Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.

This is it. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.

Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.

As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?

The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.

I get called BUM, for bargaining unit member. It is better than most alternatives.

By my reckoning it was a reasonably fun spot to shitpost about politics and poke fun at each other, but when The_Donald got banned it seemed to pick up a lot of refugees (oh the irony) and the mods did nothing to stem the tide of sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. garbage. I used to pop in once in a while for a sensible chuckle, but after the change I blocked it.

I’m not sure it’s even possible to contain some of the tropes. I still occasionally see people posting “first” on YouTube and similar, and that’s a Slashdot troll meme from more than 20 years ago.

Slightly off topic, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction. I recently upgraded my home router/NAT firewall to one that runs pfSense and it now supports IPv6. I was slightly horrified to find that DHCP had assigned all my devices IPv6 addresses and that they were all publicly routable. Comments online seemed to indicate that in order to protect devices on my local network from being probed by external entities I’d have to create custom firewall rules. I know just enough to know I didn’t want to do that as the likelihood of doing it wrong and compromising security far outweighed any benefit I’d see from IPv6. The only other option was to disable all IPv6 traffic at the firewall.

What am I missing here? Is it intended that regular home users have their printer, which the manufacturer hasn’t seen fit to update since Bush Jr. was president, exposed to the entire Internet? Is it that the IPv6 space is so large that port scanning for vulnerable machines is like finding a needle in a haystack?