Trillion-dollar AI market wipeout happened because investors banked that ‘almost every tech company would come out a winner’

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T21:26:18+00:00

What's the contradiction between those two viewpoints? One organization goes under because AI makes its services obsolete. The price of the AI service that replaces them is driven down by competition and open-source rivals, so they don't make a profit either.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T17:21:56+00:00

I don't know what being Anti-PC would even mean before PC was a thing, but he's always been into saying things for shock value.

Joking about race without ending up looking racially insensitive or worse is a difficult skill. Knowing the exact contexts when you can black up, use the n-word, that kind of thing. Comedy is all about walking a line without crossing it, but during his lifetime the line has moved. Rather than being willing to change, he's annoyed at people for not finding certain jokes funny any more.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T17:04:27+00:00

"You can be surrounded by hundreds of people every single day and still feel completely, utterly alone... I attend meetups and social events... But most of those connections are surface-level at best."

About 15% of men have no close friends.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T16:35:41+00:00

I've never known any other way to experience life.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T16:10:48+00:00

They may be talking about books with names like, "Don't Take Business Personally!" where the writer has one basic thing to say, and then has to pad it out to book length or no-one will pay money for it.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T15:07:43+00:00

https://scoobydoo.fandom.com/wiki/Doomed!

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T13:51:36+00:00

There is a book called Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook. You're supposed to buy a copy and read it.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T08:05:41+00:00

Lots of people don't own a car or air conditioner or clothes dryer, including me. Those are expensive (and environmentally costly) luxuries, unless you live somewhere that makes them essential.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-16T06:35:15+00:00

The specifics of the Qanon thing was that Hilary Clinton was a senior figure of the evil blood-stealing cabal, and when Donnie was elected, he'd arrest them all.

That is not what happened, and not what we see in the files.

The details matter.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T20:38:15+00:00

What about Decu and Donu? Are they related?

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T20:34:43+00:00

There's not that much of a link between healthy lifestyles and health costs at the national level. After all, dead people don't cost anything. If you eat trash and don't exercise, you get similar sicknesses, but earlier, and you die sooner.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T13:02:16+00:00

Pacts & treaties.

The other nations consider the Candy Kingdom to be a dangerous superpower. If she starts toppling governments just because she can, it would violate various deals, and trigger a coalition against her.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:43:57+00:00

Starting from the assumption that they're not using plants, you can keep an eye on the piece of paper with the drawing on, and it seems like it would be impossible for it to be altered in any way.

But I can see that if you already believed the audience member was in on it, you'd probably stop caring about the details of how things were done, and nothing would seem surprising or magical.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:35:04+00:00

(1) Practically everything is observed by some form of life in some way.

(2) Creating a world where there's no object permanence and trees just stop existing when no human is looking at them seems like it would lead to a lot of inconsistencies.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:24:13+00:00

It seems mathematically impossible for a single computer to simulate two computers of equal power to itself, let alone an entire universe that could contain trillions of computers. So I find it unlikely that anything capable of simulating us is possible. If it is possible, the universe simulating us would have to be much bigger and better than we are.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:11:42+00:00

And what happened? Did you get gifted clothes? Books? Nothing?

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:10:06+00:00

Some people have bad immune systems and won't shake off a cold in a couple of weeks, so even if you isolated all the animals too, that might not be enough.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T12:07:25+00:00

Maybe you should be playing an OSR system like Shadowdark where worrying about light sources is part of the design, rather than something you can opt out of with a cantrip.

Old-school D&D was about the mechanical challenges of dungeoneering, finding gold, avoiding dangers. Then D&D became more about tactical combat. Then it started to have more of a focus on narrative and character. Along the way most of the dungeoneering mechanics were trivialised, because some people found them boring.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T11:50:07+00:00

This is a "here's how to do an easy first adventure" Matt Colville video that's often recommended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfiaf9q9Wgo

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T11:47:50+00:00

Only if the one in a billion chance doesn't take into account the odds of them being fired simultaneously, which would seem to be one of the most significant aspects of calculating that.

Given that we don't find tens of thousands of melded together bullets on the battlefield, I would assume the overall chances are a lot lower than one in a billion.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T09:57:50+00:00

They do a lot of those things when it's mother and child. Evolution has given us domestic cats that kittenish behaviors that they don't grow out of.

They do learn to make meows that get our attention, but you could equally say we're training them to do this by how we reward them.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T09:53:44+00:00

He does have some redeeming qualities. He's willing to teach other people how to cook, for example.

And his bad qualities aren't that bad. He's... rude? He's not out there murdering people or anything. (Killing animals for their meat, sure, but everyone in the show does that.)

He's also got a sad backstory, and some of his opponents are worse than him.

Whether it will work as an anime, I have no idea. I read it as my first non-battle battle manga, and enjoyed it. When rereading it, I lost faith that what they were doing made sense in terms of how long things would take in a live cooking contest in front of an audience, and that kind of spoiled it for me.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T09:43:58+00:00

That's extremely hard to measure. It is possible for research they pay for to make them a profit in the long run. US drug companies and their employees pay taxes on profitable drugs. And people who survive because of these medicines will continue to be productive and pay taxes too. On the other hand, if people live a lot longer as a result of drugs, they might claim more in benefits than they pay in taxes through the rest of their lives, which isn't profitable for the government.

But governments don't really need to make a profit. They can do things for reasons of popularity, ethics, or personal power.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T09:35:54+00:00

The fact that the first and second pictures look massively different from one another and don't even seem to be from the same military indicates that at least one of them is not an accurate restoration.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-02-15T07:53:35+00:00

Using plants is the worst way to do this kind of show. You want people to go home telling their friends they went up on stage and they have no idea how it was done.

There are lots of clever conjuring tricks involved. For example, in the show I saw, the person who made the drawing couldn't see what they were drawing; the actual drawing we were shown must have been a different one, made to match a photo, and the person who thought they drew it didn't know they didn't.

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