DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

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  • 181 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • The central Mexican indigenous empires were obliterated by a combination of civil war and disease before any sizable European colonizer populations had moved in. Cortez “conquered” the Aztecs in the sense that the remnants of the remnants of what were left surrendered to him as the most heavily armed surviving army.

    The Europeans then brutalized the survivors beyond imagination, but the vast majority of the deaths occurred before then.



  • Game Pass was always doomed from the start. It’s not a Netflix situation where there’s functionally infinite content out there that would otherwise be more difficult/expensive to procure, so the price point of a subscription was never going to work long term. Why would you pay $30/month to play AAA releases when there’s only ever 4-6 AAA releases in a given year, and you probably only care about maybe 2 of them at $60 a piece? Why would you pay $30/month to rent indy games that cost $20 to own forever? You’d be better off taking that $30/month and throwing it into a savings account to pay for future games and pocketing whatever you don’t spend every few months.

    Phil Spencer is a prime example of failsons never facing consequences for their ineptitude even when they’re objectively fucking over their fellow capitalists.



  • Tesla is only worth as much as it is because of Musk though. Tesla’s stock price has historically been inflated to unfathomable bullshit levels by small investors dumping all their cash into Tesla because Musk ran around screaming about how they’ll be on Mars in twenty years and now’s the time to get on the bus. Up until his ego made him publicly flame out and go off the deep end he was the ultimate hype man CEO.

    Sure, he’s a toxic asset now, but how many people dump all their Tesla shares the second he gets fired and craters the stock price when the company doesn’t have any real fundamentals to fall back on to survive?

    For context, Tesla’s EV/EBITDA (value over earnings, to simplify a complicated formula) is currently hovering around 100x. A “healthy” value is closer to 10x. That means that Tesla shares are currently priced assuming that Tesla makes nVidia look tiny in the next 10-20 years. It is completely disconnected from objective reality.




  • Whether or not you go into cyber security, it’s very worth it to try and find a more niche skill set to market yourself with. The market is very saturated with JavaScript frontend people and Python backend codemonkeys, not so much with SREs, infrastructure engineers, and machine learning engineers (your mileage will vary depending on which job market you’re in here, but it used to be wide open and most flavor-of-the-month AI engineers are obviously leaning towards LLMs instead of neural networks in my experience).

    It does also seem like non-FAANGs are starting to steer away from leetcode problems for interviews which is an advancement for those of us who don’t want to memorize algorithms to get a job, but again your mileage will vary.


  • The entire AI industry is massively unprofitable right now, completely propped up by investor hype and news articles continuing to claim that superintelligence is right around the corner. The actual real world output is… uh, some tech startups are now shitting out unmaintainable proof-of-concept codebases for their dogshit business plans slightly faster than before? Companies paying $200/month/head to make their developers pretend to use Copilot? The only people consistently hyped around it are the capitalists desperate to remove labor from their equations altogether to deal with the rate of profit falling, and much like previous attempts at mass outsourcing it’s just going to blow up in their faces when they have to re-hire a bunch of people to unfuck their efforts to not have to hire those people in the first place.






  • The difference being the Soviet-captured Nazis were forced at gunpoint to contribute to their R&D projects, being treated as prisoners before either being imprisoned or executed. NATO made its first supreme commander an SS member, put so many Nazis in the West German government that there were actually a higher percentage of them there than in the actual Third Reich, and let von Braun live a long and comfortable life as a free man.


  • This was always what was going to happen when they rolled out the SAVE plans. The entire thing relies on the government never once deciding to reneg on their end of the deal, and the second they do you’re left with a fuckton of principal on the loan still with no recompense because you were assuming that regular payments would result in forgiveness decades down the line.

    This is also why the only real method for fixing the cost of college is immediate forgiveness of all federally owned loans followed by mandating cost reduction for all public universities, but then porky can’t print trillions in interest and administrative fees over the next 50 years so it was never on the table.