The quote doesn't show him admitting it, but rather says his biographer said it.

Thunderf00t made many videos about the Hyperloop and while you do need to keep thinking for yourself while watching them because he makes mistakes or interjects conjecture or personal opinion as fact at times, he still does a good job of showing how absurd Hyperloop is on its face.

The so-called "fall of Elon Musk" should be a reminder to everyone so just think for yourselves. I know the TV ended up painting this guy is the second coming of Christ, but you don't become a multi multibillionaire several times over by just being a good guy. There's an old saying, you can become a millionaire through honesty, integrity, and hard work, but you can't become a billionaire.

Also everyone needs to keep in mind that most of his billions came out of your pocket. His companies are based off of massive government subsidies including the hyperloop, and one of the reasons why Tesla's stock price is so high is just because of government policies that have led to a massive stock market bubble at the expense of the common man. And there's just so much money sloshing around due to excessive government debt and massive central bank money printing it had to go somewhere, and it ended up going into stocks and other assets making those people rich while inflation adjusted wages have stagnated for decades.

If it isn't search or video, Google always has one foot out the door.

I believe that one of the reasons the stadia failed is everybody knew about the Google graveyard and wasn't willing to buy into an ecosystem destined to die.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also something that would affect their ability to attract good talent. People want to feel like they're working on something meaningful that's going to stick around for a while. Putting years of your life into developing something for Google just to have it hit the Google graveyard has got to be deeply dissatisfying.

They've done a lot of stupid things lately, but this isn't one of them.

Governments should be using open platforms and open source software.

What is this "retirement" you speak of?

Oooh! The period where they put us all out on an ice flow when we become too old to work!

"This is your final warning, please migrate to FOSS platforms"

Many ads are malicious. Many try to install software you didn't ask for on your computer, or they try to trick you into pressing a "download" button on a download site that isn't for the thing you wanted but for their software, or they fake error messages to trick you into installing malicious software.

Back when I was younger, all those sort of activities would fall under the banner of "cyber-terrorism". Therefore, installing an ad blocker is an act of counter-terrorism.

Ngl, "brand safety" is a pretty dangerous idea. That's where tech companies start to get a justification to fiddle with speech.

It's shocking how few users you really need to have a great community, and how quickly it stops mattering what other platforms are doing when you have that.

I'm not opposed to intellectual property because there's an argument for providing a limited time monopoly to the creators of works to provide incentive to make works public. Without any such incentive, it's entirely possible that the monetization structures for different works change, for example locking content behind restrictive systems that don't allow for personal use at all.

The key is "limited time". If you can't make your money back in 15 years, then maybe it's time to make a new thing? The idea that someone should own a thing you made after you're dead is stupid -- how exactly will that promote you to create new works? If you're dead, your creating days are over except for creating plant food out of your bones and organs.

I put my money where my mouth is, and the legal page of the graysonian ethic specifically lists that the book is put into the public domain or license after Creative Commons CC0 license after 15 years from the date of first publishing.

Now we just need headphone jacks and SD cards and lineageos support and my dream phone will be mandated.

He's persona non grata these days, but the old quote from Scott Adams applies here:

"I read a newspaper article about something I know very well—my own field—and it was so full of errors that I had to wonder how many errors there were in other articles on topics I didn’t know much about."

If they're getting an important detail like this so mindblowingly wrong, what else are they getting wrong?

I found the same, tbh.

I've been on the thrediverse using lotide until now, which is different then lemmy or kbin. There were some federation issues so lotide wasn't federating just as the place was blowing up with more users, so I decided it was time to install one of the new pieces of software.

I spent 3 days trying to get kbin working and federating, and just wasn't having luck with it. Even now, kbin.social is pretty dodgy about federating, and doesn't federate with a lot of other stuff at all.

My instances require good federation. That's non-negotiable because otherwise it's just me sitting here talking to myself.

Ultimately I went with lemmy, which I managed to get up and running quite a bit quicker.

To be fair to kbin, it's a super new project. lemmy and lotide have been going for years, I hadn't even really heard about kbin 2 months ago. I think it'll get a lot better, but it's going to take time and effort.

I sucked it up with respect to the lemmy devs politics stuff... Instead of bitching that they're not exactly like me, I'm going to just be thankful to them for creating a platform we can share.

Reminds me of the old saying: "how do you make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with a billion"

Start with a billion visitors, then snag 100 million, then keep 1 million then blaghole the site

As long as you aren't accepting any undue benefit for the mistake, I wouldn't worry too much about it. An error like that without consequence isn't really a big deal. If, on the other hand, they were giving you special tax status or something, or if you applied for a promotion and you got the promotion in part because of affirmative action whose benefit you weren't entitled to, that could be a problem.

I've been on this part of the fediverse for years (via lotide rather than lemmy or kbin, but I've been here), and kbin itself is incredibly new. I'd never heard of it more than about 3 months ago, and I'm constantly on the watch for new stuff because I always believed this part of the fediverse had huge potential.

Honestly, considering how new it is, kbin is shockingly good. Go back and look at reddit 3 months into development!

I've been saying for a while now: AI demos really well, but when you actually need it to do a thing it often fails spectacularly.

It's a verisimilitude engine: It tries to make something that looks like it should be right, rather than actually trying to be right. Sometimes the easiest answer is the right answer so it gives that, but when you start asking it harder questions, it'll just make something up that looks right but isn't.

https://babylonbee.com/news/man-scientists-confirm-washing-your-hair-and-just-kinda-letting-shampoo-run-down-rest-of-you-good-enough

Good enough.

Shittylifeprotip: if you run an unprofitable forum website, assert your dominance over your users by fucking with them. They'll respect that you're an alpha Chad and give you more money and views.

