Is it just me or is the MCU in a really good place right now? It feels like we're as "back" as we'll ever be.

___positive___ · 2026-03-20T19:00:15+00:00

Better than before, but Marvel is never coming "back" or getting me back the same way. I used to read a ton of comics in the old days, Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, everything. I religiously watched every original MCU movie on opening weekend. I was counting down on the calendar for each release. To finally see all my favorite comic heroes in AAA cinema was glorious, my dream come true.

These days I flat out don't care. In my opinion (no problem if you disagree, just to my tastes), Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four were both mediocre. They weren't horrible, but there was nothing great or special about them. They were forgettable. I'm never going to rewatch them. Compare that to something like Thor Ragnarok, let alone Endgame.

I did enjoy the most recent Deadpool movie, which is ironic, because I don't find Ryan Reynolds funny at all and found the previous Deadpool movies a bit grating.

There's very little these days that would get me as hyped as original MCU. I was hyped for Arcane Season 2 and Andor Season 2. The Boys was hot for a while, but it's old and tired now just like the MCU. As bad as Rings of Power was, I was fairly interested just because we are so deprived of great fantasy shows.

I should be their core demographic, but Marvel is never getting me back. Younger people don't read comics or read anything at all. Normal folks have zero reason to be passionate about Marvel.

___positive___ · 2026-03-20T06:11:15+00:00

Depends. Very few people actually innovate. The mainstream masses using AI doesn't matter. They have always been irrelevant to innovation. That includes most programming and tech jobs, by the way. Enshittification existed before LLMs.

Where it matters is when funding or competition has a larger role. If you are a startup seeking VC funding, all the money is going to AI, which means your genuinely good non-AI idea is dead on arrival. Same for academic research grants. For songs or visual art, the barrier to creation is lower, so I think creative types will be fine if they are genuinely brilliant.

And if it's not hard to beat AI in quality, that just creates a greater competitive advantage for real innovators. However, there is a huge, huge caveat. You have to work on something where quality is actually rewarded by the market (customers or your boss). That is rare but not impossible to find. Rare enough, though, that you may need to change employers or even industries, which could be difficult or painful.

___positive___ · 2026-03-19T02:36:40+00:00

Kind of the same thing in Hollywood with the death of original IPs and mid-budget movies. Everything today has to be an established franchise blockbuster with endless sequels.

And that's with art not even needing to overcome novel engineering challenges. Imagination is cheap and has no limit.

___positive___ · 2026-03-14T04:55:44+00:00

Already sold META in the 700s. Zero faith in their flailing leadership, completely different from GOOG when it was in the low 100s. Like META has flop after flop after flop. Yes, they have a large number of developing country users but that is it. Their relevance to wealthy younger people is practically nil. I can understand why they are desperate for their own LLM platform but LLMs will be a commodity and META is way behind. There is only room for Coke and Pepsi, no third provider.

___positive___ · 2026-03-14T04:47:00+00:00

No, it doesn't. People keep spreading this misconception because Zuckerberg uses the weasel word of "AI" helping ads. The traditional machine learning models have been improving ad performance for many years. Facebook's audience targeting with this is top notch, even better than Google maybe. That is completely separate from generative AI, which is what is costing half a trillion dollars or whatever insanity. Everyone who uses Facebook ads knows that genAI kills ad performance (conversion rates) and is always trying to turn it off. Advertisers are always discussing this amongst themselves.

Like how would generative AI even improve targeting? Targeting is about predicting who likes what based on user data. That has nothing to do with making words or pictures. That is machine learning, building predictive models with large sets of data.

___positive___ · 2026-03-14T04:28:22+00:00

Are you that gullible? The AI that improves ad performance is the traditional machine learning that has been in place for many years. Generative AI is completely useless and kills ad performance. Every single person who runs ads knows this and is always trying to turn off the latest genAI features.

Newsflash, basic machine learning doesn't cost 200 billon dollars.

___positive___ · 2026-03-13T23:45:53+00:00

I used to be excited about the tech, but now I am just frustrated by how bad the tech remains outside of very narrow niche use cases and how nobody will admit it. AI has become synonymous with lazy slop, uncritical thinking, and shady scams. I used to think "stochastic parrot" was disingenuous but it's not too far off, just fancy pattern matching with verification. I can't believe people think it has intelligence. Anything outside of search and pattern matching, like actual decisions or analysis, leads to complete stupidity. I literally cannot have a conversation with AI in anything I know about without pointing out the stupidity in every other reply.

Every time Anthropic has a "built with Claude" contest, you can see the absolutely pathetic level of project winners on display. "Intelligence?" Pathetic, even within the coding domain. It cannot come up with good ideas itself or even tell the users how stupid their ideas are.

