Also, it’s not even a novel idea.

OpenMP has been around for over 20 years, it’s just a lot less “magical”.

Yeah, they’re basically talking about a virtual machine (they call it a “framework” but it sounds more in line with the JVM or the .Net CLR) that can automatically offload work to GPUs and tensor cores and the like.

Programs would basically compile to a kind of bytecode that describes what calculations need to be done and the data dependencies between them, and then it’s up to the runtime to decide how to schedule that on available hardware, while compensating for differences, e.g. in supported precision for floating point math.

They’re quoting like 4x speedups but their benchmarks are all things that already have efficient GPGPU implementations, mainly signal processing and computer vision, so the computation is already highly parallelized.

I could see this being useful for that kind of Big Data processing where you have a ton of stuff to churn through and want to get the most bang for your buck on cloud hardware. It helps that that kind of processing is already coded at a pretty high level, where you just lay out the operations you want done and the system handles the rest. This runtime would be a great target for that.

I don’t really see this revolutionizing computing on a grand scale, though. Most day to day workloads (consumer software and even most business applications like web servers) are not CPU bound anyway. I guess memory bound workloads could benefit from being offloaded to a GPU but those aren’t all that common either.

Remember kids, if it’s Chromium based, it’s still part of the problem. The Chromium project only exists to provide the illusion of choice. Don’t let Google have the power to dictate web standards at will.

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Worst part is, now you can’t find a dumb TV anymore. The closest thing out there are “commercial signage displays” which are just dumb TVs with limited inputs and usually without remotes, but 25-50% more expensive because “commercial” (and because they won’t be able to continue making money by showing you ads and selling your data) and a lot of retailers won’t let you order one without a business account, or force you to order in bulk.

And every Neanderthal I complain to is like “but smart TVs have so many more features,” like, bro, I can make any TV the smartest fucking TV in the world by plugging it into the desktop PC I’m gonna keep right next to it anyway. All the “smart” bullshit just gets in the way. I’ve yet to encounter a smart TV UI that didn’t require a dozen button presses to change inputs and spend two seconds or more re-drawing the UI with EVERY INPUT because they put the cheapest processors they can find in these pieces of shit.

I feel like the easiest way to stop this bullshit is for states with EBT programs to take away Wendy’s ability to charge EBT cards.

Wanna dabble with surge pricing? Fine, but you’ll lose all your customers that are on welfare.

Pretty much, but in app form, yeah.

Yeah, I thought about maybe making it free for women, but besides being sexist and exclusionary, I think that would just open it up to the scams that plague all other dating apps.

At the end of the day, people don’t realize how much they spend on stupid shit throughout the year. A full year of Netflix or Spotify or a WoW subscription (assuming you’re not taking advantage of long-term commitment discounts) comes out to $150-200, and those add up if you’re going in on multiple services.

The price point I had in mind was like $99/year. Shit, they’re wanting to charge about that much for new AAA games now. I’d have to do more math to figure out if that’d actually be viable, but it’s the number that popped into my head. I think it’d be doable in the $100-200 range, and I actually have a bit of experience with how much it costs to run a platform like this.

Paying for a dating app definitely feels wrong, like you’re hiring an escort or something, but people spend money on their love life all the time: buying clothes, going out to bars and clubs, paying for cover charges and drinks, dumping money on OnlyFans creators in the hope that they’ll pay the slightest bit of attention to you, etc.

I think if the value proposition is clear and obvious, like a dating app where you know everyone there is serious about it because they paid to be there, it would have a decent chance of working out.

There is the question of how to get people on the platform in the first place, because you’re definitely right in that there is a chicken and egg problem. Why pay for a dating app that no one is using?

Firstly, there should be some sort of money-back guarantee if someone literally can’t get any matches, to avoid people thinking they got scammed. Maybe a no-questions-asked policy for the first couple weeks, like with Steam. A good user experience would be paramount for the success of the platform, so even if someone doesn’t have any luck they should ideally still feel like the platform gave them a fair shake.

Additionally, I think it should be open to sign up for free before full launch, to seed the user pool. I have some thoughts on how users can help keep scammers off the platform by verifying each other, and that would be the only thing they can do before launch. This could also be a way for users who can’t or don’t want to pay to earn access to the platform after launch. And to incentivize users to keep helping out, they could get a boost in search results if they helped verify a handful of users every day.

Also, if the project was crowdfunded, that should definitely come with either a year or lifetime membership, so that’s another a source of users who are invested in the success of the platform, and who are going to be excited to use it day-one.

I’ve been thinking for a bit now that the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there’s no incentive to keep people on it forever: you already got their money. You’d actually want people to have good experiences on it so they get their friends to sign up.

