LOTR fans stay losing

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency "executives."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

It's slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it's going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.

Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game

In this context, "moat" is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he's just not, uh, very good at it. He's put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem "approachable" in a social media context, and that doesn't help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don't doubt that he's beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That's surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and "punching everything up!" with a few rounds of ChatGPT.

please be gentle with my child, they will soon have a presence on the discount paperback rack at the local grocery store

Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable

User requests something that accommodates their actual use-case. Altman responds by dismissing it as "toys," in that same cultivated faux-casual lowercase smarm that constitutes the bulk of his public identity. This man is not fit to be an executive.

I used to be a serious systems programmer like you once, then I took a prompt injection in the knee

Jobs is Tech Jesus, but Antennagate is only recorded in one of the apocryphal books

We are, of course, assuming that the author continues to "micro"dose.