Make it a Starship exploding with dogecoins flying out of it.

I am still hopeful the Twitter HQ will become a homeless shelter one way or another: Looks like Musky boy just hasn’t been paying rent, so, fingers crossed.

I am remembering a lot of AAA games in the past two years that have launched and basically been unplayable for a day to two weeks due to some kind of combination of not enough servers, garbage netcode, or other game breaking bugs.

Elon just went to a different clown college.

A mandatory class at both AAA game dev flavored clown college and blood diamond mines flavored clown college seems to be the art of talking up a whole lot of cool innovative features and then going hugely over budget and development time and then cutting most of those features for a late delivery date.

(And no, I don’t care if the devs are good at their jobs but management fucked them! is the defense for AAA games. Sure, maybe that’s correct on an internal level. Doesn’t really matter for a consumable product. Would be nice if the idiot asshats got laughed out of the industry instead of new car collections, golden parachutes, but thats a whole 'nother discussion)

Its probably fairly straightforward:

Their new format and infrastructure for video hosting was not properly tested, and they did not expect the amount of bandwidth needed to support viewership demand.

Basically, same thing as a modern AAA live service game launch.

It probably isn’t a DDOS. Its probably just… a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

Not if they disagree with a business strategy on profit potential, moral/ethical ramifications, debt management, buying out another business, doing a stock split or stock buyback, where to source a needed material or service from, whether or not to massively raise executive compensation, environmental concerns, or if they’re going to get fucked by a hostile takeover, or being acquired by a private equity firm, maybe they do want to outsource some part of this business or spin off a part, maybe they don’t…

You say that as if its just always immediately obvious to everyone what the correct path is, and that the primary focus of that path should be to maximize profit, which in and of itself is a bad assumption on its face and is also a matter of contention: do you want to keep doing bandaid solutions to ensure short term profitability, or do you want to cut back on profitability for a year to shore up your market position or develop a new branch of the business, or engage in a capital intensive plan that will likely guarantee profit in the long term?

Businesses are a bit more complicated than ‘the richest guys always agree and always know how to make the mostest money and they would never ever have conflicting opinions or interests with me!’

Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else?

This is where it starts to get complicated.

You can promise to sell you stock by a certain date in the future to someone, at a price the two of you agree upon now.

If the actual price of the stock goes below the previously agreed price, by that deadline, well then you probably gained money.

If the actual price of the stock goes above the previously agreed price by the previously agreed date, you probably lost money.

This gets even more complicated when you take out a loan to buy a stock, and then do the above.

Theres a whole lot more. Check out investopedia.

I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept?

Its the same in that both crypto and stocks can crater to zero if there are no buyers.

It is different in that crypto, as you say, is completely digital and nontangible, whereas most businesses on a stock exchange have at least a basis for their stock valuation in real world assets, products, services, revenue flows, profit margins and such.

Basically, what is more likely to go completely tits up?

A random NFT scheme?

A brand new start up IPO?

A long established industry giant?

Probably the 1st then 2nd then 3rd.

Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?

Ultimately they are both markets, which have prices ultimately determined by what people feel is a fair price.

Both involve projecting possible rise or fall in the value of the asset (stock vs crypto coin), but in the case of crypto, there is usually 0 actual underlying fundamentals, there is no business model beyond ‘if we all invest in this it will be worth more money’, which works until the price goes high enough that usually the person or group that invented the crypto sells all of their crypto. This causes panic and everyone else sells off for much less.

Functionally, that means a whole bunch of people lost money, and the originators made a whole bunch of money.

A pump and dump scheme, its usually extremely illegal.

Crypto bros kept acting like the laws governing finance did not apply to them.

Turns out, the laws do apply to them, and even as bullshit as the stock market is for the average joe, basically the entire crypto sphere collapsed in 6 months after it turned out that they were basically all cooking their accounting books and doing all kinds of fraud.

While the stock market is largely bullshit in many ways, it is at least regulated to prevent many different kinds of financial fraud, while the crypto sphere is almost entirely comprised of con artists and their suckers.

Sure, one share is one vote, but uh that means that whoever has the most shares wins the vote. IE: one or two very wealthy individuals or groups votes count for as much as potentially millions of other people.

The average working class joe investor basically never has the power to really influence anything.

There are also tons and tons of different kinds of shares and different kinds of voting power, and often there are setups that basically mandate some particular entity always has a significantly large portion of shares.

Basically, its not democratic at all, unless you subscribe to the ‘some pigs are more equal than other pigs’ kind of democracy.

EDIT: A metaphor one can use is killstreaks in COD vs TF2s randomized damage.

In the long run, given a set of purely equally skilled players, CODs kill streak mechanic will functionally randomly choose certain players and elevate their score higher and higher. A positive feedback loop. You end up with a very uneven distribution of scores because mild success is rewarded with wild success.

Whereas in the same situation with TF2, the semi randomized damage across players of equal skill basically would result in a much more even scattering of overall player scores.

