Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

The equity is merely an estimate; it's no longer a traded company so a public valuation is not applicable. The value is still a valid valuation, just as DJT's valuation of his properties were "valid," but it's not as if you can sell portions of the company tomorrow to generate cash that will settle in three days, like you could with Tesla. And the debt is secured by the $19B valuation, so it's not in addition to the equity; the company is "worth" $19B but caries a debt burden of $13B making it's liquidation value $6B (not really book value since that includes "good will" and "future performance", not just the value of it's real, personal, and intangible/code/patent properties).

Considering that Threads was not trademarked by Meta before their launch (or, at least, isn't listed on their Trademarks page ) it is a massive fail on their legal department.

It doesn’t matter how good a secondary product is, most users will stay with the default out of a mix of (lack of) expertise and apathy. What this tells me is that the average user makes Google substantially more than this amount after all other expenses are added in.

Google (well, Alphabet) is worth over 1.5T dollars. They could have paid this and made the search engine better. You imply that Google is a poor (general purpose) search engine, but Google became Google by being a better search engine than all the others and, afaik, hasn’t really lost that position. It’s been enshitified by the increase in advertising volume and by the natural language model which benefits non-technical users at the expense of more syntactically exact power users, but neither of those speak to the core algorithm.

I think I read your title differently - as in, gravity would ebb and flow like wind or rain or barometric pressure or temperature. In normal days the gravity might be mostly constant, or may fluctuate a few percent as the day goes on, rising and falling over the diurnal cycle. But at times a gravity storm could blow through, causing wild fluctuations from just a few percent (or even reversing!) to a couple hundred percent, causing travelers to lose their un-secured cargo or to be pinned in place until the storm subsides. Locals would know the dangers and have things easily tied down, or beds for riding a gravity storm in relative comfort, but any huge storms people would evacuate, praying that the fluctuations wouldn’t destroy their homes or farms. (And now I’m imagining the end of O Brother Where Art Thou with the cow on the roof)

While this is certainly an interesting thing to know, there was no quantitative data provided about the discoveries. While a bunch of rare earth metals wandering around the atmosphere is certainly not a common occurrence, knowing whether we're talking about parts per billion or parts or parts per undecillion is a substantial difference (if Google didn't just lie to me, there are around one quattuordecillion molecules in our atmosphere, probably give or take a couple orders of magnitude).

That’s an urban legend. Prices are aggregated and cataloged by ITA matrix (purchased by google/alphabet a decade ago). The only time a price change is when the airline itself changes the current retail price.

Now, if you’re using a third party service - like Priceline or Travelocity - to check and book tickets (which is a terrible idea, btw) they may track your history and alter their price, but the master index (served by google flights from ITA matrix) will not change for you, personally, or your specific ip or other identifier.

Note: Airlines will adjust their prices based on interest/purchases, so if you’re hitting a flight with requests to bill so hard that the airline thinks the flight is popular, or you go through the reservation process far enough to “fill” a particular fare class, then the price will change - but it will change for everyone, not just you. Similarly, Amazon will raise pricing during a buying surge - but it’s for everyone, not just you.

On the (mostly) plus side for untracked browsing - as long as it’s so tight that you’re hopping ips and avoiding any back end fingerprinting of your system - Many merchants do source-based pricing. Ex: if you go to book certain services direct vs following a referral link (like via a cash back site or association) you my find different pricing. Using and AARP link to some travel services will result in a 25-30% price increase, to offset the 20% rate coupon they offer, plus a little coin for themselves. Other sites will also trigger cost basis alterations - especially for services which are hard to identify or compare a fixed cost.

what wore him this fast down

Customer support. Or his waifu left him.

All my main numbers VoIP are Google. I’ve got two others at a large (Canadian, iirc) provider.

I switched to Joplin after dumping the fully enshittified Evernote earlier this year. Joplin’s entry and reading interface is straight up terrible, and I sorely miss the auto-ocr search from Evernote, but it’s overall layout basic enough to be usable.

A second sim is the only options for some. Either ChatGPT or one of those requires a real-world mobile number. Anything on a VoIP is blacklisted. I literally can’t sign up for it or a couple other oddball services (like the Dunkin’ app*) because I refuse to divulge my carrier number to anyone but my family and 2-3 close friends. I have a (former) mobile number and two former landline numbers on VoIP that are my real, active numbers but some services simply refuse to use them.

I’d use my freebie backup sim for registration, but many use that # as their required+sole 2FA “security“ so signing up with it is useless as I’d have to use that phone every time I interacted. Maybe it’s time to look into eSIMs.