Congratulations to the instance for it's extraordinary growth!

Welcome everyone who popped over from reddit.

It's important to remember you're on the fediverse, a huge variety of websites running all sorts of software of which lemmy.world is just one server, and Lemmy itself is just one piece of software. There's many other reddit-alikes like Lemmy, as well as software like Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube.

Decentralization is strength. Try to spread out over instances with our users and our communities because instances can and do shut down, shut off federation, or otherwise become reddit.

This is supported by admins and users, there is no pot of venture capital money keeping instances running or paying admins. Keep that in mind.

On mastodon, you can subscribe to communities on platforms like Lemmy, the community looks like a user. On that side of things, it just acts like a relay that accepts messages and then sends it out to everyone who is subscribed.

However, your thoughts are on the right track. You don't really see that many Mastodon users on lemmy.

People don't leave link aggregator sites like digg when there's problems!

A quarter million users and that's not even with all the different instances.

Very cool. Just remember folks, don't forget to diversify and decentralize! These other instances have some interesting posts and conversations, and by spreading out we make sure no single instance or community can break the fediverse.

Tech enthusiasts have always been the early adopters. They're the ones who see the potential for a new platform and migrate to it first. Recall that the internet itself was just a thing for nerds for the longest time.

Somebody has to be first. It isn't going to be people who are only going to follow, it isn't going to be people who are going to leave when they realize that none of their favorite people are on there. Going to be people who have some kind of vested interest in trying this new and interesting thing.

As for the relatively older age, I hate to say it but a lot of kids think that technology is consumption. It's a big problem. In a recent shocking employer survey, employers talking about the lack of tech skills among gen z. This isn't an isolated data point, either. There's a lot of data suggesting that kids are growing up as experts on TikTok and Facebook rather than fundamental skills that would let you go out and do something like run a website.

If anyone was bothering to listen, we've discovered that big tech uses a lot of fraud to make themselves look bigger than they are, especially early on

As Wayne Gretzky once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

So we'll start with the reality check. Probably no one's gonna like your podcast. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's at just because you build it doesn't mean they'll come. Could be that you put in a whole bunch of work and even spend some money trying to get some production values, and it just doesn't work out.

But for the other reality check: every other podcast out there had a first episode. A lot of them failed, but a bunch of them succeeded and went on to be relatively successful. One of the top media personalities in the world right now is a guy just sitting down and having discussions with people.

So take the shot. Worst case scenario, it turns out no one listens. Then you can move on with your life knowing that you tried.

Besides, it's not like you did something crazy like write a novel length book over the course of a year with the philosophies you want to pass down to your son and get it professionally edited and commission artwork for the cover and get a primo ad read during the trial of the decade only to sell like a dozen copies. Now that might be embarrassing. But you can bang out a podcast in a couple of days!

Actually, he pissed of Captain Janeway and was erased from the timeline.

Used to be a nice guy before he became a former individual.

My kid really loves the 2000s Alvin and the chipmunks movies. Dave is always talking about how they need to be like normal kids and they need to plan for the future, but on a lark I looked up how long a chipmunk lives and by the third movie they'd be like 50 in chipmunk years.

I think we'll just assume whatever Gene makes them talk makes them live really long. Let's do that.

We always hear about "fail fast" -- here we got to see it in real time!

The nice thing about the fediverse is that if you find something else federated that you like, then you can just use it. You move to the new instance running the software you actually like, and resubscribe to the communities you like on the original instances.

There's already kbin as an alternative (the largest instance of that is at https://kbin.social/), I believe you can subscribe to lemmy and kbin communities using friendica, and I can already see a lot of other options coming down the pipe.

OTOH, I've been here for years. I chose to go all-in on the fediverse a couple years ago.

Being a fantastic game is a great start.

Dude.....wash your hands....

We never needed big tech. Today we need it even less.

I'm excited to see what we build.

Both of those instances tend to be fairly censorship heavy, so people who just want to have a chat will be less interested in joining an instance that's going to shut down a conversation that they're enjoying.

Before all this stuff with reddit went down, most of the instances on the threadiverse we're fairly censorship heavy, and so people didn't really bother coming over from the main fediverse. With the establishment of new and more liberal instances and the infusion of new users, the potential of Lemmy has really been unleashed.

I've been really happy to see it.

In practice, don't be surprised if most of the fediverse doesn't defederate from either.

Seems to me that monetizing karma would bring what is already sort of an echo chamber to the next level. Suddenly an unpopular take can cost you dollars and cents.

I know.

The reality is that it probably won't accomplish anything at all, particularly for lemmy users whose fediverse is structured considerably differently than mastodon.

You don't tend to see people from that side of the fediverse over here.

In the 1900s, culture was considered a common good. In 2023, all culture is to be torn down to build utopia. Rich folks who want to build a legacy end up sticking their fingers into politics and science instead of art and culture. They'd rather pay for a mob to tear down a statue than to pay an artist to create one.

That being said, the Internet did usher in a new golden age of art, culture, and entertainment. It's just that it came from the bottom up rather than from the top down. There's an unlimited amount of cool stuff being created every day, but smaller scale projects funded by regular people.

That's great and imma let you finish but remember that decentralization is strength on the fediverse. Join or create other instances, join or create communities on other instances, thats our strength.

On the fediverse, instances come and go. I've seen big instances go down either permanently or temporarily, and ive also seen big communities decide they're turning off federation. The only way to be safe from that is to decentralize, so if something happens there's still something worth doing on the fediverse.

Besides that though, congratulations lemmy.world, I love to see the thrediverse Renaissance we're in, and nothing but love for the folks running this instance and the folks participating on it.

The stock is not the company, that's important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.

Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they're participating in the AI boom. I think that's going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it's helping a small number of companies stay afloat