Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.

But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.

Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.

No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.

Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.

Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.

Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.

It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

Nah we want you to start all your fucking about, get any beverage or condiments you might want, wash your hands, and have everyone at the table ready to eat when the food is ready.

And subsequently, not get any criticism while we’ve finished our meal and you’ve just sat down because you had to go to the garage to get a new bottle of OJ, pee that became a poop, wash your hands, and find the sauce you’ve suddenly decided to dig out from the back of the pantry.

They were first to market with a decent GPGPU toolkit (CUDA) which built them a pretty sizeable userbase.

Then when competitors caught up, they made it as hard as possible to transition away from their ecosystem.

Like Apple, but worse.

I guess they learned from their Gaming heyday that not controlling the abstraction layer (eg OpenGL, DirectX, etc) means they can’t do lock in.

While suing everyone else that makes shovel handles that work with your shovel heads.

Problem then is, You Still gotta buy a truck to buy and haul your 2nd motorcycle, your 3rd motorcycle, your dirt bike, and your track bike.

Alternate headline:

Companies accept money for a thing that will happen anyway, and will be unable to prove if they say no.

GenAi is unfortunately here, and the technocracy wants you to want it so they can farm you for more and more intimate data to leverage and enforce their technocracy. And the only way they’re going to do it is by keeping the press positive, and feed it more and more data in the hopes it fixes things.

I was expecting some sort of “Ai discovers new bug in 30 year old software”… cool I’m excited.

Then they were talking about how the bug was persistent, and I’m more intrigued “is the bug some weird emergent behaviour corrupting state somewhere?”

Nope, just another example of a shit in shit out data model.

More eyes on your website, means less on other websites, making your adverts more valuable.

And when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, because you run the advertising on the other websites too. Bonus: you can penalise rankings for websites that don’t use your advertising network.

What are the icons for?

I know gnome, and the 3 that have their name in the logo (xfce, sway, tty).

I’m going back to Slackware. Can’t keep up with this shit any more.

Israel better start to follow the Geneva convention and start building particle accelerators under their cities.

And this is why I asked my provider to turn off voicemail.

I don’t want to talk to them. Whoever they are.

Hips that make a Pixar mom jealous.

If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.

Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.

Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.

Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.

Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.

This would be better if it fed the parent comment into ChatGPT prefixed with “create a plausible but factually incorrect aggressive response to <comment>”

Feed the machine to the machine!

This annoys the shit out of me.

I’ve got a /unique/ device that I use to exclusively run a single specialist app. It’s 5 years old, and it does the job.

Well, did the job. But they dropped support for Android9. Can’t unlock the bootloader (technically I can, but any rom just bootloops) and the vendor stopped releasing updates in 2021.

Sure, it’s an edge case. But I’ve got perfectly functioning hardware, to run perfectly functioning software and 6 months ago everything worked fine.

Now it doesn’t, and I’ve either got to find replacement software, or hardware. And I’m probably just… not. Everyone loses. Hardware manufacturers don’t get a sale to replace broken hardware (and it wouldn’t have been long, the phone has been yeeted down the road at 70km/h more than once), software vendors lose my subscription, and I just have a shitty experience.

And why? Because of some way software is packaged. Who benefits from this?