chrisco255

There are not 6875 roads named after Lana Del Rey. "Del Rey" means "of the king" in Spanish and is just a popular fancy-sounding name to use as a street name in subdivisions.

The Cheshire Cat example is more on target and was amusing to learn about.

Red meat is good for you actually.

Is it really hard for you to imagine that enshrining a cartel and wedding the government to it, centralizing AI even more than it already is, is actually the path that leads to the doomsday scenario you imagine?

You're asserting correctness with no facts to offer of your own, just speculation and your own biased assumptions.

What if consolidating AI into a highly regulated cartel, with no chance of upstart competition ruining their position, is the scenario that leads to the worst possible outcome?

Big Brother but instead of a government that controls you it's an AI bot that nudges you to insanity.

That's not really why foldables make sense. It's not for productivity, primarily, it's for entertainment. Videos and ebooks (and other long form text content) look better and feel better on a foldable (for the same reason we have e-readers despite having Kindle apps). Multitasking I'll admit is more useful on mobile now in the AI era than in the past. But really, a foldable isn't meant to compete with a Mac Air or similar. I don't even think it's really competition for iPads. It is nice to have the optionality and flexibility at all times and nothing is more on your person than your primary phone.

Passports aren't actually very comfortable in the pocket even then. They are clunky things.

Agree with this sentiment, after using the Fold 8, I don't want to go back to a phone that doesn't fold.

Some foldables do have poor ratios, admittedly, but none of the ratios are so bad that I've seen that you get a smaller picture in practice than a standard smart phone.

It is true that mobile oriented design killed a lot of great web designs from the 00s. But its not just screen size, thumbs are less precise than mouse cursors, necessitating larger buttons and click areas.

I actually read more ebooks with a foldable. It gives me more functional options for entertainment other than doomscrolling. Videos are also obviously better on the inner screen.

Even if it were true you would also have to design the app for when the device is rotated.

What app is going to design to flow nicely with a iPhone Duo but not a iPhone 18? Unless Apple has a 1.4:1 ratio across their entire product line, app designers have to deal with variation.

Also, when you rotate the device, the ratio changes. This is especially common when unfolding a foldable.

$800M a year is less than 1% of their quoted revenues at $100B+ / year. Claiming credits as revenue would be tax fraud. Credits to clients for services are counted as debits against

There are zero serious companies collecting $1000 on revenue and sending $999 as a cost of goods sold to Anthropic/AI. It would be unprofitable to even run a proxy to Anthropic on such thin margins. But I digress.

No company was banking $100 and keeping $99 in the "before times" either. These are fantasy numbers not even the most highly optimized software company produced. As an example, Slack famously went public in 2019 and it had revenue of $401M with a gross margin of ~79%, meaning they were pulling in $316M in gross profit. That is the figure before labor, administration, R&D, sales & marketing, etc. They actually operated on a net loss after factoring for those expenses, despite their high gross margin, which is common in high growth startups (Amazon famously ran losses or marginal profits until decades after their founding because they continuously reinvested in expansion).

Credits reduce revenue by all basic accounting standards. You can accuse these companies of fraud, it is within the realm of possibility, but it would also be <1% of their total quoted revenue, so not really worth the heat at the same time.

You are making conflicting arguments at the same time. There exist startups that are able to generate gross profit with some consumption of AI services, they are also able to invest nearly 100% of their capital into AI to generate those profits without needing to spend on traditional labor, and yet AI is not sustainable. By your own circular logic it is of course sustainable, but by grounded logic, you have to understand any business that goes from zero 4 years ago to $100B+ in annual revenue today with double digit growth rates is offering the world something of value. Anyone who has tried AI sees some value in it. There is some revenue and profit to be made here. Betting against that in the long term will just lose you money and sanity.

The vast majority of startups are not funded by OpenAI or Anthropic. They are not a significant source of venture capital. Meanwhile, OpenAI is pulling in $40B+ per year and Anthropic $65B+ per year.

You are mixing up valuations with liquid cash and you're also making sweeping statements about how those startups are spending their cash. A majority of a raise is not spent on AI compute.

Situational Awareness blew up because they used leverage to invest, and leverage is a great way to blow up any fund even if they were directionally correct about AI.

Do you know off hand what distance a run needs to approach before women and men are equally competitive?

And yet they remain so popular, curious how an egregious claim completely contrasts with reality.

FPGAs are improving exponentially so it is only a matter of time.

There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.

You'll be dead before disc rot takes effect on almost any disc kept out of direct sunlight and in a climate controlled environment.

Games don't need to be 1TB, it's just that companies no longer invest in trying to make games smaller.

Most towns in U.S. have historical downtowns with a main street, court house, library, police station, etc and a collection of retail stores, it just likely isn't on the main highway, you have to look it up but they're definitely very common in at least the bigger cities of the county they are situated in.

Some are rundown, but theres thousands that are well kept. They just aren't the main shopping hubs they used to be, mostly boutique stores, coffee shops, barber shops, etc.

Cidercade on Riverside in Austin is one of the spots I was thinking of. They have a pretty good selection of old arcades.

There is also Pixel Palace in Round Rock that has no cover but most games are 25 cents.

Austin Toy Museum has a bunch of arcades ($17 entrance fee). Austin Pinball Collective for mostly pinball.

Pinballz is good too but expensive and does the Dave and Busters model, however, most of their classic arcades are cheap to play.

USPS is run as a federally owned business. It was traditionally self sustained by postage fees not by taxes, but it is nice that it was from our country's earliest days, a key piece of infrastructure.

Nowadays mailing any letter is pretty rare as most people communicate via text, email, etc but it is still absolutely possible to do so.

And yes the red flag is to indicate a letter needs to be picked up for delivery.

There are arcades in Austin that charge a cover and just allow free play (typically subsidized by beverage sales). But some have the Dave and Busters model. The games are definitely more expensive than they were. In 80s and early 90s a $2 or $3 stack of quarters would grant a fair amount of entertainment.

Probably set her back $75 for not returning it.

Occasionally it would happen. It definitely wouldn't happen every time you went in. But I do remember going in with my brother and sister and parents and haggling over what 2 movies we were going to rent for that weekend. That in and of itself was a lesson in negotiation and was part of the fun of the whole thing.

In my small town Blockbuster was amazing. We had one or two video stores with tiny libraries and were poorly run before that. When Blockbuster opened we were ecstatic and mindblown by the selection. Blockbuster would often carry 30 or 40 copies of new releases and you could actually have a good shot at finding Jurassic Park or Batman or whatever the week it came out on VHS (this was early 90s). The mom and pops near me never did that and they were often disorganized and unclean.

Blockbuster may have not been the best for finding old niche classics but if your goal was to find anything mainstream released in the 80s or 90s it was great.

Many clerks were passionate about the movies even at Blockbuster, as it was one of the best places to get access to movies at a time when it was a lot of work and effort to even get ahold of a few hundred titles back then.

It wasn't a universal truth some employees in stores didn't really care and were just there for a paycheck but sometimes you found good ones that were passionate and friendly.

Nah, Americans were going to Vaudeville theater shows before movies ever came around. The classic theater experience was the norm. Drive ins became popular in the mid 20th century (they probably weren't even possible until transistor radio era).

Movies were good for awkward teen dates when it's probably a supplemental activity to hanging out between class or after school, but as an adult I think they are not great for first dates because you don't get the time to talk or interact. Still fine as a date night for a regular relationship.