Random Dent

It definitely seems like the smart move as far as I can tell. I assume building new infrastructure/software etc. would create a lot of jobs, plus it seems like a solid long-term investment in general, and it would probably help against hostile influences from outside. By which I mean mainly Russia but also increasingly the US too. Sorry, Americans but I also suspect that your troubles won’t end with Trump. I think the whole system needs flushing out TBH.

I think it must be really tricky to be a games company that has some attention on it. If you don’t announce a game, people think you’re not doing anything and get angry/pester you about it (EG: Bethesda with Fallout currently). If you announce a game but don’t give a release date, people assume it’ll be out in 1-2 years and get angry when that turns out to not be true (EG: Bethesda with Elder Scrolls currently). If you announce the game and a realistic release date (EG: “We’re working on Last of Us 3 but it won’t be out for 8-10 years probably”) then people get angry about it taking so long. If you announce a game and the deadline that people expect to hear, you’ll either miss it and people get angry (EG: GTA6 recently) or you have to do crazy crunch (EG: this game.)

Or you can take the Cyberpunk route of announcing the game, taking forever, missing all the eventual deadlines regardless, still crunching anyway, and also releasing it unfinished and virtually unplayable on some systems, but then it all somehow works out really well lol.

My desktop won’t run Windows 11 according to Windows 11. But if I make a VM with fake TPM on it, it will run perfectly well inside a VM on a machine that won’t run it lol

I’m trying to think of the last time I heard news about something to do with the internet getting better instead of worse, and I’m genuinely coming up blank.

I wish there was a better way than the “be a horrible piece of shit for the first half of your life until you get your bag, then do nice stuff to rehab your image” path a lot of of them seem to take, but at least we get something out of some of them that way I suppose.

I came here to do a Doctor Who one too, can I tack it onto yours?

It’s also revealed that the Master just hacked the Matrix to mess with the Doctor’s head, and the Timeless Child was just some bullshit he made up.

I’ll bite!

https://xkcd.com/2347/

I think you could make an argument that being compensated for your labour, but way under the value your labour produces and also under the constant threat of homelessness and starvation if you don’t do it is still an unethical system.

Yeah I like Strawberry too. It’s not flashy looking but it does everything I need.

Yeah you don’t have to go full prepper but some of it just comes under common sense emergency stuff I think. Like where we live we have a reasonably sized garden so we grow stuff to eat, and have a big rain barrel to collect water. Normally that’s just used to water the plants but you could presumably boil it up and make it potable if you really needed to. Between that and just having a reasonable amount of dry food in the pantry it’s probably enough to see us through for at least a week or two if anything serious happened.

Yeah we’re kind of remote and we once went for I think 9 days without power after a big weather event. Having a radio and a little gas camping stove were lifesavers. Also get lots of candles and books, one of my main memories of that time is how boring it was lol.

Next thing I want to do is get solar-ed up so we can just flip that on for an hour or two if needed. The previous power cut was years ago when a solar setup wasn’t really feasible.

I think the collapse will ultimately be more like a correction. I think AI does have its uses if deployed properly, but right now it’s being way overblown.

That COVID essentially gave everyone PTSD or brain damage or both, and has probably fucked us for at least a generation, maybe more.

NB: As a side note, this is just a hunch but I suspect that the next generation coming up (IE people who were infants/very young kids at the time COVID started) is going to be a real weird one. They missed out on crucial social development milestones because of the lockdowns, probably most of them got COVID because we rushed everyone back to school and who knows what that does to very young brains, and they’ll spend the rest of their formative years in this sort of jibbering fascist aftermath that we seem to be currently living in. I have no idea what effect this will have on society, but I’ll go out on a limb and say “probably not good.”

I used to work in a store that was on a busy intersection, and there was a homeless guy who used to stand there all day with a sign. He was harmless and everyone kind of knew him. One day he got hit by a car on the intersection (by accident), so I called 911. I started telling them and they were like “Oh yeah we already had about 10 calls about him, don’t worry.” Then an ambulance came and got him and he was fine, he was back there like a week later.

My first thought was they’ll probably use it to generate endless slop assets for The Sims, since people seem to pick up whatever they put out for that.

Just sitting here playing the long game, waiting for EA to finally implode and get sold off for parts so we can finally get a new Command & Conquer.

I was at a barbecue on a Saturday night once when my boss called in an emergency because he thought we were being hacked. The reason being, because he was in Starbucks trying to look at our website on his phone and it wasn’t loading properly. I had to explain that:

1. It’s Saturday night and I’m not on-call for IT.
2. I’m also in the art department and IT is in no way part of my job description.
3. Because of 2, if we are being hacked I don’t know what to do about it.
4. It’s probably just that Starbucks wifi is shitty?

That was a stressful job lol.

I used to have a not well known webcomic and would get death threats/“kill yourself” messages pretty regularly, so yeah for drawing a cartoon would be mine I guess! They never used to bother me especially though, I thought they were funny. I used to have a page up where I’d post the dumbest ones lol.

They also likely won’t be threatened by it - they’ll either wreck it from outside or weasel their way into it and enshittify it from the inside, as with all things.

For just text LLMs, they seem to run on surprisingly modest hardware. My laptop only has 8GB RAM and integrated graphics and it can run one. It’s a little slow and it runs the CPU kind of hot, but it works.