On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.

So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I'm thinking locksmithing.

It's a reference to a meme that was particularly popular on Tumblr at some point, it's called Apollo's Gift of Prophecy Dodgeball, you can google that to see some examples. Basically when someone makes an obvious and ridiculous joke that (much) later turns out to be true, they were struck by the dodgeball of prophecy.

Crocheting/knitting is cheap to try out but once you really get into it (and start worrying about yarn quality and so on), the money pit opens. Ask me how I know.

So how many ChatGPT 4s have they precariously stacked up on top of each other this time?

Nah, humans are great at pattern-matching, even just being aware that some find 67 funny is enough for you to start spotting it. I started finding some amusement in it just due to exposure from younger coworkers.

Fun, but I don't love the Polish word selection because a lot of these are supposed to contain special characters and they're not actual real Polish words without them.

Like blad - that's not a word. Błąd is a word, it means a mistake. So does this count or no? Or kal vs kał, one is a word (means feces) and one is just some letters.

In Poland we use standard qwerty keyboards with Polish keyboard layout set (called Polish Programmers), you press alt+character to get the special version (like alt+s gives you ś, alt+a gives you ą and so on, the only nonintuitive one is alt+x which is ź, because alt+z is taken by ż). Combine with shift or caps lock for capital versions. No issues.

It's not isometric though, the camera can be controlled, zoomed in/out/rotated, and it has a full 3d world. And it's huuuuge. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any game should be that large, but BG3 has at least some justification for it.

...which improves the metaphor even further, genius!

Arbitrarily forcing a choice to clarify your feelings on the matter can actually be very useful, it's just a bit rude to use other people for it. When I have a choice like this I'll sometimes throw some dice (d6, 1-3 for white, 4-6 for blue), if I'm happy or don't mind what they landed on then it's the correct choice, if I'm not I'll probably realize which option I was secretly hoping for and go with that.

Honestly, thank fuck for the AI studio Ghibli trend, they overtrained the models on that stuff and caused the easily recognizable piss filter to appear. Makes finding AI slop at a glance easier.

A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).

They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".

I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I'm not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it's a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I'm making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he'd try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)

I'll bet quite a lot that they'll learn the exact wrong thing from this and decide that they just weren't republican enough.

Until I played Morrowind, I had no idea that planning your commute to work can actually be fun. "Wait, so if I take the StriderBus to there I can transfer onto the MageMetro and then it's a straight shot over the hill to my destination? Amazing!"

I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they've done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we'd surely be left behind 🫠

And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I've tried it over the last few days since it looks like it'll be mandatory for larger work.

And boy. Boy oh boy.

There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R'lyiehian that would do it.

The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn't that bad, then it's kinda working.

It's just... idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let's be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I'm supposed to read and correct but can't because it's unreadable. It's like a textual white noise. It's pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.

I think I'll be defining all of my work as small from now on.

It's more of a top-down Terraria than a pixel shooter, with procedurally generated world, village building (with npcs that can do jobs there), gear upgrades and boss fights. That comparison might make it a bit less ridiculous.

I had to check what community I'm in, still can't believe this is not the Onion.

Eyup, I've waited 6 years to get World and now I am comfortably playing it at max settings with a light sprinkling of mods. I'll do the same with this one.

It's perpetually in progress but what's there is already pretty much a complete game, dev just can't stop adding/revamping things. I've played it like 5 years ago, spent 50+ hours and had a great time. There's also an active modding community.