True, but those people are great when all you care about is line going up. People who ask think critically and ask questions don’t make line go up as fast.

The long story short is that you are being made to (by default) give up rights that you should have, particularly around class action lawsuits. It’s strictly bad for you and strictly good for the company. They probably shouldn’t be allowed to do this. Since they are, the only thing we can do to protest it is to opt-out.

Maybe you’ll never sue discord. But maybe someday there will be a lawsuit brought against discord by someone else. A few ideas for topics might include a security vulnerability that leaks personal information, the use of discord content for AI training data (e.g. copyright issues), or the safety of minors online. If you don’t opt-out, you can’t be a part of such lawsuits if they ever become relevant. This overall weakens these lawsuits and empowers companies like discord to do more shady things with less fear of repercussions.

And, since the vast majority of people will never opt-out (since you’re opted in by default) these kinds of lawsuits are weakened from the start. That’s why every company in the US is doing this forced arbitration thing. At this point, they would be crazy not to since it’s such a good thing for them and the average person doesn’t care enough about it.

I’m almost starting to wonder if that’s the plan. Just keep saying “IPO IPO IPO” to get funding from over-eager VCs who want a piece of the IPO before it becomes widely available.

But then you just never IPO. Keep making minor to moderate mistakes along the way so you can be all “weeeeell we would have IPO’d but insert thing here so we want to wait another 6 months to let it die down”. Repeat until you’re ready to quit, then actually IPO and ride the initial IPO high all the way down via golden parachute.

You say “only” 6 months ago but it’s surprising to me just how quickly this time has passed.

I was a Reddit every day user pre-Lemmy. I happened to get linked to something there yesterday and saw all my sub’s “last visited” dates at 6 months. It’s crazy how easy it was to go cold turkey and I haven’t seen a need to go back.

Copilot, yes. You can find some reasonable alternatives out there but I don’t know if I would use the word “great”.

GPT-4… not really. Unless you’ve got serious technical knowledge, serious hardware, and lots of time to experiment you’re not going to find anything even remotely close to GPT-4. Probably the best the “average” person can do is run quantized Llama-2 on an M1 (or better) Macbook making use of the unified memory. Lack of GPU VRAM makes running even the “basic” models a challenge. And, for the record, this will still perform substantially worse than GPT-4.

If you’re willing to pony up, you can get some hardware on the usual cloud providers but it will not be cheap and it will still require some serious effort since you’re basically going to have to fine-tune your own LLM to get anywhere in the same ballpark as GPT-4.

Image generation tech has gone crazy over the past year and a half or so. At the speed it’s improving I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

Here’s a paper from this year discussing text generation within images (it’s very possible these methods aren’t SOTA anymore – that’s how fast this field is moving): https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/WACV2023/html/Rodriguez_OCR-VQGAN_Taming_Text-Within-Image_Generation_WACV_2023_paper.html

They wouldn’t make these games if they didn’t work.

Part of their shtick is to get you to make any purchase at all. Then you might go on to spend hundreds! Or you might quit. But in some sense that’s also good because the plan was never for you to play for free.

Seems like you might have fallen victim to the Scunthorpe Problem. I’m sure you can guess what word they were trying to censor there…

There’s nothing special about a generic for loop (at least in C-like languages). There’s no reason you couldn’t do something like for (i = 0; true; i++) to make it infinite. Some languages even support an infinite list generator syntax like for i in [0..] (e.g. it lazily generates 0, then 1, then 2, etc. on each iteration) so you can use a for-each style loop to iterate infinitely.

Now, whether or not you should do such things is another question entirely. I won’t pretend there aren’t any instances where it’s useful, but most of the time you’re better off with a different structure.