Discord seems to be ethereal. If you're on when things are happening, cool. If not...it's just a wasteland, like walking into a bar at 10am and seeing holographic echoes of last night.

usenet was probably the first community I found on the internet, and I think the format is still a good template for human interaction. Reddit was, in a way, very similar in it's "old" and pre-enshittified format and I believe that's why it found success. It's less about discovery and more about deep dive, niche communities where you can connect with real and remote people with the same interests.

I use the internet for so much more than social media; the only real downside (aside from the loss of communities like usenet/reddit as a common point of connection) is that the search engines have tipped over and are getting worse rather than better. They're falling into the AI/ML autocorrect disaster hole where specific, technical queries are dumbed down to an 8 year old's level of perception because that's what the average user is searching for.

I guarantee I can "drop" more than 120g after a cup of morning coffee. Checkmate scientists.

Here, though there's more than just public transit - there's a huge shopping mall/complex just half a mile north of this area. That's a very reasonable walking distance for nearly everyone, especially given how flat this area is. Of course, you still have to navigate 3-4 multi-lane highway crossings, but at least it's close.

Out of curiosity, I googled how many people it takes to support a single grocery store, and the top 5-6 links appeared to suggest between 3500 and 5000 people are needed. That sounds pretty close to my town, though we have a couple of monster stores so we may be closer to 8000:1. Restaurants and bars are going to be similarly constrained, though, so the diversity of options in such a small apartment complex will probably stay on the lean side (again, given little or no on-site parking and a generally car-centric city surrounding the area).

Somehow I expected this to be outside of the Phoenix area; like, on its own. It looks more like an excuse for a high-density living concept, and going "no cars" means not having to set aside any space for parking; you just pack more people into the same area to make more money (~$27,000/yr for a 950SF, 2 BR apartment, if you're curious; you can't buy here). It's literally an apartment complex that takes up a single "block" in Tempe. I guess it will depend on how happy you are with the shops they can attract to a community with only 1500-2000 people and no parking for outside customers.

ALL media is easily and continually manipulated to social engineer your world view. If you can name an outlet which is free of sociopolitical bias on sociopolitical topics I’m all ears. Every act of commentary is exposing a position, whether it be left, right, corporate, status quo, centrist, or any other area of ideology. Not recognizing that every source has a bias is dangerous.

They should start by rounding them up and putting them in controlled areas. We can call them Ghettos. Then they can control everything and everyone going in and out, keep them under close watch. Then we can start an orderly cleanse. A Final Solution to the problem with Palestinians.

This sounds so familiar…

Amazing how that platform continues to exist

There's a lot of really engaging shot-form content on the platform; most people assume it's just a firehose of what you see when you log in anonymously.

and people actually get their news from there

It's a poor substitute for a healthy set of reading, but it's also a way people put things happening "now" online. Not unlike choosing your broadcast or print media, the results can be really interesting or really misleading (or both; okay, often both)

Textile processing has always extracted a terrible price from the environment. The difference today is that there are orders of magnitude more humans, owning orders of magnitudes more pieces of clothing. When your wardrobe consisted of 8 pieces of clothing and you shared an entire continent with millions or tens of millions of people, production was pretty labor and material intensive but you had the whole earth to dilute it.

I'm currently (For a couple years now) on a merino wool kick. Is the farming of merino sheep, the transport to (mostly Vietnam), washing, combining, dying, fabrication, and then shipping half way around the world resource intensive? I'm sure it is. But I'm tired of throwing things away all the time, and the wool is comfortable and (so far) durable. It's also pretty expensive, but I'm hoping that the durability and resulting low(er) impact is a net gain.

It's not worth the cost. There aren't enough 20+ year old macs in the wild who need to connect to a DVI monitor to make the assembly commercially viable after tooling costs.

Though it's a very good representation of why non-standard connection schemes are a terrible idea. I would say that outlawing black mock turtlenecks would be an appropriate punishment, given that Steve Jobs is dead and we can't kill him a second time. But that would also seem unfair as it would mean we would have to all see Panos Panay shirtless all the time. That just punishes the rest of us.

Are you looking at the same picture? I see a crosswalk from the bus stop side to the median at the nearest on-ramp access, then from that median to the sidewalk under the freeway.

It's clearly a lot of crossing to get to the bus stop, but the problem here is where the bus stops, not the current crossings provided. There are few other ways to provide non-grade access to a multi-lane freeway. I'm not sure of any which would be workable given the proximity of land use which prevents a cloverleaf, and the addition of one would probably make the crossing even more treacherous. If the bus were simply to add a stop on the (photographic) north side of the highway, up near the commercial entrance, that would be the nominal "solution" and require nothing more than a sign.