somehnacct3757

The dutch auction doesn't solve the race aspect. There are plenty of situations where people can't buy tickets when they want - they're at work when the price is reached, driving, the webserver is at capacity, etc. Scalpers have the advantage in all these scenarios.

Secondly, people will pay more money once scarcity and FOMO kick in. I may want a ticket for $40 but scalpers knew X would happen somewhere around $50 so they bought all the tickets then. Am I not going to see the concert for $75 buying a scalper ticket? Not a straightforward decision to make! These are the sorts of inputs scalpers will consider when deciding X.

Complicating the situation is that I don't trust any of the companies making virtual assistants with this level of personal data; so the first thing I do on a new device is block the assistant's access to my location or any other behavior learning functionalities.

Again, X is not a price it's a demand level (for scalper tickets). Everyone can 'bid their price' and scalpers will still buy out the bottom of the auction and take control of the pricing.

Cuz the auction ran out of tickets so the price starts to climb as scalpers monetize FOMO. Regular purchasers don't know what the scalpers think X is for this particular concert. Even if you knew X, all you could do is try to buy a ticket right before the remaining quantity reaches X which guarantees you paid more than the scalper, but maybe not more than the scalper's resell price.

X is the moment scalpers buy up the remaining market and set their own prices now that they control the supply. They know many other ticket holders can't compete with them since they paid more money for their ticket.

X isn't the price in my solution it's the percent of concert hopefuls who will hold their nose and pay a scalper. Once there's exactly that many tickets left, there's no point running the auction anymore. Scalpers should use their bots to completely buy up all remaining tickets, as they do now, and then set them for a higher price on the secondary market.

Buying the first 1-X% tickets nearly guarantees you will pay more than the scalp price except for a thin band right before X where the prices are within the scalper's margin.

Basically this system only beats scalpers if everyone is richer than scalpers, which most concertgoers are not. If you're rich you might like the sound of this new system on paper but it's actually cheaper for you to stay with the current system and buy all your tickets on the secondary market.

I don't get what this has to do with combating scalping. This is just a new auction game to play. It levels the playing field for a time, as all new games do, but the scalpers will eventually win it.

In this case the game is to find X where X is the percent of concert goers willing to pay scalpers. Then you buy the bottom X% of tickets for the current price and list them for more money. This is easy to do because the auction site tells you the number of remaining tickets.

Since there's no supply of auction tickets left, scalpers can now set the price. And since they paid the lowest price out of any of the ticket holders, they hold all the power.

I can't say I know the full picture, but usually to get the severance package you have to sign away some legal rights and/or sign a non-disparagement.

So on one level it's a bribe.

That's by design and your comment is high praise

https://www.figma.com/blog/did-snapchat-succeed-because-of-i...

Yeah if the car manufacturers are gonna start selling trims that do all the really scary stuff for you (like cutting a hole in the roof), and basically include that work as part of the car financing, it should lower the difficulty of a DIY conversion and make it a more reasonable option.

The secret behind the van life influencers is that a nice loadout is easily six figures and they are rich people 'slumming it' for fun.

While the price point on this trim is high compared to base, they are just capturing some of the value previously going to aftermarket body shops.

The cognitive distortion 'catastrophizing' comes to mind.

For example you just imagined a made up scenario (this and that would have happened if X variable was different) and then accepted it as fact to justify a litany of observations about entire populations and subgroups.

This daydreaming is somehow 'more eggregious' than the contents of the article.

What about adult Heelys, can we normalize those rather than try this rent-and-litter startup scheme again?

Personally I would rather walk than share a helmet with N other scooter riders, especially in a climate like Miami's

I think the modern manifestation of journalist is an influencer, with an individual brand, who can support their journalism through their brand. Rather than needing to clan up with a newspaper and take editorial orders from the newspaper execs.

It's pretty easy to buy-in to all journalists being influencers, but it leaves open the question how do we make sure all influencers aren't journalists. What code or standard do journalists adhere to to elevate themselves over baseline influencer, broadly speaking. That's an open question and one I hope gets answered eventually...

This is a good idea. Seek rent from brands already on the platform and clear out all the people who got a checkmark purely as a status symbol.

Then the checkmark can be used to bifurcate two social classes with different Twitter rights.

I believe Twitter has two types of content: PR and comments. The problem is they both look like tweets and have equal standing on the platform. PR is the valuable part of Twitter and comments are, well, comments. Most newspapers and blogs (the antiquated PR publishing mechanisms) already learned comments aren't worth the trouble. Now Twitter can make the distinction too.

