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Comment Re:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 2) 31

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.

Comment A fake problem? (Score 1) 41

China's geezer party leaders probably got jealous of all the young whippersnappers having fun, so had to reign it in.

Theory is that's also why the Old Testament was written. "If my wanker no longer works, those wippersnappers are no longer allowed to snap their whips either! Parity of misery, Hallelujah, pass the wine!"

Comment Re:As intended (Score 1) 136

Overproduction is an absolute requirement for a market economy to function, you incredible dummy.

Yes, overproduction is necessary. But it's also waste. And if you get too much of it, then it's unsustainable.

You people are so pig fucking ignorant about everything

Fine words from a coward.

Comment Re:Stop calling it Firefox (Score 1) 25

I don't want anything in the browser that I have to worry about whether it's turned on and spying on me or not.

Anything like that should be an add-on so it can be not just disabled but removed (assuming it's shipped with the browser.)

My pet Firefox peeve is with mobile. It's shitty and getting shittier. Not only does it have a javascript-related memory leak they haven't bothered to fix for many years, but now it's hanging when trying to upload images. It works once or twice and then on the third try the browser hangs. It takes a long time to get through to kill it too so it looks frankly like yet another memory leak.

Comment Ugh... this was awful. How do people like it? (Score 1) 56

I can't think of a sci-fi series that's more polarizing than this one in recent memory?

Even in my own group of friends, it runs about 50/50 that people either loved Alien Earth, or they thought it was trash.

I watched it because of a high recommendation from one guy I know, and tried to give it a chance. I had to stop after a few episodes. It was just painfully awful, IMO. I mean, sure - lots of money was poured into good special F/X and it's the creatures we all know from the long-running franchise. But the story line and characters were ridiculous.

I mean, sure -- let's take a bunch of kids and immediately throw them into harm's way, doing "save the planet" stuff! And "Boy Kavalier" is a bad caricature of just about every tech CEO in modern times that people like to poke fun at. Except even more over-the-top with his "poor me ... because I'm SO intelligent, nobody can even have an enjoyable conversation with me" garbage.

The thing is though? I *do* get the points people raise in favor of it. The concept had "legs" in the sense there's potential in the idea you have competing corporations with different approaches to "improving humanity" and it creates a dynamic of tensions between your cyborgs vs your hybrids or synths. It's just that to me, it felt like they took those great ideas and squandered them.

Comment Good time to sell to Donald (Score 1) 53

Ironically Iceland is green, and Greenland is ice, relatively speaking. Greenland was allegedly named by a shipping marketer trying to downplay the ice.

Here's a fix: sell them to Trump just before they start really freezing over. Since Trump doesn't believe in climate change, he'll deny he's being duped, believing the current cold is just random weather that will change back.

(Some argue he knows, he just wants stuff here and now to brag while alive, the future is Eric's problem.)

Comment Prepare now because (Score 1) 53

...not enough people or nations will do anything to prevent this. I'm just the messenger. There are basically 3 categories of people:

1. Those who care and are willing to sacrifice money or time to do something about it.

2. Those who care, but get distracted by other concerns such that they mostly ignore it.

3. Those who believe subject matter experts are liars or exaggerators, and thus ignore the problem.

Each of these is approximately 33%. Thus 2/3 (#2 & #3) won't do much about it, and this reflects leaders who happen to be charge of a nation at any given time.

If we get lucky, we'll figure out geoengineering without accidentally breaking something else. Otherwise we are hosed, figuratively and literally.

Comment Re:To what extent was it AI generated? (Score 1) 67

Most people who make a living off of AI produced music probably select from multiple candidate tunes made by the bot, and tweak the ones they like with prompts, and/or editing via old-fashioned sound editors.

Thus, humans are becoming vetters and tweakers rather than direct creators.

It's best if the bot generates the music as seperate tracks for each part (instrument & voice), as that makes hand-tweaking easier.

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