Capitalism rewards you more the more money you have, and the more money you have, the easier it is to make even more money, which leads to the haves and the have nots.

In a Co-Op business model, by contrast, its often one person, one vote. There are barely any of these in the US though… we love our entrenched wealth divide between those bastard wealthy asshats and all of us temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will get rich one day.

Nope, not even close.

NFTs are wildly, wildly more speculative investments than the stock market, having absolutely 0 solid foundation of an actual business with capital and products and services behind them, they have a proven track record of 99% of them losing 99% of their value in a year or two, and 99% of them are just outright scams.

Go watch a some Folding Ideas videos for a more in depth explanation.

After a decade plus of watching crypto currencies evolve, the only one that actually does what a crypto currency was originally supposed to do is monero, xmr: Secure, very hard to trace transactions that can be done with anonymity, provided you learn a whole bunch of opsec.

At least for the US, yes you are correct that this was the conventional logic that governed the average joe’s investment into a stock, up until… roughly the 60s or 70s.

I am not going to write a dissertation on the history of American financial investment, but yeah nowadays, the way you invest in the stock market is … you buy a stock, hope that its value increases by more than inflation, and then sell it later for what is called a capital gain, ie, profit from the difference between the price you bought vs the price you sold.

So yes, your the second half of your post is correct:

You buy Stock A for 100 from Some Guy 1, then later you hope to be able to sell Stock A to Some Guy 2 for 150.

The specifics of this can easily get absurdly complicated with exceptionally complex and advanced math and mountains of rules and regulations, but basically, what still holds true is this:

Literally a goldfish swimming to the left or right side of a tank to indicate what stocks should be bought or sold, this outperforms the average financial ‘wizard’ on wall street making your investment decisions.

BUT, basically at no time in the past 20 or 30 years has putting your money into a bank’s savings account to earn interest managed to beat the inflation rate, so if you want a chance to actually be rewarded for setting aside money, you put it into stocks, a mutual fund, an index fund, and well if you ever need to pull some cash out for an emergency, you get fucked by fees.

What you really do is buy real estate. But you have to already have a good deal of money to do that.

Isn’t capitalism fun?

They also announced they are going to stop paying stock dividends starting Q4.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/intel-to-suspend-dividend-cut-15-of-staff-upon-big-earnings-miss-d811a220

Back in ye olden days, you used to buy a stock largely due to its ability to regularly pay you back a dividend, as a more conventional kind of investment, before the more modern idea of ‘buy low sell high’ became the most prevalent investment strategy / market dynamic.

Basically yes, the last part of what you said:

A game that basically cannot be played without the existence of servers which are typically too complex or too expensive or outright banned from an average user with a decent internet connection acting as the server, that is a game that is ‘truly dead’, a game that is not really playable in single player whose multiplayer infrastructure no longer exists.

You can host a few people on your own minecraft or valheim or palworld server, or you can play the whole game single player, and the vast majority of gameplay systems and experiences work in single player.

Compared to say an MMO whose servers are just down, a live service game whose live service is now discontinued, a massive multiplayer fps that just no longer has any dedicated servers, etc.

Palworld is still a playable game getting updates from the devs and its multiplayer capacity still works.

It just is no longer wildly popular, which is again due to its nature of being yet another flavor of the week or month for twitch, yet another open world survival craft game with a goofy gimmick.

It is only dead in the sense of the collective zeitgeist moving on to something else once they got bored of it.

Popular gaming lingo does conflation or concepts with totally different meanings all of the time.

We’ve got ‘dead’ as in unpopular or less popular versus ‘dead’ as in literally unplayable due to lack of infrastructure.

People are calling it a dead game because it was a flavor of the month random meme game that happened to get wildly popular and was then left in the toy trunk after its novelty wore off.

When people are calling it ‘dead game’, they do not mean it in the older sense of either a server reliant multiplayer game that has no more players, or that its so old and buggy or incompatible with modern hardware and is not being developed any more, such that the game is unplayable.

They mean it in the sense of ‘i got bored of it and so did almost everyone else.’

Everyone heard ‘Pokemon with Guns!’, thought this was amusing, then played yet another open world survival crafting game with a gimmick.

I tried it once a decade ago and uh, no luck whatsoever lol.

Aha, you’re right!

In my defense, i posted at midnight, without my glasses =P

I want to know who the fuck is gaming on FreeBSD and how.

Because we live in a ravenous corrupt oligarchy barely able to keep the appearance of a functioning democracy.

2024, Reverse Turing Test Challenge:

Can an LLM AI differentiate between human input and LLM AI input?

What about the Grrr! model after that astoundingly XD So Random! thing from Invader Zim?

He’s an android or robot, right?

Holy shit are you telling me…

Garbage In…

= Garbage Out?

No, that can’t be it, throw billions and billions of dollars at this instead of, I don’t know, housing the homeless.

Best post in this whole thread, imo.