I wonder how long it will be before the Supreme Court awards these sock puppet accounts with personhood, just like they did corporations.

“Oh shit, someone revealed the plan that everyone already knew about! Quick, distance ourselves from it!”

“Does that mean we’re no longer doing the plan?”

“Don’t be stupid! Of course we are still doing it! We just don’t admit it!”

Whatever she does do is just going to be reversed. Good or bad, it will be fine purely out of spite. It’s a futile exercise.

I’m really sorry you’re in this situation. I can’t fully understand where you’re coming from because I can’t walk in your shoes. But I genuinely wish you the best. It sounds like you have a shit-ton of stress and are dealing with depression right now. I can relate to that part at least, and I really hope you can get some help from a counselor, because while they can’t help with some things, they can make a world of difference in other ways. Hopefully I don’t piss you off by saying this, but… sending you a virtual hug. Hang in there.

He’s bona fide!

The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).

But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.

I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.

Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!

I really hope you’re not letting your dog’s nose near Uranus.

I expect Russian media is framing this as part of a grand alliance consisting of the ‘good’ half of the world. Lots of countries. The best countries. Sooo many! You know… Russia, North Korea, Belarus, China (they are soooo close to sending troops guys, we promise!), ‘Chechnyans’… Some Moldovan sycophantic trolls… Umm… Yeah.

• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Il
• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Un
• One medal for kicking 100 starving peasants
• One medal for siking Trump when Donald tried to shake his hand
• One medal for sending a trash balloon over the border to the South
• One medal for brushing his teeth
• One medal for eating caviar
• One medal for dissing Blackpink
• One medal for being in the choir for this rendition
• One medal for losing the dialup modem passwords
• One medal for finding them
• One medal to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them

And vodka. Soooooo much vodka!

Based on an informative documentary series called Futurama, they traveled back in time and took the brain out of a freshly-deceased Richard Nixon’s skull.

I think I know where you’re coming from on this. Linux is very cool in a lot of ways, and it is very flexible and fun to play with. But it does require an investment of learning and time to get more familiar with it. And that can be frustrating/overwhelming to face. And like you, I find the whole cult-like vibe around it annoying.

I first got familiar with Linux many years ago, mostly out of curiosity. But also because I liked the ideas of using it and the idea of having another OS option other than Windows/MacOS. While I am still not a Linux expert, I feel like I can get around the OS competently. And in hindsight I think it was worth the time I spent getting familiar with it.

Also, like you in not a pursuit when it comes to terminal use in Linux. Give me a nice UI option any day if the week. And to be fair, many Linux distro have come a long way with their UIs in the last 20 of so years.

If you just want to tinker with a solid distro that has a decent UI, I recommend either Ubuntu or Zorin. Also, I recommend trying to pace yourself with learning it. Only pick the parts that interest you, and take your time learning about them. There’s no rush. Good luck.

ETA: Also, if you want to play with a couple of different Linux distros, I recommend using a virtualization app like VirtualBox. You can just spin up virtual machines and install a distro on them. And if they don’t work out or you don’t like them you can just delete the VMs. And virtualization is a fun little rabbit hole in and of itself.

Yeah, speaking as someone who grew up in the UK and had South Asian friends, the 80s (and 90s) were bad for racial intolerance and discrimination against minorities. I saw it a lot, along with the same shit directed towards black people. It was definitely a tangible part of the post-colonial culture. It’s still a problem, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Interesting article. But as a veteran developer the whole AI trend reminds me of the outsourcing trend back in the mid 2000s.

Back then Western developers (especially junior and mid levels) were seen by many companies as a waste of money. “We can pay for three developing world developers for the price we pay for one American/European one! Why are we wasting our money?!”

And so the huge wave of layoffs (fuelled also by the dot com bubble bursting and some other things) kicked off. And many companies contracted out work to India, etc. It was not looking good for us Western developers.

But then the other shoe dropped. The code being sent back was largely absolute shite. Spaghetti code, disparate platforms bound together with proverbial duct tape, no architectural best practices, design anti-patterns, etc etc. And a lot of these systems started falling apart and required Western developers and support engineers to fix them up or outright replace them.

Now, this isn’t a sleight on Indian of other developing world developers. I’ve met lots of phenomenal programmers from that part of the world. And developers there have improved a lot and now there are lots of solid options for outsourcing to there. But there’s are still language and culture barriers that are a hurdle, even today.

But I digress. My underlying point is that there are similarities with today’s situation with what has happened before. Now, it’s very possible LLMs will go to the next level in several years (or more) time. But I still think we are a ways away from having an AI engine that can build a complex, sophisticated system in a holistic way and have it capable of implement the kinda of crazy, wacky, bizarre business rules that are often needed.

Additionally, we’ve heard this whole “developers are going to be obsolete soon” thing before. For 20 years I’ve been hearing that self-writing code was just around the corner. But it wasn’t even close in reality. And even now it’s not just around the corner.

No doubt, AI will hit a whole nother level at some point. The stuff you can do with Chat GPT and the like it’s insane, even right now (though as another article here on Lenny earlier today said, quite a lot of LLM code output is of suspect quality to say the least). And I know the market is rough right now for greener developers. But I think we’re about to see history repeat itself.

Some companies will lean heavily into AI to write code, with only a few seniors basically just curating it and slapping it together. And other companies will find a middle ground of having juniors and seniors using AI to a more limited and careful level. Those latter companies will fare a lot better with the end product, and they will also be better prepared with regard to tribal knowledge transfer (which is another topic in this altogether). And when that epiphany is realized it will become the default approach. At least for another 10-20 years until AI can change things up again.

At least the kid half-heatedly apologized when he was called out (after trying to nitpick about costs and the law and then realizing he was out of his depth). The mother pitching a tantrum and throwing the signs at the couple who were investigating & filming was utterly pathetic.

You have to be an especially sad person with no life to drive around stealing signs of the ‘other team’ from other people’s property. And no amount of “lolz I saw it on tiktok and it looked funny” bullshit can excuse it. That family needs to get a life.

I hope that couple press charges, and they probably will. But given where it was and how politically bias many cops are, I doubt it will go anywhere. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

Here are some of the common complaints about Jill Stein:

As the Green Party candidate she will pull in more third party votes than most (if not all) of the other parties. While those views are usually trivial in number in the grand scheme of things, they can have a big impact in let seeing states.

She has not gone out of her way to criticize Trump, and has instead treated both Trump and Harris as being equally bad, even though Trump is arguably much more anti-environmental than Harris.

This isn’t her first time coming in as what’s seen as a Democrat vote-spoiler candidate.

From the perspective of some, she pops up every four years to try to take votes off the Democrat candidate and then seemingly disappears for another four years.

She has a bit of a cult of personality thing going on - arguably moreso than either Harris or Biden.

She’s in her mid-70s, and so no spring chicken. This has become more of a concern this cycle because a) she’s for years older than she was in 2020 (obviously), b) age has become more of a point of concern given how both Biden and Trump have apparently seen marked cognitive decline at less than 10 years her seniors.

There’s some evidence to suggest she is cozy with Putin, who is clearly does not have America’s best interests in mind. For example, she was photographed at a fancy dinner sitting at the same table as him and several of his ‘crew’ (among others). The common excuse for this is “she didn’t choose her seating!” But equally there’s no reason she couldn’t have got up and moved or left the event.

Photo of the dinner in question, with labels:

I’m sure there are other points I’m missing. But those are the ones that spring to mind.

“They see me Jerkin’, they hatin’!”