“Pie fights”

Sorry, I thought the joke was implicit in your question, but the analog to “Lemmites” is “Piefites” which I think is just fine because say it out loud.

To be honest, the poster is “SPU,” so this is probably 90% to promote the site. (Not that I really care that much in this case, I like South Park and think episodes that have Muhammad in them should still be available despite religious extremists being upset.)

Well, I just nouned your verb right back to the way it was, checkmate.

You’ve just justified another $100 million in salary to David Zaslov.

All the people talking wonders about the “warmth”, “tone”, and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.

I moved to all-digital music-making and -listening in the 90s, and agree that a lot of the “analog” benefits are imagined or the result of misunderstandings how technology works.

But I think you’re missing the point. Don’t forget that noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition are all legitimate effects often intentionally applied to make music sound a certain way.

A cassette is objectively lower quality by sampling rate, reproducibility, etc, but you agree that it affects the sound. At that point, I think you have to admit that a contrary personal preference for cassette or vinyl is valid. It’s not objectively “worse” because many people actually and validly find those “bugs” to be “features.”

It’s fine to like the digital revolution, but I’m just identifying you’re making a value judgement, and others can rightly value differently.

Or more specifically, we are ashamed when we can’t afford things we need. We are saturated by right-wing propaganda that says if you don’t succeed, it’s your fault. So, like abuse victims, we internalize the shame of what is done to us.

It’s a message tailored so we don’t question the rich, and as an added benefit to them, trains the poor to not seek government systemic solutions to the inequality that creates their poverty.

I’ve seen this sentiment expressed multiple times, but you explained it beautifully. Our parents got to be people. We’re just resources.

I think those doomsayers will be partially vindicated in the coming months. You can go to Best Buy’s website and order a Switch 2 with no waiting line, no delay. The supply is outpacing demand. Because I think a huge part of the 6 million sold was pent up demand for a new console and the inevitable cumulative brand effect and population increase leading to a larger early-adopter pool.

Unless Nintendo somehow had the ability to increase supply in a way unheard of for launch consoles in the past, I think that they met that early demand, and now it’s going to slow down abruptly. Now they have to convince regular people in a bad economy to spend way more than normal for a Nintendo console, with no Mario or Zelda killer app.

Eventually it’ll be a great selling machine, but these early numbers are misleading.

Funnily enough I tried that too, still needed a code. Probably will be fine, I’ll try tomorrow,

Just FYI, they may be getting hammered. Tried this and to authenticate it sent a 15-minute-expiration 2FA code, which took 3 hours to arrive.

Hmmm, I have been skeptical of AI, but it looks like it’s getting smarter.

Thank you for submitting your final exam for AP American History. ChatGPT 5-TeacherEdition graded your Llama 6.3o answers to be 25% incorrect. This determination is only appealable by confirming an error in grading with a Gemini X-5-level grading-appeal service, with a Standard Reliability rating of 7.5 or higher. Our system notes from your records that this service is not available to your income tier.

Your future profession is selected as: Meat packer.

Have a nice day.

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.

Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?

The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?

Yes, but it’s legitimately different when you are a huge company versus a struggling artist. A company like Nintendo has the capital and staying power already to reap generational rewards from embedding their IP into a culture.

Yes, I opt out. The point of the scan is to (1) build a thorough database (although DOGE probably already did that, we just haven’t found out yet), and (2) to accustom you to your identity not belonging to you.

The second point is the real point of opting out - as soon as nearly nobody opts out, and they’ve made headway on a database, it will no longer be optional. Opting out in that sense is the only vote you’re going to get to cast against it.

I deduce that the one nerbal has now become a priceless commodity since the last person using currency now has cornered the nerbal market.

There’s precious little detail about what’s going on here, but I assume Curve’s NFC payment system hasn’t enabled Device or Strong verification like Google Wallet.

I’m honestly ok with that “lower security” as long as there are appropriate safeguards to only paying when the phone is unlocked (which it should never be outside of my control). But that itself seems to assume Curve won’t enable those things in the future, which is uncertain.