Interesting read.

Now can somebody please fix the horrible volume sliders on everything.

Like a lot of folks, I use and recommend Bitwarden for passwords management. Their Authenticator app is really good for mobile TOTP, too.

Yeah, he was a hypocrit and I despised the guy. Woz was the real hero of Apple. But Jobs did say that stuff, and he was correct in that moment. We see it over and over.

As much as I disliked Steve Jobs, the man was 100% correct when he talked about companies rotting from the inside. They get taken over by sales & marketing types and the product designers and user experience experts get kicked to the curb.

TY!

Is there a Pirate Bay for books?

I hope they figure out how to 3d print gum tissue. Harvesting donor tissue from the roof of your mouth certainly works, but is probably the worst part of the recovery.

Seems like it should be doable. But I doubt it’s high on the list compared to kidneys, livers, etc.

I worked on a creative writing thing with it and the more I added, the better its responses. And 4 is a noticeable improvement over 3.5.

Ha! That definitely happens sometimes, too.

Exactly. And for me, being in middle age, it’s a big help with recalling syntax. I generally know how to do stuff, but need a little refresher on the spelling, parameters, etc.

Programming jobs will be safe for a while. They’ve been trying to eliminate those positions since at least the 90s. Because coders are expensive and often lack social skills.

But I do think the clock is ticking. We will see more and more sophisticated AI tools that are relatively idiot-proof and can do things like modify Salesforce, or create complex new Tableau reports with a few mouse clicks, and stuff like that. Jobs will be chiseled away like our unfortunate friends in graphic design.

It’s been a tremendous help to me as I relearn how to code on some personal projects. I have written 5 little apps that are very useful to me for my hobbies.

It’s also been helpful at work with some random database type stuff.

But it definitely gets stuff wrong. A lot of stuff.

The funny thing is, if you point out its mistakes, it often does better on subsequent attempts. It’s more like an iterative process of refinement than one prompt gives you the final answer.

Glad you brought up worker cooperatives. I have watched a few Richard Wolff videos and they sound awesome to me.

There’s also this guy, who looks legit on paper, but I can’t figure out if he really is legit or not. I hope he is…

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/employee-ownership-life-changing-for-family-60-minutes/

Yeah, I love Gabe, and I love Steam. Even if it was created because he dropped that installation disk on the floor.

My dream is that the poison pill thing becomes very effective and very common, and I think some folks kind of missed the nuances. Which is fine, that’s why we have a forum to hash this stuff out.

I had heard of this, and I appreciate the link to the paper. It’s one reason I used the term. My understanding of it is that these seldom actually work in practice. It did not help Twitter, for example. I appreciate the counter-argument. I definitely want this to be a thing.

TIL Valve has a poison pill clause. Cool.

That’s true. I would like to hear about them…

I know a lot of indy game developers do their thing hoping to get rich from it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And they don’t all do that. Some people just really love coding and creating, and just want to make a cool game. Nothing wrong with that, either.

But for once, I’d love to see some brilliant founder create a game studio that has some kind of poison pill clause that prevents it from ever going public or it’s IP ever being purchased by a large mega-corp. And in my wettest of wet dreams, that idea becomes a meme.

Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking. Our whole corrupt system is set up to make half a dozen business bros get wealthier. They won’t tolerate anything that jams a wrench into that machinery.

It is clunky and I am also old, slow, and uncoordinated. I did manage to finish it, and I ended up liking it overall. I didn’t care for the Batmobile stuff, and I was never good at it. But once I got “good enough” at the Batmobile sections and could solve the puzzles, etc, I have to admit I found it satisfying in the same way you feel after getting your taxes or colonoscopy over with.

If you decide to walk away from it, you aren’t missing anything super fantastic. I love the series, but there’s no requirement to complete all of the games. Life is short, there are lots of other things to do. No need to beat your head against the wall on it.

You might like the Spider-Man games better. The combo moves, power ups, suit choices, etc, are more customizable there and I think it ‘flows’ better. Zipping around a realistic map of NYC is really damned cool, too. (Though I did find myself missing the moody atmosphere and je ne sais quoi of Gotham and Bats). There is are the occasional nasty / annoying boss fights in Spider-Man (one of them early on) but once you face roll past them, the rest of the game is hella fun.

Thanks again. One of my friends keeps encouraging me to play it.

Thanks for the warning. I haven’t played it yet, and it’s on my list.

I honestly don’t care if they do or don’t add this stuff, but please make it skippable. The last thing I want is some boring corporate-approved formulaic bland sex scene that I have to suffer through in the middle of an interactive game. At least movies and shows let me 30-second skip past that stuff. All of them are exactly the same sequence. It’s tedious.

As for flirtation being more important to in-game social interactions and dialog trees that could be fun. It could also set young people up for trouble. They’d be practicing the “wrong habits” that will get charges filed against them IRL.

The reason game designers are afraid of sex is because most of Western society is. Can games help turn that around? I don’t know, but probably not. The USA is super puritanical about all things sex (but blood, gore, and violence are generally OK).

Hardspace Shipbreaker. I play open shift mode because I’m old and slow and have nothing to prove. I love the music and just taking my time and getting into the flow zone with it. There’s a half-decent story about worker exploitation, etc., going on with it but I pay little attention to the story in games. I’m here to play not watch a streaming series. Fortunately you can do other stuff during a lot of it, though they do have some unskippable cut scenes, which I am never a fan of.

His tombstone will read “He tried everything. Low-carb, no-carb, and pretending to eat exactly 1,977 calories a day.”

I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.

Doesn’t hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.