Sure, that's the embrace part of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Get their users to use their platform with all of the pre-existing networks and content, so that it's a viable alternative to Twitter, and they bring such a big community that the major established players want to interact with it.
Step two, declare that they've got some great ideas on how the space can be improved, but activitypub doesn't support them, and they don't want to wait around for the standard to update; we need to bring these improvements to our users now! So they unofficially "extend" the standard, so everyone on Threads is getting the new gee-whiz feature, but they can still talk to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else's experience is a little bit worse. And while we're at it, maybe we add something that feels bad for both sides when a non-Threads user interacts with a Threads user. So gosh, I mean, why not go ahead and migrate your account over to Threads? You don't lose anything; you still get to interact with your existing networks, nothing bad happens, just that now you also get the cool features.
Step three (and this one happens much later), the overwhelming majority of users are using Threads, because it does all the cool stuff that Mastodon can't do. So now we've got another great idea, but unfortunately, this one just isn't compatible with activitypub. So, we're gonna give you guys some heads up in advance, if you want to stay connected, you gotta switch over to Threads, and if you don't it's just gonna be a wasteland because all of those users aren't visible to you anymore, and your grandma is gonna be sad that she can't talk to you because you won't take the simple step of signing up for a free account.
This isn't idle speculation. Google did this exact thing with XMPP a decade ago.
Beyond that, it'll try to summarize a book, but it often can't do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can't really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that's in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.
One thing I found that's really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like "Are you sure about that?" It'll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It'll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like "Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob" and it will very frequently say you're right and make up a story along those lines that's plausible within the text. It doesn't work on really popular stuff; you can't convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it'll tell you details that it's making up whole cloth with complete confidence.
A martini is gin and vermouth, maybe with some bitters if you like
A vodka martini is vodka and vermouth, bitters again optional
A vesper martini is gin, vodka, and lillet blanc
Any of the above can be made "dirty" with olive brine if you want
Anything else is a cocktail in a martini glass. No shade if you like apple schnapps, lemon juice, and vodka, drink what you like, but it's not a martini.
A bunch of my favorites have already been listed, so I'll just mention the one that wasn't: Antichamber, a first person puzzle game that's probably somewhat like Portal in terms of how it requires you to rethink your assumptions about how space works, but it's a very different game, both mechanically and in tone. I don't want to give away too much, but it's a mix of weirdly unsettling elements (although it is by no means a horror game), a design that's actively trolling you in ways that will make you laugh, and mechanics revelations that will have you scream "Wait, I could have done that this whole time?!" It's one of those games that I wish I could delete from my memory and play for the first time again.
Sure, that's the embrace part of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Get their users to use their platform with all of the pre-existing networks and content, so that it's a viable alternative to Twitter, and they bring such a big community that the major established players want to interact with it.
Step two, declare that they've got some great ideas on how the space can be improved, but activitypub doesn't support them, and they don't want to wait around for the standard to update; we need to bring these improvements to our users now! So they unofficially "extend" the standard, so everyone on Threads is getting the new gee-whiz feature, but they can still talk to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else's experience is a little bit worse. And while we're at it, maybe we add something that feels bad for both sides when a non-Threads user interacts with a Threads user. So gosh, I mean, why not go ahead and migrate your account over to Threads? You don't lose anything; you still get to interact with your existing networks, nothing bad happens, just that now you also get the cool features.
Step three (and this one happens much later), the overwhelming majority of users are using Threads, because it does all the cool stuff that Mastodon can't do. So now we've got another great idea, but unfortunately, this one just isn't compatible with activitypub. So, we're gonna give you guys some heads up in advance, if you want to stay connected, you gotta switch over to Threads, and if you don't it's just gonna be a wasteland because all of those users aren't visible to you anymore, and your grandma is gonna be sad that she can't talk to you because you won't take the simple step of signing up for a free account.
This isn't idle speculation. Google did this exact thing with XMPP a decade ago.