It’s annoying that its driven by ad revenues, and made more dumb by the fact that if everyone can decode it, then they’re still advertising over sex and violence. So the whole endeavor is pointless.
But I don’t think it will cause any harm. Humans have been using slang, code, and memetic language to obscure meaning from others and identify their in-crowds since the dawn of human language. Some of it is dumber than others, but it won’t cause any harm.
My first thought
I never really posted on reddit. The apps I used to lurk all stopped working to one degree or another, and more and more of the content on reddit is just bots karma farming with AI slop and reposts.
Made it pretty easy to stop going there.
Thank God for Tylenol.
For years I had no idea that Steven Crowder and Dave Rubin were different people. I found out when one of them got divorced from a woman and I was so confused cause I was sure that guy was gay.
If people would have gotten this upset back when it was Medi Hassan and Joy Reid we might not have gotten here.
Flirting can mean a lot of different things and it can be taken differently by different parties, it’s going to be tough for anyone here to diagnose it beyond the fact that you don’t seem to feel comfortable with it. That’s what’s important.
For future reference:
If you find out something about your partner/relationship that doesn’t comport with your original understanding, and you’re not OK with it, you need to re-evaluate the whole relationship.
Whether that’s infidelity, lifestyle changes, identity changes, secrets, lies, values, kinks, etc… You need to either leave or figure out some ground rules you can both live with.
Best of luck.
Imagine you’re finishing in 8k, so you want to shoot higher resolution to give yourself some options in reframing and cropping? I don’t think Red, Arri, or Panavision even makes a cinema camera with a resolution over 8k. I think Arri is still 4k max. You’d pretty much be limited to Blackmagic cameras for 12k production today.
Plus the storage requirements for keeping raw footage in redundancy. Easy enough for a studio, but we’re YEARS from 8k being a practical resolution for most filmmakers.
My guess is most of the early consumer 8k content will be really shoddy AI upscaled content that can be rushed to market from film scans.
I haven’t read the DOT code in a while, so I genuinely don’t recall if they’re mandated, but I recall that all my trucks had them.
This is of absolutely no use in preventing people from a close merge on the passenger side where the driver definitely cannot see. Often the driver’s first indication that this has occurred is the crunch. I’ve never seen one of these accidents that wasn’t completely avoidable.
I used to do fleet management. It’s so bad. I never would have believed how many people take clearance signs as suggestions.
And the class D (regular license) drivers test should include a “show me where the truck driver can and can’t see you” portion.
So you have a pair of strawmen there.
If that off the cuff, apples to oranges, example is too silly by a third, how about the entire US canibus industry? They’ve been prohibited from using the federal banking system and seem to be making ends meet alright.
If you work in the space then you know they’re going to have more and better solutions down the line. The EU is looking for solutions to circumvent the big US processors. Alipay and WeChat pay can already circumvent US credit card processors, and have made significant inroads in the US.
I AM taking the position that unless they do something… Anything… A first turn out of the driveway to be 10% less dependent on alternative means of payment processing, there will never be a path to being 100% free from coersion.
They could be doing things today and right now it doesn’t look like they are.
Valve is estimated to be a multi billion dollar organization with a per head profit of 3.5 million. They have an extremely captive audience that’s deeply financially invested in the platform and would jump through a lot of hoops to keep using it. Pretending they’re helpless and shouldn’t be troubled to start steering in a pro-consumer direction just because they don’t have a 100% solution today is defeatist bullshit.
If 50 Cent could sell album for crypto from his nothing website a decade ago I feel like Valve has the technical wherewithal to implement one of 1,000 preexisting checkout solutions in the short term.
I think selling steam giftcards (an existing solution they’re already using) at a markdown to expand that business would be pretty viable for a company that regularly marks their products down by up to 90%.
They could literally do both of these almost instantly as preferred options while still accepting the big cards.
The short term strategy would probably be to introduce Y payment processor and make it the preferred method of payment. Encourage it’s use industry wide and encourage consumers to adopt that method as widely as possible.
If that takes off… Then they can tell the other processors to get fucked.
I don’t think we should be giving corporations a pass for caving to challenges from authority whether it’s hard or not.
Whether it’s valve pulling NSFW content, universities expelling students, or CBS firing people over political speech it’s all anti-consumer behavior driven by a financial incentive to cater to a bully with too much power. They’re all just rolling over and showing their belly rather than deal with a problem in the short term.
If Valve or Itch had paired that statement with a statement about what other payment processing options they were pursuing that might someday lead them back to a pro-consumer position I’d be on board for granting them some grace on the issue, but to the best of my knowledge from the articles I’ve seen, their position has been “tell me what to do Daddy”. If I’m wrong about that I apologize and I’ll start reading different sources.
There’s just too much capitulation to anti-free-speech behavior and I’m not ready to give anyone a pass at this point.
Just say you make bat soup. Don’t try to make it sound fancy.
I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone who loves their ISP since the early days of transitioning from 56K modems.