DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

There’s a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.

Sure there is. An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.

Pass nationwide legislation that restricts owning housing for commercial purposes beyond a certain threshold, and put rent controls in place pegged to 20% of the median income per town/city. You’d eliminate 95% of homelessness before the ink was dry, massively increase homeownership rates, and be the most popular politician of an era.

It’s not even an ebil communist plot, and it’d still be more effective than giving even more money to private developers on a pinky promise they’ll build something people can afford, just trust them this time.

If you want to support your favorite artists, buy their merch while at one of their live shows. That’ll put literal orders of magnitude more cash in their pocket than streaming their music ever would, and you get a dope ass t-shirt out of it.

Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.

Sounds like a skill issue to me /s

You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don't make money.

So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in 'upgrade' for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn't have been a problem to begin with.

And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You've made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.

Only the most sane and functional economic system.

To add to the list of non-chud reasons to dislike it, the plot is driven entirely by characters doing the dumbest thing possible at every turn on all sides for little to no reason.

Someone once pointed out the First Order could have ended the movie in the first ten minutes by having their dreadnaught just shoot the Resistance’s capital ship instead of the planetary (read: entirely stationary) base first, or by having the dreadnaught’s fighter screen/escort ships deployed instead of just chilling and doing nothing the entire fight.

That’s what 70 years of exclusively using your military as the enforcers of neo-colonialism does. Turns out what works for leveling a low-tech guerilla hideout in Vietnam or Afghanistan isn’t so effective when your opponent has comprehensive SAM networks.

Horny answer incoming:

If you’re into ERP at all, f-list.net is unparalleled in catering to just about anything you can think of that isn’t outright illegal. There’s a lot of trash as you can imagine, but you can build out a fairly intensive kink list and scroll through an absurd number of character profiles and channels for just about anything.

Well, I’d rather the day be sooner than later.

Agreed, but we’re not the ones making the decision. And the people who are have two options: move forward with a risky, expensive, and potentially career-ending move with no benefits other than the system being a little more maintainable, or continuing on with business-as-usual and earning massive sums of money they can use to buy a bigger yacht next year. It’s a pretty obvious decision, and the consequences will probably fall on whoever takes over after they move on or retire, so who cares about the long term consequences?

You run months and months of simulated transactions on the new code until you get an adequate amount of bugs fixed.

The stakes in financial services is so much higher than typical software. If some API has 0.01% downtime or errors, nobody gives a shit. If your bank drops 1 out of every 1000 transactions, people lose their life savings. Even the most stringent of testing and staging environments don’t guarantee the level of accuracy required without truly monstrous sums of money being thrown at it, which leads us back to my point above about risk vs yachts.

There will come a time when these old COBOL machines will just straight die, and they can’t be assed to keep making new hardware for them.

Contrary to popular belief, most mainframes are pretty new machines. IBM is basically afloat purely because giant banks and government institutions would rather just shell out a few hundred thousand every few years for a new, better Z-frame than going through the nightmare that is a migration.

If you’re starting to think “wow, this system is doomed to collapse under its own weight and the people in charge are actively incentivized to not do anything about it,” then you’re paying attention and should probably start extending that thought process to everything else around you on a daily basis.

Translating it isn’t the difficult part. It’s convincing a board room full of billionaires that they should flip the switch and risk having their entire system go down for a day because somebody missed a bug in the code and then having to explain to some combination of very angry other billionaires and very angry financial regulators why they broke the economy for the day.

Train gang needs no justification

Games have to talk to your operating system to have it tell your GPU to draw lots of funny pictures that come together to make up the graphical portions of the game. Game developers do not want to do this directly, because talking directly to the OS is hard. As such, games talk to graphical APIs like Vulkan or DirectX to do the hard bit for them.

For years almost all games used DirectX, which is made by Microsoft. This gave Windows a virtual monopoly on PC gaming because they weren’t about to let their competitors use their API. Then Vulkan came out, which was designed from the beginning to be OS-agnostic, sending us to the promised land of games that could (with some other efforts) run on any machine, anywhere.

Feudalism never ended, it just transitioned from a bunch of failsons inheriting land titles to a bunch of failsons getting middle management jobs through nepotism. Every company larger than 50 people is a vast internal labyrinth of lords-in-everything-but-name jockeying for promotions, accolades, and raises by inflating their roles, and the best thing you can do for yourself is find a position that isolates you as hard as possible from having to deal with that yourself lest you end up spending 50 hours a week working to get one over some petty rival of your boss.

Company whose business model is based entirely on running an enormously massive and expensive LLM and then serving content with it publicly for free with no greater ideas on actually turning that into a business is going under. In other news, water still wet.

I’ll admit I thought the AI bubble was going to last longer than a few months (and inevitably FAANG will probably artificially extend it until even they have to admit there’s not a ton of productive real world uses for it), but I suppose late stage capitalism has to speedrun the boom-bust cycle as it gets increasingly desperate for profit.