EpeeGnome

Sounds like she didn’t have any problems spending her husband’s porn money before. It’d be a bit hypocritical if she suddenly has a problem with it now that it’s her hand on the tiller. To be fair, big life changes like the loss of a loved one often makes people rethink things in their life. If she does have an issue with that business model, she’ll probably just sell her stake so she can remain uninvolved, but still be rich.

Same username I use everywhere. I came up with it back around '07. For the first part, I fenced epee at the time. I never did earn my C rating in the sport, though I came within a literal inch of it multiple times. For the second part, we were playing a lot of DnD at the time, and I am very much like a DnD gnome.

As much as I hate these assholes coopting Tolkien’s works, it is a really apt name for this company. In the story, the Palantir were wonderous tools for communication until they were corrupted and taken over by literal evil, turned into tools of surveillance and control.

I dislike that the article refers to Thiel as a Libertarian without putting quote marks around it. While he is firmly opposed to governments regulating businesses, he makes and sells the tools to help governments exercise more authority over private citizens. I know the term has also been largely coopted by fascists, but it still annoys me.

Some of the services supposedly built on AI have turned out to be exactly that. The AIs themselves aren’t though. They’re dumb in a way that is very distinct from the way we humans are dumb.

A TV doctor snake oil marketer turned MAGA official.

Not high school, but close. We hung out in the same group of friends freshman year at the local technical college. He was a very free spirited guy, with all sorts of wild tattoos and piercings, like a few others in the group. He even got some sort of genital piercing that I declined to see when he was showing it off after he got it. He was also fairly antiestablishment, an atheist who I think leaned politicaly towards anarchism.

Unlike the rest of the group though, he was way into drugs. There were a few who dabbled in marijuana and probably one dedicated stoner, but nothing like this. This guy was snorting lines of cocaine off the bathroom sink between classes, and always finding new pills try. Aside from that he was a very personable guy who had interesting perspectives to include in our conversations about anything and everything. Even when he wasn’t all there, at worst he was still decent company, so everyone just let it go. We’d all expressed our concerns at one point, and there wasn’t any point in continuing to bring it up. We were a very diverse group and most of us had some things we tolerated but didn’t agree with in each other.

For Christmas that year I bought a cheap little gift for each person in the group. Most were silly, but I got him a pill organizer. He excitedly began to brainstorm organizational ideas on how to use it, going on about uppers and downers and more terminology I can’t recall. I told him something along the lines of knowing he wasn’t going to stop experimenting, but I hoped it would help him stay safe. He hugged me and said it was one of the most thoughtful gifts he’d ever gotten.

At the end of the school year we largely all ended up going different ways and I lost track of him. Many years later, I heard from a friend I had kept in touch with that they had run into him. I’d feared he’d end up in jail or dead, but he was doing well, if in an unexpected way. Still had kept the crazy piercings, but was otherwise a button down, white collar guy. He had a wife and kids, lived in a suburban home, and worked as a manager at some office business. He was even a deacon at his church. He was healthy, happy, and proud to be many years clean of drugs. I’m glad he kept enough of the rebel spirit to keep the piercings, and I’m more glad he was off the drugs.