Has this story ever been confirmed by Target directly? As this happened in America and her father was outraged about it, it would have been awfully convenient, to “blame” the algorithm for “discovering”, she was pregnant. It takes quite a data analyst to figure out trends before someone even knows they are pregnant. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a pattern for someone if they know they are pregnant and are just hiding it from their dad.

Good bot!

https://youtu.be/iHfJRON3b-w

Enjoy 😉

Oh, I didn’t mean „morally disappointed“, but disappointed in his inability to brutally grow the business instead of wasting his time with petty crimes.

She is giving Tom Wambsgans with Lukas Matsson, human punching bag vibes.

If you’d be born wealthy, it would be pretty stupid to listen to them explaining how to get rich, unless you want to piss away your and your daddy‘s money. Elon hasn’t made it quite the way (but he is getting there), but Trump Sr. must be very disappointed.

If you are a permanent employee and get a good salary I can follow your argument, you are a cog in a machine and get reimbursed regularly. But if you are hired project by project and get paid some lump sum (and probably not a good one), then exposure in credits and on IMDb is really valuable.

He didn’t have the liquid capital to buy Twitter, either, that’s his problem.

Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.

Economists who want to use the platform to discuss economist topics? Why should public figures hide their identity on all their accounts?

I cannot understand this either: we have an everything app, it’s called our homescreen, why would you use that to launch another one?

Destiny 2’s migration from battle.net to Steam on the other hand …

I know this mantra and I agree for most utilities and consumer goods.

But Activision is barely functional anymore. We don’t tend to look ahead, but Activision’s pipeline is all dried up. They’ve driven a lot of their cash cows into the ground or fell out of the zeitgeist, like Tony Hawk’s, Crash Bandicoot (yeah, some 30- to 40-somethings may have fond memories, but the series has no pull factor anymore like Mario and even Sonic still do), Spyro (same thing) and Guitar Hero. Movie adaptations have fallen out of style, which have been most of Activision’s output in the 2000s and the movie-adjacent IPs, that are still pulling numbers like Spider-Man aren’t licensed to them anymore.

Blizzard has more or less (paradoxically more and less) the same problem: Yes, they are currently remembered for their Diablo 4 launch and lauded again as if they could never do anything wrong, but their last two games in the 2020s have been Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal. Before that Overwatch in 2016. There is just not a Diablo 5 in the books for the next few years. RTS have always been niche, but considerably less so in the eras of Age of Empire and Command & Conquer, when StarCraft and WarCraft have been major hits. I don’t know if a StarCraft III would bring in billions. WoW is an entirely different beast, which fails to acquire a younger audience, while comparable phenomena like Fortnite don’t really struggle with this. WoW and Classic are bankable money hoses, but they are not getting bigger.

Even King has kind of run its course: Sure you have heard of Candy Crush, but its time has passed the moment smartphones became good enough for Fortnite (again). I just don’t see school kids in 2030 playing Candy Crush 2, while I can imagine they are still playing Fortnite. The same goes for Angry Birds. King failed to adapt to the new age after smartphones moved beyond the iPod-touch-era.

ABK has 17K employees and USD 7 billion of revenue, which sounds impressive, until you look into their annual report: nearly half their revenue comes from mobile vs. consoles and PC and it is the only segment not shrinking. According to their last annual, mainly due to the contributions of Diablo Immortal next to the shrinking King-franchises. More than 75% of ABK’s revenue are in-game purchases and subscriptions, which leaves less than 25% for game sales. Additionally Vanguard is credited multiple times in the report as selling so bad it ripped a hole in Activision’s 2022 financial year.

All in all I feel like Activision is the CoD-machine first and lives off of the last people still playing WoW and - more importantly - still playing Candy Crush. With the only exception of CoD (Warzone) they have difficulties acquiring a new audience and are visibly not growing any more. A streak of badly received CoDs can tank their company.

I still remember the heydays of both Blizzard and Activision and have fond memories of a lot of their franchises, but these times are gone and an acquisition now when the times are okay (Diablo 4, CoD MW2 selling much better than Vanguard) is much more sensible, than a sell off in a few years, when Candy Crush dries up and the then-current CoD sucks.

I play only one game from Acti-Blizz regularly which is CoD, since most of my friends play in religiously (time for new friends?). And it is treated so badly by Activision, I hope MS fixes this. I know all the highbrow arguments against consolidation. But I don’t care for Diablo or WoW (sorry) and the one game I play can only win from MS acquisition (impossible to treat it any worse). So I personally want this to go through already.

If you know the basics of AWS/Azure/Cloudhosting (spin up VM, create users, login via ssh, register URL, etc.): really low (1-3) with the ansible recipe. With docker not much higher if you know the basics about docker that is.

If cloudhosting is not your forte, but are reasonably skilled in basic linux navigation, configuration, and upkeep use a Hoster that is doing a lot for you like DigitalOcean and read their tutorials. Since you still don’t need to configure a lot the challenge rises to a 4-5 maybe.

If you have never heard of hosting nor Linux it still isn’t the most difficult project to start learning to do these things. Setting up rises to a 6 or something. But keeping a Linux server running over an extended period of time is much harder than setting one up. Maintenance is difficult compared to a MacBook or something, so be prepared to read up on backup and restore docker containers and volumes and how to keep your instance reasonably updated without breaking your server. This would still not rise the difficulty above a 7.

Small disclaimer: In the past I have used alts and burners on Reddit all the time. I have the best intentions to keep my instance up to date and running smoothly, but if something catastrophic would happen, due to me meddling with stuff, I’d shut it down and start from scratch. I’m not clinging for my comments I wrote drunk at 03:00 AM.

Yeah, about that …

Host your own instance. When there is downtime it is your fault.

Is the M.2 port fully PCI capable? I’d like to put a PCI RAID controller with maybe four or six SATA ports into something Pi-adjacent. But full featured PCI-ports are kinda hard to come by in SBCs.

I’m hosting on DigitalOcean and buy the URL somewhere else (GoDaddy in my case). If DO becomes to expensive under load I’ll move to AWS. Have done this with a few other projects the same way: start out and tinker, finding a good setup on DO and move to AWS for price efficiency.

It is the same for eBooks imo. There are some sources of DRM free eBooks, but they don’t tend to have the popular books. I’m always buying on kindle, because it is so laughably easy to circumvent their DRM as long as one has a kindle serial number attached to their account.