During COVID, I had a mental breakdown when I finished a university exam (which had been at home, on my computer) and was desperate to be anywhere but at my desk, sitting at my computer. However, I was also desperate to decompress with my friends, but they were in my computer.

Do it.

This quiz was stressful. Like, there were so many times when I knew I was being cued up for a trick question, but I still fell for it.

The most fucked up thing is that Grok does seem to have guardrails — except they’re geared towards preventing it from being “too woke”

It is not reliable at all, and yes, it is widely considered to be psuedoscience. Yes, this is a batshit insane scenario

It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

Damn, I didn’t know this, thanks for sharing. I am not American, and I was pretty young when Hurricane Katrina happened, so context like this is new to me. More reasons to hate Bush

How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?

There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.

My friend was like that. He had a lot of friends who were girls, and the way that he handled that was by putting us all in the “friend” box (he was bi, so he did the same for guys, but given that most guys are straight, that wasn’t as necessary). It was a great method until he ended up hooking up with his best friend — it was a surprise to no-one but him. He walked around looking shellshocked for a week.

All the Finns I know are delightfully weird.

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says

“Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”

I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA

“A torrent is never dead, it’s just waiting for seeders”

A friend of a friend is the daughter of a Russian oligarch. It was a messy situation in which she was at risk of being drawn into the politics, even though her dad was an asshole who she would’ve been glad to see defenestrated. I only know the surface level info, but it sounds like a fucked up situation in many ways

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out

Superficially, this book looks like one that I would enjoy (if not for your anti-recommendation causing me to steer clear). Because of this, I would wager that you would have an interesting answer to “if someone was considering the above book, what’s a book you would recommend they read instead?”.

In the spirit of “take a book, leave a book”, one of my favourite non-fiction books for a general audience is “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life”. This recommendation is beyond the topic of the current thread, but in terms of enjoyable books that made me feel smarter, I love this one; I read it as a biochemistry undergraduate, and I was surprised at how much I learned from it.

I think you’re highlighting two different problems here.

I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they’ve been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between “Cut and Paste” and “Copy and Paste”. It’s grim.

The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it’s larger than that. It seems like it’s not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they’re able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company’s success doesn’t matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.

It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn’t start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from “Tech Won’t Save Us”. The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that’s patently bullshit and it’s clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can’t blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it’s a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don’t seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don’t get platforms or access to ask those questions).

Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I’ve found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I’m exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental “rolodex” of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don’t necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won’t have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.

“I inspected RAM to double check.”

That’s an unhinged level of commitment. Respect — I dig it