Grifters every last one of them man. That game is some serious dog shit too. I feel bad if they had to vibe code it is as it seems like something that could easily be cobbled together from any number of free sample games in a few hours at most.

I had forgotten that people were still trying to use NFTs to scam people out of money by making you pay for jpgs. That is so 2010s.

Well, Instapaper has been doing a fine job reading CNN's articles for me, both desktop and mobile... an extra click or two, but worth the effort.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if they don't have a bunch of A/B tests running all the time to try and determine which icons/gameplay/mechanics are the most addictive and drive more users to the games. They just want you to pump your time and money into them.

deep in this article is a reminder that this is Microsoft which is driving this AI madness. King, purchased by Activision-Blizzard, then Microsoft as part of the consolidation. This is driving completely by MS and their AI push to automate all the things with AI.

Personally I have no love for King's games they are all clones of some other game IMO. I'm not actually aware of their current level of lootbox/gambling type mechanics but that was my impression of their games.

We definitely have reached the stage where companies are banking on AI instead of outsourcing to fulfill their need for labor.

Hope that all of these people can find their feet quickly.

yup, and there's at least a 25% chance it was written by an AI.

https://fortune.com/2024/10/30...

if you get rid of the toxic trash accounts that were making Former Twitter a cesspool of bots and flame wars.

Hate to break it to you but all of Apple's products were not the first one, they were just the most usable/best one. Vision was not the first VR, Watch was not the first smart watch, iPod was not the first mp3 player, PowerBook was not the first laptop, Lisa/Macintosh was not the first WIMP computer, and Apple I/II was not the first Home Personal Computer (or homebrew computer).

They don't have to be first, they just have to make one that is better. Usually they have been buying the competition if they are small enough and making it if they can.

That would be the right way to do it. But, in the short term, it is also the most expensive. So we'll do it the wrong way and our traffic control system will never be the same.

Another form of payday loans pushed onto digital consumers.

The people can't have the welfare if the corporations take all the government money all to build the rockets to Mars, AI Data centers and nuclear reactors to power the data centers. He's right about that for sure.

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

Hopefully the Russians choose not to go looking for this guy.

I don't think any of those technolgies you mentioned had nearly the investment or interest of such a wide variety of people. From health care, to government, to coding, to any company with a terrible chatbot, all of them have people interested in trying to replace system X with a LLM guessing machine.

The crash from this hype train will be large indeed. Even if it does 1/10th of what they say it can (which I doubt since people are claiming that it will replace most workers and do all the thinking for us, thank you AGI boosters), it will have a profound impact on how we do information work.

Sounds good.