Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

Trump doesn’t like the commission that normally hosted the debates because of the typical “concerns” over bias (read: they don’t let Trump say whatever the fuck he wants and run roughshod over the entire thing). Biden doesn’t like the commission because they did a shit job at moderating trump last cycle and didn’t follow their own rules (especially regarding COVID, since they let Trump lie about getting tested and go on the debate while he was infection with the virus).

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

The problem is that as far as I’m aware there’s literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you’re describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They’re almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.

Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between “random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals” and “multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from”

God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.

I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I’m doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone “don’t think about a brown bear” makes them think about bears, then I’ll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I’m halfway across the world.

Even when I’m paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it’s just that it’s mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go “wait a second, that makes me think of…” and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).

I have ADHD, in case it isn’t obvious yet.

I see you read Piers Anthony too.

There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

Funny, I tweaked my Linux PC at work to look like Windows XP. It’s so cursed, I love it.

my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being “reviewed” by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao

Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.

I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.

…yeah.

Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

Y’know what? I’m gonna be even more of a furry now, just to spite you.

Fuck that victim-blaming nonsense. The entire reason ad blockers were invented in the first place were because ads in the 90s and early 2000s were somehow even worse than they are now. You would click on a website, and pop-up ads would literally open new windows under your mouse cursor and immediately load an ad that opened another pop-up ad, and then another, and another, until you had 30 windows open and 29 of them were pop-up ads, all of them hoping to trick you into clicking on them to take you to a website laden with more and more pop-up ads. Banner ads would use bright, flashing, two-tone colors (that were likely seizure-inducing, so have fun epileptics!) to demand your attention while taking up most of your relatively tiny, low-resolution screen.

The worst offenders were the Flash-based ads. On top of all the other dirty tricks that regular ads did, they would do things like disguising themselves as games to trick you into clicking them. (“Punch the monkey and win a prize!” The prize was malware.) They would play sound and video–which were the equivalent of a jump scare back then, because of how rare audio/video was on the Internet in that day. They would exploit the poor security of Flash to try and download malware to your PC without you even interacting with them. And all this while hogging your limited dialup connection (or DSL if you were lucky), and dragging your PC to a crawl with horrible optimization. When Apple refused to support Flash on iOS way back in the day, it was a backdoor ad blocker because of how ubiquitous Flash was for advertising content at the time.

The point of all this is that advertisers have always abused the Internet, practically from day one. Firefox first became popular because it was the first browser to introduce a pop-up blocker, which was another backdoor ad blocker. Half the reason why Google became the company it did is because it started out as a deliberate break from the abuses of everyone else and gave a simple, clean interface with to-the-point, unobtrusive, text-based advertisements.

If advertisers and Google in particular had stuck to that bargain–clean, unobstrusive, simple advertisements that had no risk of malware and no interruption to user workflow, ad blockers would largely be a thing of the past. Instead, they decided to chase the profit dragon, and modern Google is no better than the very companies it originally replaced.