>For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon.
It's funny, I've always loved that kind of environment. Quiet high school hallways after everyone's left, empty university buildings late at night, offices after hours, even empty offices that haven't been moved into yet. For me it evokes feelings associated more with watching a rainy day from inside, or lofi-girl with headphones studying.
I understand why it can evoke horror or unsettling feelings for people, but for me the first word that comes to mind is just "peaceful".
Even the environments in the Backrooms trailer - minus the obvious horror elements - look like they would be a lot of fun to explore!
This thread is giving me flashbacks from my university. I lived on campus so i got to explore at night whenever.
I don't know how to explain the feeling. I wouldn't call it peaceful. A little eerie but also kind of exciting. My campus was a bit odd. Some 'brutalist' architecture and dungeonesque parts. I miss it now.
There was a vending machine that would randomly add 10 cents to itself every couple minutes. If you waited long enough you could get something for free. Lights that would turn on by themselves. Doors that would open randomly. Might have been haunted.
I totally agree. When I was going to school while working, I'd often stay late, or come in on weekends (and stay late). I loved that feeling of peacefulness. Same feeling I got when I would take a walk for a break while staying up for an all nighter coding in the computer lab in university. I think those horror-ish feelings (and same with the dystoptian pictures of american suburbs), really only work if you haven't actually experienced those places.
Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.
The past failure is in the abstract, and in the past. And anyway, they were unfairly maligned. There is an inside version of the story that they will be happy to tell you, which was clearly not their fault.
But that is neither here nor there. What is important is the now, and in the now you are in the presence of someone who is Good At Making Money. And you too, by joining forces, will be Making Lots Of Money with this charismatic person, who can clearly achieve great things and will be clearly avoiding any past missteps that may have caused their downfall right before reaching greatness (but weren’t their fault anyway).
I took as beyond sarcasm, just a simple explanation of how they manage to keep going written in the first person. From my perspective it is incredible anybody could misunderstand.
That's how I took it too, and didn't realize someone might read it otherwise, but I can see how it could be misunderstood if someone isn't paying as much attention.
There is no tone of voice in writing. This is part of the problem with written social media. Some writers will say "only an idiot would believe what I wrote", showing themselves to be adversarial in their communications. I don't think that's you in this case.
It's hard for me to tell because I've seen this multiple times in my career (in tech). People wasting investors' money getting funding over and over while those actually building stuff get suppressed.
I swear there are some people who control a lot of money who are just having fun ruining people's lives for laughs.
There are people who spend years working for some company, betting their career on it but it turns out the whole thing was some kind of inside joke.
My view is that some companies are basically somebody's toy and the employees are part of the entertainment like a personal reality TV show for some rich person so they can play-act as a hotshot entrepreneur.
Probably it serves as some kind of inflation control mechanism. If you have a lot of money and want to spend it without driving inflation, you have to find things with extreme diminishing returns and you have to invest in people who value such things.
The only thing I can add (regarding the motivations of people willing to invest with a fraudster) is that many people invest with the belief that they'll make money because they are just part of the scam and they assume there's a greater fool somewhere down the line.
I joke that I'm on the "Claude Code workout plan" now.
Standing desk, while it's working I do a couple squats or pushups or just wander around the house to stretch my legs. Much more enjoyable than sitting at my desk, hands on keyboard, all day long. And taking my eyes off the screen also makes it easier to think about the next thing.
Moving around does help, but even so, the mental fatigue is real!
I've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.
I have a small gym next to my home office and I just cannot do it. When I train I need to be 100% focused on the exercises otherwise in the best case I'll stagnate, and in the worst I'll injure myself. So instead I do some mindless chores if time allows.
Ironically, this brings us one step closer to believing the simulation hypothesis might be true... In which case, maybe there is no real world anyway ;)
>OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding.
By itself, this doesn't tell us much.
The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.
I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).
Normally that would be a fair point (and maybe it was valid in 2022).
But given the US approach to foreign policy in 2025, one could argue that the list of countries that “have a contentious relationship with the US” (or, maybe more accurately, the other way around) is a lot longer and less clear-cut today than it was a few years ago.
It's funny, I've always loved that kind of environment. Quiet high school hallways after everyone's left, empty university buildings late at night, offices after hours, even empty offices that haven't been moved into yet. For me it evokes feelings associated more with watching a rainy day from inside, or lofi-girl with headphones studying.
I understand why it can evoke horror or unsettling feelings for people, but for me the first word that comes to mind is just "peaceful".
Even the environments in the Backrooms trailer - minus the obvious horror elements - look like they would be a lot of fun to explore!
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