The trick has been around since industrial spies noticed the first liar got away with it.

I wonder if stock-holders can successfully sue for lying about the cause of a sales slump?

Make the AI bubble pop already. I'll stop wanking off for a year if you pop it, I swear on my rosie palm.

Of all the early computer start-ups, Apple is the only "started in the garage on a shoestring budget and passion to create something everyone would love" that I can recall hearing about. Were they they only ones to get started like that?

And I see so many people already trash-talking Jobs... business sense without a great product has nothing, but tech genius without business never takes off. Both are necessary! It takes a good product and a good salesman to make a successful brand. Apple was fortunate to have both, it was their recipe for success.

Bell Labs invented the transistor because the low hanging fruit of vacuum tubes had dried up. Some low hanging fruit is always dried up. That never stopped progress.

While true, the pace of the Next Big Thing is not necessarily constant.

into place to protect their oligopoly. Some blame it on "socialism" when it's really crony capitalism.

Zork the Cockroach: "What the fuck is 'rick-rolling'?"

When credit cards and bank accounts are given to children, a parent signature is required. If phones and ISP's are paid for through such venues, then they are automatically age-checked. If a parent is allowing a child to use a device the parent pays for, they should be required to opt in the device to allow the child to access mature material.

Minor grammar fix: "the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D has dried up."

I don't believe it's because of the tax-breaks, for they still exist, but that the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D have dried up. Software has replaced hardware for many functions of machines, and software needs less "big lab" R&D since it can be done in pajamas. Corporate hardware labs just stopped being able to pay their way.

If say quantum computing started spewing innovations, a similar "gold rush" of R&D may appear again. This is not saying "everything has been invented already", but rather that technology doesn't progress at a steady pace. The AI boom (bubble?) has produced AI labs, but I doubt its lab boom will last as long as the solid state boom.

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

GitHub apparently has dropped below 90% uptime and it's very likely because they are using AI slop to write important code and it doesn't work.

It's a huge problem but there isn't really a solution.

It's not a question of if it's going to be mandated it's when. And we will suck it down because we are nerds and nerds lean towards the libertarian side and it's the libertarian types that are pushing this from the top down.

Specifically Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted because AI slop is starting to infest his data sources that he sells for money.

All this age verification bullshit is just Zuckerberg and other billionaire types getting out ahead of the AI slop apocalypse so that they can continue to have access to training data that can be tracked back to real humans, so that they can slightly improve the value of their advertising products, and most importantly of all so that they can continue to monitor all of us and gather all our sweet sweet data without the data set rendered completely worthless by slop.

We will let them do it because folks are easily distracted by other issues when it comes to fighting for privacy or other consumer rights.

The 900 though is for the higher end option. Still you're looking at $600 for a PS5 with a disk drive now. If I'm comparing that to something like the Sega Genesis or super Nintendo that is more than either of them launched at adjusted for inflation let alone what they cost at this point.

It bugs me cuz it kind of feels like people who aren't well off are getting cut off from what used to be one of the few affordable hobbies. Yeah you could play Old hardware but it's hard to find players on old games... And playing newer games as part of the hobby.

And of course you have to know about those games. It's hard to be a dumb kid and we were all a dumb kid at some point and you're not necessarily going to be able to find that cool game that a bunch of people are playing...

They did it overnight. It was done across all retailers so it was coordinated. I doubt you can find a retailer that isn't selling it for the increased price now even though obviously it's the same old stock that you could have bought last week for $100 or $150 cheaper.

It's amazing how quick they can reprice things to screw us consumers over.