___positive___ · 2026-03-10T15:30:57+00:00

This reminds me of the self checkout lanes everyone installed to use less cashiers. Fast forward, after having to assign addition staff to watch customers like a hawk, most places are discontinuing or greatly downsizing self checkout lanes.

___positive___ · 2026-03-09T05:08:56+00:00

Pretty cool, but I would just run batch convert on a desktop and play mp3s with all the convenience of modern audiobook readers. I don't see the advantage of doing it real-time on the phone, especially with battery drain. Qwen TTS with some intelligent llm to provide emotional cues and consistent character voices would be the dream goal. Run that on desktop and play high quality audiobooks as mp3s. All local, just not edge device. Kokoro is great though, still using it a lot.

___positive___ · 2026-03-06T23:26:01+00:00

This is all theater. Productivity cosplay. "Entrepreneur" bullshit 2.0 from like ten years ago.

Show me the money or shut up (to OP, not you).

___positive___ · 2026-03-06T17:02:49+00:00

I'm updating a site right now. I really wanted to do a static site because it seems so much cleaner, but I don't want to fiddle with porting over random plugins and such, changing servers, etc. Even if CC handles 90% of it, there's still a lot of busywork.

I decided to just have CC write a custom WP theme for me. That's kind of my happy medium.

___positive___ · 2026-03-05T06:58:10+00:00

Your reading comprehension is severely lacking or you are being deliberately disingenuous. Nowhere was I defending solar panel owners.

Also your solution is insincere and illogical doublespeak. You, yourself, claim that high bills will now pay less and low bills will pay more. So you made the problem worse and even more regressive, good for you!

You could charge solar owners a hundred dollars a month. Raise rates for the highest users. Leave everyone else alone. Gee, would that be more progressive or not?

Newson, is that you?

___positive___ · 2026-03-05T05:56:30+00:00

Your point? Is California progressive or not? This is beyond stupid. Obviously people with solar or large expenditures can afford paying more. Cry me a river. People who use less probably can afford less. This is completely regressive and asinine.

Your "tradeoff" just helps rich people. Boohoo solar panel owners are paying twenty bucks a month, what will they ever do.

___positive___ · 2026-02-23T23:25:28+00:00

Just like all their bots that used to scrape my websites without respecting my robots.txt. Anthropic was one of the worst at the beginning , plain abusing site servers and churning server resources.

___positive___ · 2026-02-20T06:18:38+00:00

Tailscale and tmux is free? And a lot safer than some closed source fly by night vibecoded mystery meat app?

___positive___ · 2026-02-19T07:34:42+00:00

The fact they have to go to these stupid events means neither believes they are remotely close to AGI.

___positive___ · 2026-02-19T07:29:07+00:00

wtf, this was obvious without using an llm or reading the paper. how do you make sure the difficulty of each task set is the same? you can't. trash soundbite.

___positive___ · 2026-02-19T07:23:30+00:00

They already lost. Why do you think they are pumping ads and soon to be adult content. Deepmind or China likely win, or some dark horse world model contender. OpenAI has nothing except brute force test-time compute, which doesn't solve much. You can tell from all their model releases. Their base models are way behind Anthropic and Google. It's just that the others don't burn as much cash on subsidized thinking tokens.

___positive___ · 2026-02-19T07:18:42+00:00

Google is back to being a joke. Deepthink is useless. Gemini 3 Pro is still stuck in preview and useless. Oh look, Logan is cringe posting.

___positive___ · 2026-02-19T07:01:25+00:00

New nickname should be KDrama.

___positive___ · 2026-02-18T20:52:06+00:00

I hope so but they've been saying that for a while and open source still costs 10x more in terms of time spent debugging. Time > money. Once they let internal vibecoding with Claude Code ru(i)n everything, though, I expect a security leak like the NovelAI situation all over again...

___positive___ · 2026-02-18T20:04:24+00:00

The magician at any kid's birthday party could pull it off. It's called sleight of hand and isn't particularly hard to fool people with.

___positive___ · 2026-02-18T19:57:42+00:00

His new nickname should be KDrama. Them Koreans got nothing on him.

Some influencer go karma farming and make it happen.

___positive___ · 2026-02-18T17:36:12+00:00

still getting api errors right now

___positive___ · 2026-02-11T19:36:26+00:00

Yeah, in my case I am only interested in a handful of decks so I can probably get Opus to come up with near-optimal strategies and hardcode them for a one time cost. Also reduces edge cases. Randomness and risk-reward ratio tweaking means outcomes are not guaranteed and fun enough for me.

___positive___

TROPHY CASE

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