Serious question: do you think people in Iran would prefer the status quo, or Return of the Shah (son)? My gut says Shah, but I don't know anyone from Iran, so that's just a guess.
About 30% would take the shaw has a first or second choice. This is higher than support for the current regime but the country is deeply divided on what an alternative future would look like.
It’s a serious question but it’s not a relevant one. There isn’t a ballot with just “Pahlavi” and “Ayatollah” on it; and there probably never will be considering how much Iranians hate both.
Speaking of evil dark-patterned business practices, Epic just recently U-turned on lootboxes again. Fortnite did have them originally, but pivoted to the less egregious FOMO sales funnel around when it got really popular, except now they've backtracked by allowing pay-to-win and lootbox mechanics in user-created game modes.
Fortnite's user-created modes are essentially an attempt to compete with Roblox, and like Roblox their age demographics skew very young, so this reads as a deliberate attempt to exploit children specifically.
Maybe it has changed since I played it, but I honestly found Fortnite to be pretty non-predatory compared to most live service games. I know that's a low bar, but at least you can just buy stuff when you see them on there.
If we looked at the top 100 played steam games, I don't think Fortnite would crack the top 15 for most manipulative.
Weirdly I agree. After seeing the truly god-awful pay to win gambling-filled landscape of Roblox, Fortnite feels pretty tame and respectful. V bucks aren't shoved down your throat, the battle passes are pretty transparent about what you get, and the whole cosmetics store feels less lootbox-heavy than a lot of games.
> Now, third-party games can offer premium in-game items and effects, with developers pocketing 37% of the proceeds — temporarily doubled to 74% for 12 months.
37%? Developers get a 37% cut? Holy fucking hypocrisy from Tim Sweeney and the camp at Epic Games with their predation here.
Epic wasn't fined for putting things on sale. Instead, it was fined for putting pressure on children to buy things that were put on sale; e.g. through wording like "Get it now" and "Grab it", and through design.
This makes no sense. You can't buy anything on Fortnite with real money. The purchase you make is for blocks of v-bucks which can then be spent on items.
The actual financial transaction is completely divorced from any items that are on sale and, hopefully, that financial transaction is completely out of the direct control of children.
I play Fortnite -- I get the battle pass, I have a lot of skins and items, and I have never paid a cent. I earn enough v-bucks from playing the game to never have to pay.
That's actually pretty amazing and so I question this fine situation. If you didn't give your kid a cent for Fortnite, they could still play and have great time with their friends and basically get the full experience including skins, items, and emotes.
I appreciate the validation that he doesn't customize it much. I see a lot of people creating really complex agents/workflows that I tried to replicate and always came across to me as more trouble than they are worth. Kinda like 10 years ago when people would create complex workflows for storing their notes.
In America, the problem comes when the gain and the loss come in different years. If you make a big gain in 2024, but didn't pay taxes on that gain, then lose the money in 2025, they will come after you for failing to pay taxes in 2024 even though you no longer have the money in 2025. The lesson is to pay your taxes.
A bank will be happy to lend you the money to cover the spread since you have the collateral of a large tax refund in the future. It'll cost you a little bit of interest but it's generally not the catastrophe that people make it out to be.
Maybe if you are an ultra high net worth individual. I don’t see your avg Joe walking into their neighborhood Chase bank asking for a $500k loan using their potential tax refund as collateral is going to get it. That seems like an esoteric financial product.
Tax refund loans are offered in conjunction with the tax filing service like TurboTax or H&R Block because they already know what your refund amount is going to be and it’s relatively risk free (small refund amounts) and easy to automate. They are similar to pay day loans.
Crypto bro showing up with $1m gains and losses from crypto transactions and asking for a refund loan at their neighborhood bank is probably not going to go anywhere (it’s too large a risk because it’s not just a few thousand dollars but at the same time it’s too small an amount for them to do custom due diligence to underwrite a loan).
Anyway you can’t erase gains in year 1 with losses in year 2 at least in the USA (you can only offset $3k/yr max in year 2 if you don’t have any other gains).
I followed Rob's work on this in real time, it was a master class in calling out a company with no value. He just continually laid out how numbers didn't add up, and laid out the inevitable conclusion. I had no idea about the threats, but I do know his wife had a baby while all this was going on.
There is a very strange totally coincidental correlation where if you are smart and NOT trying to raise money for an AI start-up, you think AGI is far away, and if you are smart and actively raising money for an AI start-up, then AGI is right around the corner. One of those odd coincidences of modern life
Mind you, such a correlation can be reasonable—the Yesses work for something because they believe it, while the Noes don’t because they don’t. (In this instance, I’m firmly a No, and I don’t say such a correlation is reasonable, due to the corrupting influence of money plus hype sweeping people along, which I think are much more common. But there will still be at least some that are True Believers, and it does make sense that they would then try to raise money to achieve their vision.)
This is very similar to the conclusion I have been coming to over the past 6 months. Agents are like really unreliable employees, that you have to supervise, and correct so often that its a waste of time to delegate to them. The approach I'm trying to develop for myself is much more human centric. For now I just directly supervise all actions done by an AI, but I would like to move to something like this: https://github.com/langchain-ai/agent-inbox where I as the human am the conductor of work agents do, then check in with me for further instructions or correction.
Has anyone figured out an elegant way to add front-end design to a process like this? Every implementation I see people use includes either vague references to front-end frameworks, or figma images. It doesn't feel like a cohesive design solution.
I have a folder of scss files containing the utility classes and custom properties that make up the design. By instructing it to use those, and to reference similar files, it more or less conforms nicely to the existing design language.
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