But building oracles and such is gross.

You’re talking about a religion whose entire foundation is built on saints and prophets. The whole Jesus story is a big deal because it is fulfillment of prophecy.

The who AI pope question was insane.

It’s certainly heretical to the Catholic Church. But fits comfortably in a bunch of New Age and Technocratic Futurist Protestant understands of their faith.

Ah. Hence the age old adage: “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got”.

Nonsense. Grok’s been a confused, masochistic mess since at least June.

Remember when God said he didn’t want idols made

You are about 1700 years late to this argument. Christians reconciled with iconography some time in the Byzantium Era.

And after Protestantism? FFS, can you imagine what Joseph Smith would say about an AI Prophet, after spending half his career reading discs out of a hat with special sunglasses?

Regulatory capture is a motherfucker

I think some of you younger folks really don’t know what the Internet was like 20 years ago.Shit was up and down all the time.

I worked on a project back in 2008 where I had to physically haul hardware from Houston to Dallas ahead of Hurricane Ike just to keep a second rate version of a website running until we got power back at the original office. Latency at the new location was so bad that we were scrambling to reinvent the website in real time to try and improve performance. We ended up losing the client. They ended up going bankrupt. An absolute nightmare.

Getting screamed at by clients. Working 14 hour days in a cramped server room on something way outside my scope.

Would have absolutely killed for something as clean and reliable as AWS. Not like it didn’t even exist back then. But we self-hosted because it was cheaper.

He’s traditionally been an asshole in his HBO shows - Eastbound and Down, Vice Principles, and Righteous Gemstones

A Danny McBride character calling you an asshole is a bit like Darth Vader calling you a bad father.

proceeds to list 3 separate providers

Just don’t look to hard at the market share or the client composition, sure.

The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs.

I mean, do you tell people they’re cheaping out because they hire a plumber rather than spending eighteen months learning to DIY every pipe in their house? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with outsourcing to cloud services on its face. A couple big warehouses at strategic points in town specifically designed to operate as central hubs for digital traffic makes far more sense than every single office building having a dozen different floors with two IT guys of dubious quality in a badly ventilated closet manning cobbled together rack space.

For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional.

One of the more successful American models for publicly owned and operated data infrastructure:

EPB of Chattanooga, formerly known as the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, is an American electric power distribution and telecommunication company owned by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee

The inverse of the old axiom “The cloud is just someone else’s computer” is “Yes, duh, that’s how you get economies of scale”.

In-housing would mean an enormous increase in demand for physical hardware and IT technical services with a large variance in quality and accessibility. Like, it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. It just takes one big problem and shatters it into a thousand little problems.

It’s funny, because I’ve heard a variety of reasons why the outage happened, why it wasn’t caught in time, why it signaled a problem with hardware versus software or human error versus automation.

I think its safe to say the company is increasingly over-managed and under-staffed, no matter how you slice it. Maybe its time to just break the mega-corp up already and let some good old fashioned free market competition fix this mess.

Imagine posting a picture of Danny McBride and calling someone else the asshole.

Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.

Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.

Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows

Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.

For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.

To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour.

It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.

But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.

Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.

It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.

Ticket Ghost of Ticket Future: “Don’t buy from Ticketmaster”

Me, in the Present: “Okay, but I still want to go to the concert”

Ticket Ghost: “You’re going to feel weird in ten years, when you find out what Kanye gets up to. But you do meet someone at the event to hook up with, have an on-again off-again relationship for three years, the sex is amazing but you’re on totally different career tracks. You end up seeing other people, and now you live in the same neighborhood and your kids are friends. Which is nice but also a bit weird at parties.”

Me: “Wow. That’s… a lot to take in.”

Ticket Ghost: “Sorry, bro. I tried to warn you two weeks ago not to take those edibles because they’d give you psychic premonitions, but you hadn’t taken the edibles yet so you couldn’t listen…”

Me: vomiting sounds as I clutch the toilet

FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you’d think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.

If you want to get even more bespoke, I’m the proud owner of a version 2 box of “Kingdom Death”, a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization’s way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.