Tech startups always start out giving away their product for free, then they see "hey, ten million people use this now, imagine if we got them all to pay $5 per month!" But the energy barrier to getting that $5 is so, so high. Especially these days when everyone has subscription fatigue.

When normal people talk about AI they talk about using it for fairly menial tasks that aren't generative, like summarizing search results or organizing stuff into a spreadsheet. What's ultimately going to pop the bubble is no one wants to pay for those things.

3D comes around again every 20 years or so, then we find out people still don't want it.

I was going to charitably assume it was a riff on them both being named after cities. ;)

Online, every place is the Argument Place.

We should, like, stick an umlaut in or something and make everyone use the new version, like Türkiye did.

Anyone inclined to think that would think it whether we were called Americans, USians, United Statesians, or Purple People Eaters. I don't think language is the thing tipping the scales here.

That too.

The other thing is I've never seen much evidence that people in other countries *want* the name. Canadians tend to get pretty annoyed if you call them "Americans."

I think I'd be more open to other terms if they weren't always used with an implied sneer.

That's the thing, I've never seen anyone use "USian" or other neologisms like that without an implied sneer.

I think that depends on how you define "movie" and "worst." At a certain point it ceases to hold together as a film. To me the really bad ones are where someone had the technical *ability* to make a competent movie and made an awful one anyway, like Hobgoblins or Pod People.

Also, looking at the Republican side, the party actively did NOT want Trump as the nominee in 2016 and ended up with him anyway.

This is just conspiracy theory. Primaries are frequently competitive and parties are usually reluctant to put a thumb on the scale until there's a nominee. Just looking at recent history, Biden was not considered the front-runner going into 2020.

It's a selection of the people who wanted to campaign for office. Were you expecting to just grab a random person off the street?

Well, if people aren't miserable they won't understand they're supposed to want communism!

I figured that would be the more obscure one. I just assume everyone old enough to be on Blusky has heard Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Zork was just officially open-sourced, so your timing is good.

This is entirely orthogonal to whether Sarah McBride is doing a good job. (I think she is, especially given the nearly impossible situation she's in.)