It probably has to do with strict character limits and the habit spreading. Twitter is only, what, 156 characters? I know text messages used to be something similar, and early on, they cost around 3 cents a letter and you had to hit the numbers multiple times to cycle through to the letter or punctuation that you wanted. It’s where stuff like l33t speak came from, at least.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

Again, that’s literally what airlines and some hotels do. Based on how often you frequent the site and how often you search for flights for a specific date and location, they will change their prices for you specifically. The more interest you show and the closer it gets to that date, the higher the prices go. And your local pizza shop does this on a broad scale. They base their prices on demand - the more people willing to come in, the more they can raise their prices until they hit the threshold of what people are willing to pay.

This is literally just taking targeted ads and applying it to pricing. A cross section of different values can identify you as an individual based on things like browsing habits and web searches, and companies can use that digital fingerprint to tailor online prices for you the same way that the airlines do. Even at a broad scale, they can tailor prices based on your income level, hobbies, and predicted price tolerance. Hell, with this concept they could even run fake sales at an individual level instead of site-wide like Amazon does during their Prime Day “sales.”

This is one of the more irrational fears/predictions about the dynamic pricing infrastructure grocery stores want to implement - that they’ll start tailoring prices on things that you buy frequently or try to get you to buy extra with prices that look like a good deal. But it’s a lot more practical to do online than in a physical store.

Airline companies and hotels have been doing this for years. They track the location, time of year, and how frequently you’re looking to adjust their prices for you. You can sometimes get a different price for the exact same flight or hotel by using a private browser. You know those freezer doors with the display in them instead of a glass panel? Those have a camera in them as well to track which ads you spend the most time looking at so they can roll the most viewed ads more frequently. Some grocery stores are attempting to roll out digital pricing systems in their stores so that they can “dynamically change prices on items due to demand.”

It’s only a small step from using an algorithm to create a profile on you to serve ads tailored to things that you’re interested in to companies using that same profile to “dynamically adjust prices due to demand.”

On the one hand, yes, and Fandom is a blight on the internet.

On the other hand, AI like ChatGPT are wrong some 53% of the time. The fact that this is another “use nontoxic glue to keep your cheese from falling off of pizza” situation doesn’t mean that Google isn’t equally culpable for doing nothing to prevent these sorts of occurrences even when the sources are right (AI is as likely to make things up that aren’t even in its cited sources as it is to actually give you info from them).

But according to the story, he was buying at full price. No bulk discount. Jim was demanding more than his regular price. And, depending on when in the day he showed up, the price that Jim demanded fluctuated.

There’s gotta be more to this.

There’s a train bridge like that in my hometown, but it’s directly over the base of a fairly steep hill. Pretty much anything bigger than a work van is likely to hit it, and I’ve seen a couple of box trucks with the top 6 inches or so of their roof peeled back like a half-open can of sardines.

Freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion! Checkmate, atheists!

/s

Like a record, baby.

Don’t mute him, he can’t stick his foot in his mouth if you do that! But by the gods, fact-check the shit out of him to make the hole he’s digging even bigger.

Sexism? Absolutely. Self-awareness? Not so much.

4chan is where incels were born.

The worst part of this for me is that I remember when you could build a PC with better specs than a console for the same price. Now we’re coming back full circle to where that might be possible again, but graphics cards never truly came down from their inflated crypto mining prices. So that means consoles are just getting more expensive and everybody is losing.

Found the Republican

For perspective, one of the states in the southwest (I think New Mexico) tried to pass a similar ban and it got overruled by a judge because it was found that it would affect a total of 4 girls in the entire state, and the judge felt that that violated the federal law that says that you can’t make a law that targets specific people (ie you can’t make it illegal for Mike and Jerry specifically to join the basketball team).

nice shoe laces

Any interest in anything CAD related? Generally it’s engineering/mechanical focused, but I imagine IT knowledge would be very useful (I know Gcode is useful for 3d printing, at least).

Didn’t you know? According to Republicans, “Reality has a liberal bias.”

Because the best way to fight bigotry is through exposure. This is why colleges and cities run more liberal - because that’s where people are introduced to and live around a wider variety of people and cultures and realize “Oh, they’re people, just like me.”

I’m working class. I’m trans. I’ve never met a Mexican farmer. If I said that I find caring about the issues that Mexicans face alienating, would the fact that I’ve never even met a Mexican matter? It absolutely would.

The fact that none of the people that you work with have probably ever known a single trans person is very important to how they’ve formed their opinions.

Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.

I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.

And similarly, Fahrenheit seems to be tied to the internal temperature of the human body, with 100 degrees being the maximum that the average person can handle before their organs start to be damaged.