Spyke

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privacy

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‘We should be worried’: report sheds light on ICE’s booming arsenal of hi-tech surveillance tools

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Hell, even the fact that the term "African American" was invented because "black" was considered offensive. Judgement was baked right in (or at least assumed to be by enough that this somehow got popular) to using their skin colour as a descriptor.

Which then led to many people being called "African American" despite having no connection to either Africa or America.

games

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GTA 6 Price Finally Confirmed, Features a 'Single-Player Experience' at Launch

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Yeah, I got a wii U game fairly recently and panicked when I fired it up because it wanted to access the internet to look for updates. Luckily you could just skip past that and still play, but it made me wonder about the newer games that are just download codes and how they will be handled. Though I already have a good guess.

It's annoying enough that they didn't patch either the systems or games to not bother trying connecting to servers that no longer exist. Though now I'm wondering if anyone cooked up some home brew servers they can redirect DNS to that at least say "connection accepted, nothing new here, grey out the options that depend on this being real" if not attempt to support actual features.

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Ooooh I'd like that

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If you're the thoughtful type, anyways. If you're not, it might make you even more uncomfortable because some realizations from your subconscious might still bubble up and make it harder to hold on to the lies that made things more comfortable and without the ability to process it into a new normal (or see that new information doesn't negate everything that happened before, even if it gives new understanding or disproves a previous understanding).

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The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI | Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentatio…

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The metaverse isn't VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.

It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn't solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a "I want to live in a ready player one world" and didn't have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don't even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).

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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says

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Hell, even with smaller projects, you're going to have debug cycles and if AI is driving those cycles, it will be acting as a new coder for each invocation (which happens multiple times per prompt for systems like claude code).

So you'll get shit like duplicate helper functions, other code not using those helper functions anyways, debug code added and then not removed, errors and warnings using a variety of styles, overly verbose and redundant arguments, support for enhancements that don't even make sense in that context, confidently incorrect assertions about what is and isn't happening or possible, etc.

My manager wants me to make a presentation that sells some AI debug solution but the hand holding I have to do for it to actually understand and not give useless conclusions means I don't even believe in it. Or the case where it did help, turns out it didn't even use the tools provided by the solution and was just CC.

I've mentioned the cycle of being impressed with what these LLM-based systems can do and feeling like I might have been unfairly critical, and then running in to a major issue that justfies the earlier critical view. Last times I mentioned it, I said I was in the impressed (but skeptical) part of the the cycle. Well, I'm back to the "this might just be a complete waste of resources" part of the cycle.

atheism

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Threats and promises are your guiding principles?

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Though I do wonder if things would be even worse if those people didn't have religion claiming there's external punishment or reward if they control themselves a bit.

Though when Christianity tried to resolve the "if I cross the line into eternal damnation then I might as well do whatever I want after that" problem by saying they can repent, it opened up a "do whatever you want and then repent" loophole, so it could do as much to make people think they can get away with shit, especially when combined with a strong belief that the afterlife will be better.

Also, I think the shitiness is ingrained deep in our species, hell in most species. The reality is that strategic betrayal has always been the optimal solution to the prisoner dilemma, and while real world versions of it continue after that betrayal, I'd bet a high portion of historic animal ones involved the one intending to be nice or trusting not surviving, so I'd guess that survival of the fittest has a bias towards opportunistic assholes.

games

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Some Retailers Are Refusing to Sell GTA 6 Due to the Lack of a Disc

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I got an external one so I could access the various discs I burnt over the years. Been slowly (though not very consistently lol) ripping the data off of the older CDs and DVDs with the intent of writing some m-disc blurays. Been surprised at the lack of errors on the older discs, but the new discs should eliminate that worry. Even if they don't last the promised 1000+ years, it'll be a problem for future generations to deal with.

Though the quality of my former prized files is kinda shit to the point where I'm already wondering if I even really care about losing most of it. I mean I did fine without any optical drive for like a decade or more.

privacy

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Leave Windows 11 Idle For 24 Hours, It Sends Over 3000 Telemetry Pings To More Than 100 Different Servers.

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This is another one of the windows negatives. There's no real standard for tools that debloat or remove the MS malware and decent chance that you end up getting more malware in the process (that might even do what it says it does in addition to installing who knows what, so it's not even immediately obvious that it might be a good idea to go back to the "wipe storage and install OS" step. Thing could even revert some of the settings later on to encourage users running an updated version of the script (not that I think most would bat an eye at their "OS optimization script" being a thing that continuously runs and auto-updates) and it wouldn't even be unexpected windows behavior considering how passively hostile they already are with users trying to reduce their stupid shit in windows.

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Damn right

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I'm going to go in a different direction from the other reply thread and say that I don't give a fuck what the original quote was or the original intent. Just because a saying is famous doesn't mean the original version of it had all the wisdom, or any at all.

The customer is right in knowing what they want and are willing to spend money on, even if it's stupid, because ultimately they decide whether or not they will spend that money. That doesn't mean they are worth dealing with.

Personally, I would rather spend money at a business that "fires" their shitty customers, from line jumpers (was just at an amusement park that actually dealt with two different sets of line jumpers while I was there and it was glorious) to those that harass people that probably agree with them but don't make the rules.

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Google preps Pixel ‘Audio Memory’ that ambiently tracks your ‘important conversations,’ like AI notetaker pins

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I didn't say it wasn't a privacy issue, just that those are two reasons that some would probably just accept that shit.

Just like most of us accept the spy devices we already use because they allow communication and internet access and only a tiny portion of people go out of their way to try to reduce that (though due to how cell phones work at all, you can't avoid the simple "this is where their phone was at this time" tracking, which might be "vicinity of cell tower" or "about right here" depending on whether any triangulation was involved).

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Welp, there goes the bourgeois

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I really appreciate even just not having the feeling that whatever current problem is caused by greed of the company I gave a bunch of money to for the most important bit of software. And not asking no one the rhetorical question of who fucking owns my PC anyways, me or MS. Even if I had to refund one game that looked really fun (logistical iirc, or something along those lines wanted some msvc or .net dll and I gave up before I got it, though others on protondb mentioned getting it running).