Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

I will only use this if it uses Clippy’s animations.

Thats… what this is, right?

Clippy 3.0?

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

Now now, Elon does technically have one patent to his name personally.

Its the shape of the charging port for Teslas.

He patented this with the idea that if he ever did actually build out that massive EV charger network, he would basically be owed royalties if it successfully became the USB C of EV charging ports, so himself personally would be owned royalties if other car companies wanted to use that charging port shape.

But that was like a decade ago, and last I heard he fired the entire team at Tesla dedicated to the charging network.

I ran PopOS on linux for years, every game I had worked, and actually performed better than on Windows, once Proton got to version 7.

• with the exception of games that run multiplayer kernel level anti cheat.

** oh and almost all of those games use anti cheats that are compatible with linux/proton, and have been for 3 years, but the game devs/management just refuse to enable that support, even though its already included in their contracts with AC providers for no extra cost.

You can get a dock and plug in a mouse and keyboard, a monitor, etc…

They are monopolists/oligopolists, operating like a cartel.

They create new paradigms as they please, because there is no alternative.

Consumer preferences don’t mean dick in a highly uncompetetive market with absurd costs to entry.

IBM:

Providing hardware and software assistance to genocides of all kind since 1938!

Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.

Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.

They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…

… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.’

And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.

… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.

I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.

EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.

… What?

It… it goes into the company.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

They run an absurdly profitable business.

They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.

That’s after wages.

Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.

The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.

Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?

Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?

… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?

… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…

Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.

Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.

Valve’s position allows them to do this.

Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.

As a certain wise old man once said:

“These things, they take time.”

Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…

This actually is basically how Valve works.

They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.

They are a private company, not public.

That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’

(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)

(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)

…

They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.

Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over ‘its the same game in a new setting’, as well as not rushing anything.

A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.

People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.

Well its been about 24hrs now, MrPoopyButthole has been posting in this time, so they would have seen my reply… apparently they don’t care to expand on this.

Oh wow you deleted my comment.

I am 35 years old, and autistic.

I’m not especially savvy to newer, younger social/internet memes, and I was honestly describing my understanding of ‘girl math’ as a modern social meme or phenomenon or what have you.

I genuinely was, and still am trying to figure out if my anecdotal experience with ‘girl math’ is a reasonably accurate understanding or not.

Could you perhaps point out where I was specifically horrible towards OP?

I’d love to be able to review what I wrote, but you’ve deleted it.

Removed by mod

I entirely do not mean to be rude, but

Apparently it’s also not called “Girl math”, but “Impulsive over-spending”. SMH my head

Is… is this a quirky joke comment made for nothing but effect, or… did you … actually not know this, and learn this in the meeting?

Apparently we are trying to put mediums and psychics out of work.