Stated briefly: Kurzgesagt isn’t what it once was.

I played Doctor totally wrong in the dorms, it seems.

That dovetails nicely with the mental state of an undergrad. In my case, I did actually know everything back then.

At least they didn’t first hear about it in someone else’s sociology class?

He always looked so laid back.

I heard he was retired and living like a king in Patagonia.

Is 2006 coming back? I’d prefer that, but MySpace as it existed then wouldn’t land the same way now.

I have a hard time equating “the LLM did what we told it” with “hacking.” But hey, let’s throw “escaped containment” in just to make it Serious™.

Always my goal.

Cats excel at this. I’m not sure I could pull it off at work.

Where I have to go …

Because a cat adopted me. Again.

That is suspiciously close to “Nowhere” spelled backward.

_2

Oh, someone’s getting hosed.

I trust Steam thus far. But music, I buy and download. Between my computer, my phone and a backup drive, I feel pretty good that I’ll be able to listen for the foreseeable future. Movies and TV, I also donnload.

Embrace, extend, extinguish has a long and storied domestic history. But when China does it, it’s bad. These days, we copy them at least as much as they copy us.

I’m far more worried about what our own government is doing with advanced tech than China, which largely seems content to let us implode on our own without them having to spend any resources.

Happy shitting!

Self-reported unique DAU has always been suspicious, and as the World Bank estimates 2.01 billion kids age 0-14 as of 2024, out of 8.14 billion total, that gives us 6.13 billion people 15 and up. Sure, it’s slightly lagging data, but I prefer sourced data over estimates, even if the World Bank is not on the list of “institutions I trust” overall.

Given that the charts show a drop in the under-15 cohort from 2023 but an increase in overall population, the 2024 figures seem a fairly useful dataset in the scope of the number I’m trying to discern, which is what percentage of total population is being claimed by that 3.56 billion figure. Yes, there are kids under 15 who are used by Meta properties, but I’m not going to find reliable penetration data (that’s more of an Epstein thing) for the purposes here.

Current global population growth is hovering just above 1%, so I’m content to compare 2024 figures with Meta’s 2026 claim on a proportional basis. Anyway, that’s a shitton of throat clearing to arrive at:

58% of people are used by a Meta product daily worldwide.

That’s a pretty fucking extraordinary claim. Heading back over to the World Bank, total internet penetration in 2025 was 74%, up from 71% in 2024, so let’s assume a linear trend and throw a dart at 77% for 2026 to revise the numbers accordingly: 6.27 billion internet users, 1.55 billion of whom are under 15, yielding 4.72 billion 15 and up. And again, this arrives at an even more comical figure:

75% of people with internet access are used by a Meta product daily worldwide.

OK, but per Reuters in April, Meta’s “products” are still banned in China. Sure, there’s bound to be some VPN usage, but the Middle Kingdom has a robust homegrown set of “social media” apps, meaning that total internet users worldwide isn’t actually a good baseline for penetration claims I’m not going to go further into the weeds on, given that 75% is farcical enough before such considerations push things past 80% of people 15 and up who are burdened with access to Meta’s panopticon being used daily.

In short, the figure is clearly bullshit in much the same way McDonald’s signage used to boast “Over 99 billion served” back in the day, referring to absolute figures for products sold since the company’s inception but implying a customer base some 17 times the world population before switching to “Billions and billions served” in 1994.

Note: I had links to the World Bank data and Reuters article in the “deleted post” I was trying to edit (I hate my fucking trackpad), and I’m not going to go back and source everything again after spending 90 minutes compiling all of that. The edit was originally supposed to be to add that the source for Meta’s claim is its own investor materials, which are supposed to be rigourous, and that it deduplicates users across multiple apps.

deleted by creator

Yep. Musical chairs, but this time, in the 13 figures! Something that seems woefully undercovered in all of this is what’s to become of all the hardware orphaned by Nvidia’s must-have next-gen silicon and timelines on all this spending in that regard. The belief seems to be everyone must be on the cutting edge of hardware at all times, which is a grift in its purest form … spend billions now to keep pace so that you can write off what you bought in two years while buying even more expensive replacements is … not sane.

Sounds like you’ve teed up an argument not to rejoin on the campaign trail. Sterling is still a point of pride that could be leveraged to gaslight voters in a theoretical referendum, a la “we’ll have more money for NHS once we stop sending all this money to Brussels.”

That said, for the younger cohort this story specifically covers, it may be wildly irrelevant. Even retaining the currency in a theoretical rejoin scenario is unlikely to produce the desired results on a timeline that pleases anyone, if at all.