Fourth panel. AI trained on all the above, floods it all with generated content rendering the signal-to-noise ratio too terrible to tolerate, even for corporations.

Lithium as well, if I recall correctly. Most lithium is theorized to date to the big bang. There are no current pathways to create it, and only pathways that destroy it.

Most helium also dates to big bang, but some was created through fusion or alpha decay.

Brains are sexy

We called it “Beetle Bump” but same thing.

After the release of the redesign, it sort of stopped. Only really made sense for the classic version.

Keep going, I’m almost there

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

Your a wizard Harry

Just so I’m absolutely clear. This is shameless self promotion, right?

Seriously, it feels like 1999 internet. And I’m loving it!

The side effect of running your own business, but not being large enough to hire a bunch of people yet – if you take a holiday, the business just stops for that period. We can’t do that, so no holidays. On call 24/7 essentially (although more realistically, I average about 60 hours per week.)

There are chicken and egg problems involved in getting that holiday. We need an employee to cover the shop, but the income needs to be high enough to afford their salary (they need to be a technical specialist like me). So I need to get to about an 60-80 hour work week to justify the employee and then find someone with the same super niche skills, and then spend a bunch of time on knowledge transfer. Ideally, they want to buy in so they’re becoming part owner, but that makes it even harder to find an employee.

So, hopefully I’ll get a vacation within a year or two…

I am fortunate in that I took a very niche applied science in university, and was successful in that career as an employee/consultant – geophysics. So I have high value, rare technical skills. I blew out my knee in the high arctic doing scientific surveys – so I decided to try to parley those skills into something where I could be my own boss. Fortunately I also picked up a business partner with a similar background (former coworker) who wanted to run the business side of the business.

During COVID I started an equipment business to provide the required specialty tools to other geophysicists – things like ground penetrating radar and such. There was exactly one business already operating in this space in Canada, so there was room for a second player. It’s a high capital business – I’m basically taking the capital risk of buying rare equipment and spreading it out across the continent. (People don’t want to buy a $50k device to use for a week.) But it was a huge risk – I have one business partner, and we both wagered out houses on the startup loan. We’re past the hump now and our revenue is directly funding growth, so huzzah! (It took six months to get our first client – but now it’s about six hours between clients, without having to do any marketing bullshit.) I have real world hands on experience with all the gear and am not just a sales robot, which keeps everyone coming back for advice, opinions, networking, and we are growing by word of mouth.

My boss is a hardass though. ;)

If later in life means, more recently… I started my first business during COVID in my late 30s. Doing great!

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn’t owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch… But it’s still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

They are speaking truth to power at the moment, but people still play MTX mobile games so…

Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here’s a graph

Chicken and egg problem. Communities are too small to have conversation, so no one goes there for conversation. I’m a hockey fan. On reddit r/hockey is huge and busy, but so are all the team subs. Whereas on lemmy, if I post to the team sub, it’s just crickets. So I suppose that if all the hockey fans all hang out in !hockey@lemmy.ca together, we might have critical mass for a conversation now and then. And we can worry about our team subs later, if the general community outgrows one place.

Okay, more serious answer. You look like you’re on kbin, so I don’t know if this applies – nevertheless.

On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/…) that existed prior to 0.19. It’s basically a Hot sort, but it’s weighted by community size. So if you’re subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it’s still likely to end up in your feed. I’ve noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort – suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts – is in my feed. Etc.

Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they’re into niche topics.

When the reddit API protests occurred, lemmy wasn’t really ready for the influx either. Historically, when a social network dies, it’s some combination of a protest and there being a pre-existing landing place that is ready to receive the influx. In the case of digg dying, that was reddit ready and waiting.

But lemmy had so many rough edges and was almost entirely unknown at the time of the reddit protest – bugs, missing features, no apps… For most reddit users, even with the 3rd party shutdown, moving to lemmy at the time was objectively worse.

You’re right though – the next time something happens, lemmy is now established, the apps exist, many of the bugs and missing features have been dealt with, etc.

This is the funniest.

Meow