sex with people.

> Umm . . . you’re not suggesting we frame him for the app?

You may want to double check the definition of "explicitly".

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