I’m still baffled as to where these 100x valuations came from. Amazon’s market cap is $2.65T, and I don’t see how any AI company comes within a faint whiff of that sort of value.

I’m not really a dev, so hefty pinch of salt with this take, but doesn’t this feel like we’re just inventing new “fuzzy” regex with much more required compute?

> inventing new “fuzzy” regex

not RegEx ... more like a "fuzzy" DSL.

I think I heard that we’ll be fracking with nuclear materials soon so we can harvest the tritium water as a byproduct. Does anyone know if that’s just a wild, stupid theory that will never work, or an actual idea being explored? Sounds horrifying.

Recycling plastics is a huge lie that’s caused society to perform rituals that absolve them of the horrible impact they’re inflicting on the planet.

I don’t think this kind of gaslighting is unique or new, but the AI company’s specific melange of fear-mongering, disingenuous helplessness, ethics-washing, with a handy wildcard of regulatory capture is perhaps uniquely optimized and (so far) effective.

> …if you see an emdash it’s probably AI generated…

Or, and—hear me out—the writer typed two successive hyphens on their iDevice.

Microsoft Word converts dashes to emdashes if you type "<word> - <word>".

Outlook used to do this. I'm using a Mac, and Outlook on the Mac is a different animal, so Outlook on Windows may still do this conversion.

Small correction:

To get an en dash in Word, type "<word> - <word>" (word space hyphen space word) followed by spacebar.

To get an em dash, type "<word>--<word>" (word hyphen hyphen word) followed by spacebar.

Which has been happening for over twenty years on taoofmac.com, for instance. It’s a reflex by now.

This brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.

That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.

In the time before xcancel, nobody was aware of xcancel, that's correct.

It’s really unfortunate how much public trust they burnt along the way, maybe this wouldn’t be such a hard sell now?

The company is valued over $950B. It remains to be seen how much it’s worth.

The average life cycle is 20 days, during which time a female can lay ~3000 eggs and travel up to 200km. In 1971 there were 473 confirmed cases in the United States, in 1972 migrating flies breached the sterile fly barrier, and by 1973 it spiked to more than 100,000 US cases.