So, alright, in her defense, I have that particular laptop and a) it's not that heavy, b) at least the AMD versions can go up to 8-9 hours with the mux switch off, and c) it actually has a great typing keyboard. It is absolutely a kickass mobile workstation, especially if you need the performance to do other stuff like edit video (or game, obviously).

Now, would I have switched the RGB off during court proceedings? Yes, I would have switched the RGB off.

Man, I'm not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn't kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.

This is gonna keep coming up, it's gonna keep being wrong and I'm really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.

Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.

Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.

Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.

Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.

Oh, right, he's out of a job for having too many principles in Apple's vicinity.

Man, this century turned out so weird.

So this is weirder than it looks at a glance.

That is not an LLM-generated search result. That is a funny ha-ha mistake a LLM made that then some guy compiled in his blog about AI.

Google then did their usual content-stealing thing, which probably does involve some ML, but not in the viral ChatGPT way and made that card by quoting the blog quoting the LLM making the mistake. And then everybody quoted that because it's weird and funny and it replicates all the viral paranoia about this stuff.

None of Star Wars makes any sense in context. From "Darth" to the whole I think I have your dad's lightsaber stashed here somewhere thing to who Luke's family is supposed to be and these days even Obi Wan's weird desert hermit outfit now being official Jedi uniform, apparently or how Vader keeps getting bullied by all of the Empire's middle management.

Honestly, that last one is the most impressive. In retrospect, Tarkin is an absolute badass that doesn't give a crap about Vader's whole deal. And it works. The magic space wizard that basically runs the empire and everybody is terrified of just sits there and takes it. You have to respect that.

Hah. Like Netflix is ever going to approve a third season of anything ever again.

They have twenty to go, tops.

If you're coming to any international conflict, but specially to this one, from a "good guys/bad guys" framework you're absolutely not helping.

Sometimes (a lot of times, sadly) all you get in a particular issue is just assholes all the way down. Unsurprisingly, deadly military conflicts where both sides have proven at best a callous disregard for civilian casualties practically requires the asshole pile to be expansive and thorough.

The question is how you get the endless, writhing mass of assholes to stop. Which isn't looking great right now.

So in this scenario you're back in 1923?

I'm pretty sure it'd be anything including the words "World War II".

Bonus points if it also includes a date.

This.

Valve doesn't release games, it releases ads for Steam.

Which is fine. It's great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren't trying to shake all the money off of you.

But that's the end goal, still.

As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.

People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole "UK refuses to give up, fights for what's right" bit is... not how that is played out elsewhere.

If you're from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it's about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you're from Northern Africa... probably no good guys in this one. If you're in Spain it's more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you're from China, the narrative doesn't have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.

They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that's not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.

I mean, Superman's nemesis is literally a billionaire who at one point was the president of the US. Captain America straight up quit in protest against Richard Nixon once. And of course there's the whole X-Men thing.

Comic books are books. The characters are as progressive or regressive as the writers make them, but there are many examples of superhero books leaning center-left in their context from fairly early on.

I don't think people realize how horrifying these addendums are.

Not only do they not really fix the issue, but they prove that no, yeah, they hadn't thought about the possibility of "install bombing" at all until just now and it would totally have triggered massive fees.

I mean, the announcement was terribly worded, and some of the stuff (like wha't a "monthly fee" or a "retroactive fee") were very unclear, so you could hold out hope that they knew what they wanted to do and were just bad at explaining it.

But nope, that ship has sailed. They clearly didn't give this any amount of thought.

So yeah, I'm more worried about it now than I was yesterday, believe it or not. Like, a LOT more.

I've been saying this from the go: users don't need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn't add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn't a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes "do you want to see Threads or nah?", which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

What do you mean, "imagine"? Have you met the British?

IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.

I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I'm thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.

Oh, you mean it wasn't just concidence that the moment OpenAI, Google and MS were in position they started caving to oversight and claiming that any further development should be licensed by the government?

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

I mean, I get that many people were just freaking out about it and it's easy to lose track, but they were not even a little bit subtle about it.

You can do "Pa". It's objectively impossible to sexualize "Pa". You could try, but it'd immediately nuke the mood from orbit.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.

Incidentally, I dropped Youtube's web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they're cutting down features in my account because "I don't have enough of a history".

I swear, these decaying tech firms just don't get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.