The fee would probably have to be somewhat large, both because it would have to cover operating costs for the foreseeable future, and because it would discourage catfishers.

It might still work as like, a yearly subscription, which would mean more sustainable revenue. I wouldn’t do any less than that. And no a la carte options to nickel and dime people with.

You’d also want to come down hard on account sharing and reselling, for obvious reasons.

Problem is, if you go to any venture capitalist with this idea, they’ll probably fund it, but then immediately sell out to Match Group the split-second they make an offer, and then the enshittification would begin.

The only way to prevent that would be to entirely crowdfund it, or have some sort of collective ownership and governance so no single greedy bastard can sell out.

I love BG3 but I will agree that the dialogue options sometimes seem pretty restrictive, or just come out of nowhere, but that’s pretty much par for the course for RPGs.

What I really wish they had was more options for relationships, because it’s a little annoying how getting into any character’s good graces immediately means they’re trying to fuck you. I wanna tell Gale that I just wanna be best bros without having to break his poor heart to do so.

And why is Shadowheart so possessive? Sure, I wanna see where that goes, but I also really want to get into Karlach’s pants as well as find out how much of a freak in the sheets Halsin is. Why can’t we just be one big bisexual polycule? That sounds like it’d be really hot.

Buying RDR2 to play Red Dead Online with a friend. I got disconnected three different times while trying to complete the first mission, which you have to finish before the game lets you do anything else. Every single time I had to start the mission over from the beginning, including the stupid-ass cutscene.

I gave up after the third time when I got dropped as I was literally about to finish. Fuck that scam.

I’ve watched House over and over again over the years and always kind of idolized him. But something must have changed about me because the latest time around, it hit way different. I realized, “wow, I really wouldn’t want to be acquainted with this guy in the slightest.”

But I think that’s because I finally actually understood the show.

Also, Robert Sean Leonard is massively underrated as Laurie’s foil. Wilson is definitely now my favorite character.

I debated even mentioning what the replies were about because I knew it would attract comments like this.

I don’t know the content of the messages that were sent fraudulently on my behalf. I just infer that they mentioned something about Israel or Palestine or Gaza because that’s what the replies talked about.

Regardless of your stance on the issue or who’s doing this, it should be very concerning that someone is apparently trying to influence Congress this way.

I also tried replying to Senator Klobuchar’s email, which didn’t bounce so hopefully her staff will see it and get back to me.

I’m not surprised by that part at all.

It’s that it seems to involve members of Congress and an issue which is likely to be important in the coming election, which seems like more than a simple scam.

I’m also asking if anyone else has had a similar experience so I can get an idea of the scale of this. I’m also trying to figure out if it’s specifically Minnesota or if members of Congress from other states have also been targeted.

It also turns out that I also got a couple of Senator Smith’s email newsletters, probably because I was automatically added to her mailing list, so now I’m fairly certain the message from her office was genuine.

For what it’s worth, I did try to reply to the email but it was bounced back so it was definitely a no-reply address. I’m tempted to call her office tomorrow.

And that’s the other thing, why Minnesota? They have my name and email, that’s not too surprising: I’m well aware of how easy that information is to come by. But they couldn’t be bothered to look up what state I live in and realize that it would be a waste of time to target me?

Sending emails isn’t free, even if you have a mail server or a botnet to do it for you, it still takes time and computing power and bandwidth. So why wouldn’t you try to whittle down the list as much as possible?

It seems more likely that the replies might be genuine, but the message that prompted them wasn’t.

It’s a safe bet that the staff at these offices wouldn’t have the time to verify that the message actually came from one of their constituents, especially if they’re receiving them in bulk. I’d expect the replies to be mostly automated anyway, but the messages would still affect their internal statistics.

If someone’s using a mass email campaign to try to sway members of Congress, that’s really fucking concerning to me.

They don’t read like phishing emails. They’re not asking for donations or information or giving a link to click on or anything. They’re the exact kind of reply you’d expect to get when messaging a Senator or Representative about an issue: a boilerplate response summarizing the issue, stating their position and thanking me for writing in.

I just never sent any message, nor did I give anyone permission to send one on my behalf.

What’s the scam? Baiting me into replying in order to reel me in? Checking if there’s a human on the other end? Trying to sway public opinion ahead of an election?

I always had decent experiences with OnTrac shipping through NewEgg (though I don’t buy from them anymore), packages would arrive 1-2 days earlier than expected and would be in perfect condition. But then I got on Reddit and saw people constantly shitting on them and didn’t understand it.

They are:

The investigation led to felony convictions for seven individuals, all former eBay employees or contractors, and the ringleader was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison.

No no no you’ve got it all wrong:

The Nazis are supposed to be a feature of the platform.