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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Can he though?

    He might never have been a billionaire at any point, he’s always been leveraged to the gills and bleeding money. Plus the fraud, making up fake names to call up Forbes to be declared a billionaire, and the fact he is constantly hustling (while campaigning and terminally old) for a few more million

    Most of all, there’s the fact that billionaires are only billionaires on paper. Their wealth would shrink massively if they can’t time the sell-offs at the right time, most commonly known billionaires could keep the title selling for 10 cents on the dollar, but Trump isn’t near that level no matter how you slice it

    Mar a Lago is estimated at like 200-300m, his apartment is worth tens of millions, and pretty much everything else he only owns a partial stake in and is likely leveraged even if it could be cleanly sold. And who knows what other debt factors in - he’s had a lot of failed projects and a lot of unpaid invoices

    None of them are proof, but altogether it doesn’t paint the picture of a billionaire - a billion dollars is a truly unthinkable amount of money, and I can’t see a showoff like him not collecting things to brag about

    I don’t think he has it, or if he does it’d be a close thing

    And to leave you with a final thought - Trump owns 3 guns, one of which he risked his freedom to hide away. What kind of billionaire both cares about guns enough to break parole (even if the prison risk was very unlikely), but also doesn’t have a small armory professionally decorated just to show off?





  • Aside from not being Trump (which is a great trait), I know next to nothing about Harris. I know she’s a former prosecutor, and might be able to identify her if she showed up at my door

    What else should I know about her (and should I be hopeful of her pushing any meaningful progressive policies)?





  • Because AI is amazing.

    My friend wanted a scorecard to rate Rick and Morty episodes to determine if it’s falling off - I could spend a few hours and maybe come up with something, but I wouldn’t. My little assistant did it in a few seconds, with results good enough to motivate me and more of my friend group to join in

    I was about to go back to my boss to tell him my task was impossible and could have killed the entire idea, but then I expressed my frustrations just to vent. To my surprise, it offered a very specific and relevant solution, despite having no access to anything beyond our chat logs - it wasn’t quite right, but it got me on the right track, and 5 minutes later I found a solution

    This shit is miracle technology. I’m running a very simple system I built myself, and it’s still good enough to make my life measurably better. This needs to be in the hands of everyone asap, not through some service, but running under their own control





  • Madison, a former employee, basically described a terrible working environment. She was bait and switched on several aspects of the role, and only found out after giving up her US visa and moving to Canada. She was constantly berated, sexually harassed in many ways, made to manage an only-fans despite making her discomfort known, the expectations of releases were unreasonable and her coworkers sabotaged her by knowingly setting her up to release videos with incorrect facts. Taking any of this to HR, or even Linus himself, ended with her being laughed off or told to stop being a tattle tale

    All this is alleged and there’s a lot more, but the kicker to me is the fact she cut her leg bad enough to need staples, because going to the ER was the only way she felt she could get badly needed time off.

    That’s what seals it for me - either she’s a borderline nightmare, or the working situation is far beyond the pale. Add in the fact the pressure to release, inaccuracies, and public glimpses of Linus’s attitude, and I’m inclined to believe it’s more true than false



  • The big deal is they didn’t admit to having accidentally auctioned it (the alternative is they knowingly did so despite requests to return it), and in the same breath talked about how they offered recompense (implying that it came before the video calling them out when it didn’t), and firing back on justified criticism as if they’re the victim

    Oh, and all while claiming they own up to their mistakes even in the face of consequences.

    They bulldozed a smaller company without a hint of empathy. He doesn’t consider that maybe the price could have come down or the performance (when properly used) would be worth it to a small segment of overclockers - even in the supposed mia culpa Linus takes several shots at the product he basically buried



  • Is it though? That amount of money is meaningless to a company, which Linus loves to talk about these days.

    The problem is, he shit all over a startup company, failed to return the prototype after multiple requests, then when called out on it offered to pay for it and phrased his response to make it seem like he hadn’t spent months ghosting them until another YouTuber brought attention to the issue.

    Shitting on it - fine, he’s extremely harsh every time it’s brought up, but he can have his own opinion. I think it’s a bad take, he doesn’t even entertain the idea that they might lower the price, improve it to work on multiple models, or maybe this fits a high end niche for PC ricing - it sounds impractical now, but maybe a few sales would be enough for them to make a more practical version

    But whatever, I can get over that. The fact that he didn’t say “we had some miscommunication in my team, this is our bad, we’re having growing pains and I never would have sold it if I knew they wanted it back. We reached out to them to make them whole, but we’ll do better” is pretty incriminating.

    That’s not owning up to their mistakes - either they knowingly ignored requests to give it back, which is fucked up, or someone made a mistake and he made excuses instead of owning up to it, and tried to quietly bury the problem and fire back on the guy who called them out


  • You have a point, but it’s kind of like people who resist all gun control due to the second amendment despite the shootings going on

    Yeah, if life continues on as-is, the argument has little merit. On the other hand, in the case of the second amendment, we have fascists making a credible move for control.

    In the case of archiving DRM content, if we have a cataclysm (which seems increasingly likely), then having drm-free, ideally unencrypted, content sitting on random hard drives might end up making an enormous difference in a lot of lives

    Or even without a cataclysm, just general enshittification might end up destroying the gaming and media industries - passed around old games might be the seed for the next generation of tech-heads. I started my path by jailbreaking my PSP so I could use custom web browsers and homebrew - spreading these after the Internet is locked down by efforts like kosa and WEI (and whatever comes next) might be the spark that motivates the next generation



  • Oh, there’s always a deal, at least for him. The rules do not apply evenly to start with, and even though he’s not that rich, he’s still part of the aristocracy.

    Even though he broke all sorts of laws that contain the words “betrayed your nation to foreign adversaries”, started a sloppy coup last time he lost an election, and basically bragged about it in between perjuring himself, the best solution for everyone is for him to quietly fade into irrelevance.

    It’s always better not to make a martyr if you can help it, it just isn’t worth it

    Plus, the cruelest punishment I can think of is letting him use up the last couple years of his charismatic energy out of the public eye, so when he inevitably comes back he’d reveal himself to be the rambling dementia patient he’s been for a while.

    And I don’t mean that as an insult - read his speeches. His delivery is amazing. Take that away and just read them (especially from the most recent ones), and even if you realized he was spewing word salad it’s still shocking