Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.
it's just a blogging platform + newsletter service. There was never an expectation ppl would make a living income from it, except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.
Yes there was. The monetization was why it wasn't medium.com. Friend of a friend is a substack writer. 50k subscribers that pay $10/month for her insights.
I said "except for only the top." With 50k subscribers, presumably this is in the top tier. Similar to medium, the average person who creates a substack blog has to get all the traffic on their own, substakc does not help .
>except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.
For creatives, however you care to define the term, probably. But there are a lot of professions where fairly run of the mill professionals and even tradespeople still make a pretty decent living even if they're not partners in their organizations or own their own businesses. Of course, you get down to the tier that's doing taxes at Walmart or working in an auto parts store, not so much, although probably still more reliable income than the average Substack writer.
I agree. In the last 10 years, a huge number of popular independent journalists and pundits (opinion writers) have moved to Substack. For me, in 2026, it is the OnlyFans of blogging.
I was not under the impression that it was a feature. I just googled the blackout and copied the first link to provide context. Could be a Spanish blog for all I care.
Emergency blackouts are a disruption for sure and I believe people were injured in that event, but the lesson I took from it is that nothing is more reliable than community. Technology comes and goes, but we will always have each other.
> We have also seen a series of problems involving misuse and exploitation of student visas, where visas are used as an entry point for living and working in the UK without any intention to complete the course, and increasing numbers of asylum claims from students at the end of their course, even though nothing substantive has changed in their home country while they have been in the UK.
> In 2021, international students at UK universities generated an estimated £20.65 billion in exports through living expenditure and tuition fees, but it is right that these benefits are shared.[footnote 48] The Government will explore introducing a levy on higher education provider income from international students, to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system. Further details will be set out in the Autumn Budget.
It already is! The current system mandates that universities provide a whole range of degrees to British students below cost. One of the few ways they have to do that is charging high fees to international students. If they don't want this happening they could a) increase the cap on tuition fees or b) fund the gap themselves. Taxing the income that makes this subsidy work is just going to make things work as either the system moves closer to collapse or universities become even less discriminate in accepting international students.
(Though, also, some of those degrees are a lot cheaper than others despite featuring the same tuition cap. If you go to university to study most humanities or mathematics, then you're also subsidizing the engineering, science, and especially medical degrees)
The government here seems annoying about people coming here on a student visa and then transferring onto another kind of visa after studying. Isn't this the point? Dont we want to keep the people we just educated to become positive members of society? No matter your personal feelings around immigration policy, arent these the exact immigrants that wed want?
Yeah, as I understand it, student visas have one of the biggest GDP multipliers of any visa type (second only to the Tier 1 Investor). It's reckoned that the window allowing you to stay on after graduation for long enough to find a good job on a subsequent employment visa is a large part of that.
Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.
Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.
We were not able to find a happy medium before Brexit either.
One of the problems is that a lot of people do not realise just how much money overseas students pay and the extent to which they subsidise home students.
> "It's raining outside" is the most famous example. This sentence has no subject at all, and yet native English speakers feel a strong need to place "it's" at the beginning.
French is interesting because it evolved this so-called "dummy subject" pattern (which is actually called "subject-prominence") for an entirely different reason than English.
French is descended from Latin, which is "pro-drop" in the sense that you'd drop the "dummy subject" and simply write "pluit." Later, Old French, like English, lost most of its cases. Because of that, many word endings started sounding very similar (a problem known as "agreement syncretization"). The pro-drop "null" subject disappears in the record roughly as that happens, presumably to help disambiguate.
This is an entirely different path than English took, and it's also not a path any other Romance language took. Spanish isn't even subject-prominent. It fully allows the "null" construction, e.g., "llueve", which literally is just "rains."
The sentence does have a very obvious subject. The environment is producing rain. The subject is the environment and its condition is being elaborated. It = environment.
The rain is not magical, the environment is producing it. The environment is raining. It's raining outside means the environment is producing rain outside.
Who could possibly confuse that as lacking a subject.
And with this reply we begin one of the permanent debates on this subject. Regardless of where anyone here comes down on this particular case, "it" is an indisputable truth that not all English sentences have subjects. Yet, many of them have pronouns where a subject should be. Maybe the famous example isn't one of them, but "it" is not at all hard to come up with a sentence where that is true. :)
Italian, Spanish and Latin (for example) can generally avoid to express explicitly the subject in a dedicated pronoun, as the verb already encode the it through specific flection. In contrast in French and German only in imperative tense one can formally make such an ellipsis (colloquially of course one can encounter more nuances).
In Ukrainian it’s «дощить» (from “дощ” — rain) — the form of the word tells you its function in the sentence. Same happens in other Slavic languages: Polish, Belarusian, Slovakian.
Latin languages rely on the order of words to explain their function.
So much so, English speakers don’t say “blue big ball” in German, time before place is mandated.
> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.
He has worked with folks and repos under the HackerN64 collection, which has some generic forms of these optimizations. As for the actual code for each specific game I think he only releases it when he's ready to release the games.
He made a few videos about it last year and the consensus was basically that none of them have a good enough understanding of the hardware to actually be useful for optimizing anything. They end up making a lot of assumptions about how the caching behavior and memory architecture works and kind of insist that it must work the way modern PCs do. And it led to a number of cache misses and RAM bus contention that basically didn't work as well as he can do by hand.
I mean, most of the advances he made in Mario 64 come from having a deep understanding of the game's code, while enjoying the process of coming up with new ways to improve the code. Having an AI go through your hobbie like that (since he's doing it both for the sake of it and for his M64 romhack) is kind of spoiling the fun, I guess?
You really gotta lay off this childish “all or nothing” mindset. You can use AI without it doing all the work for you. You can use AI to work on a hobby. You set the limits the tool is allowed. AI is a tool.
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