For example, if you're not paying to be part of the influencer class, your comments could be hidden by default. The influencer class can also have a more stringent code of conduct, making it easier to ban people abusing their megaphone. All without stepping into 'free speech' debates with Incredibly Online keyboard warriors, who will mostly be on free accounts and themselves have what they deem to be 'free speech'.

One experiment attached an artificial tail onto a chicken and the chicken shifted its stance and was able to walk similarly to how we expect dinosaurs walked.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3915051/

I'm old enough to remember when Facebook started extracting an IAP tax on their own app platform where none previously existed. So forgive me for enjoying this particular turn of the wheel.

I would think this is a lower bound too, since there's a lot of companies with long leases signed before the pandemic either eating crow or subletting until the lease expires.

And then if you count all the companies doing a return to office motion just to justify the real estate, it could go even higher...

I don't think we will know the true impact of the WFH era for another few years.

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders.

The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.

Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.

You're right, I guess they're a blend of the cross-promo strategy as well.

Signal's maneuver may be rational, but that doesn't make it good business. You can't just release a chat app into the wild. You need some strategy for how you will bootstrap users. If you build it they won't come.

Some chat apps bootstrapped by riding emerging markets with exorbitant SMS costs. Others bootstrapped by cross-promotion from existing popular communication networks.

Signal's strategy was to replace your current SMS app as-is and then incentivize you over to their network one contact at a time. It didn't work, for the stated reasons, which honestly sound like failures of product design and engineering more than anything else. Apple's Message app has the same strategy and it's working.

We haven't actually seen what Signal's next strategy will be, which is maybe a timing mistake as announcing a viable alternative could have taken some heat off the SMS retirement announcement. Or maybe there isn't a next strategy?

'The super secure chat network' is not a bootstrap strategy, it's a build it and they won't come strategy; so I think it's fair to remain bearish on Signal's future even after reading a rational take on why writing SMS apps are difficult.

The people mad at this show are the same people who memorized Silmarillion knowledge. That memorization act for many decades was street cred in the fandom. Now the fandom has opened its borders and rapidly taken in new members who don't share the same value system as the long-time fans, and the old fans are experiencing a devaluation of their dedication and a rejection of their culture. They very predictably try and gatekeep the material.

It's not unlike what happened when Disney bought Star Wars and struck down the entire Extended Universe. I suspect when Disney gets around to retelling some of the SWEU's more famous works, that their creative liberties will be similarly challenged.

Discord has /giphy and Slack does as well, although Slack's is via addon. Slack considers this addon an Essential App which gives it top billing on their marketplace.

If you think about it for more than 2 moments you will see that owning Giphy allows Facebook to see which chat apps you're using (via the api key for the app's Giphy integration) and who you're talking to on them (by attaching an id to each gif similar to how tracking pixels work in email.) Most chat clients automatically load images, triggering the tracker.

This gives Facebook unprecedented visibility into the user counts, usage patterns, and social graph of any chat app with a Giphy integration. These apps compete with Facebook's own chat apps.

It's funny that digital billboard space is the main reason they cite.

To me the much bigger threat was that Giphy had integrations into many other chat and messaging apps which Facebook also competes with. Buying Giphy gave them new insight into competitor usage. Facebook could see which chat apps you were using and who you were talking to on them. All they had to do was fingerprint the gifs you sent to your friends

Still can't get over the power draw for the 40 series. They recommend an 850W PSU for the 4090? A 750W PSU for the 4080? Who is the intended audience for these cards?

I never have this problem with the post-its on the Miro board

I switched years ago figuring it's just like my SMS app but sometimes I'll have more secure convos with other adopters. There was no buy-in cost.

Now that it's just some random chat app with its own protocol I could not be more allergic to their brand.

Hopefully they didn't need my user type for their flywheel.

Depends on the situation. If you're traveling, cancelling your card while away from home is a huge setback.

My list of ATM defensive rituals grows even longer.

For those who think time at ATM matters, consider a thermal camera like the one at the start of the video, concealed in the cabinet by fake panels. You enter your PIN, move your hand away to touch the screen seconds later, you're pwned. Thermal cam has your digits and vague sense of hand movements.

Cover the keypad with your other hand, take detours when moving your hand, and, now, pretend press a handful of random keys.

I will try inserting bogus numbers into my PIN ritual and pretend pressing them as part of entry. Should protect against hand movements and thermal imaging as well.