experbia

My local store uses these but they lock up if you bring them out to the 2nd row of parking spaces out front. It’s enough to get the cart to your car, then you go to return it and it’s totally locked, so everyone just shoves them into the planters in a big pile of tipped over carts instead of physically lifting the whole thing and hefting it to the cart returns to return it. The store has signs everywhere now telling people not to throw carts into the planters, and the employees know the problem, and the city has evidently complained multiple times, but district management evidently refuses to believe it’s got anything to do with the cart locks and I was told by an exasperated checker that they’re apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?? lmaooo

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.

HONK JESUS HONK

I agree entirely

Janeway is my favorite captain for sure. The others are all remarkable, because of course they are, but whenever I watch Voyager, I am reminded of how much more I like her over the others.

She had (and used) this great guile to serve her and her crew’s needs. She didn’t readily break her principles, but would intelligently question them when they didn’t appear to align with the greater good or her responsibilities.

She was both flexible and reliable. I feel that some viewers saw that as unpredictability, but I don’t think so. She actively did more to help her crew in every way than any other captain we’ve seen.

I agree and disagree. I feel if a school - especially a publicly funded school - has any responsibility to teach children anything, it should be how to navigate society’s requirements. I would much rather have been taught basic finance and taxation and career planning and political systems and stuff than the same exact span of World War 2 history 4+ years in a row (this was my high school). Parents should absolutely have a responsibility in teaching their children too, yes, but that’s assuming ideal parents. In reality, today’s parents are struggling too much (in part due to never having been taught how to navigate society properly) to impart actual beneficial lessons to their children on these topics, then our schools are neglecting to fill in the gaps before ejecting the kids into adult life with demands and expectations that were never communicated to them.

THE PERCUSSION OF MY EXTREMELY DESIRABLE GLUTES WILL UNINTENTIONALLY SUMMON GUARDS WHILST I AM ATTEMPTING TO BE INCONSPICUOUS

looking forward to some backwater shithole GOP-run state legislature to try and arrest her for election interference

this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of “free” (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.

it never ceases to amaze me how stupid we all are as a civilization.

we’re opting out of it, but nature will continue. this will be a very curious and fairly hospitable world full of interesting xenoarcheological mysteries… in the distant future, to a visiting spacefaring civilization.

Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur’s Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn’t close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it’s a notable part.

Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn’t trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn… it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly “modern” games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It’s clearly just a matter of “want”.

I feel like I’ve just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald’s in a roadside casino, and I’ve just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch “games” like this ever again.

And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn’t use ad-block.

“I wouldn’t get so carried away beating you if you didn’t make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you.”

We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place.

I agree. But here we are. And until it’s illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I’m viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper “no.” I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.

A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.

Wells Fargo are simply criminal, it has been demonstrated again and again. It would not surprise me in the slightest if I were to learn that this was an intentional test to see how many people would notice a missing deposit or two and gauge how often they can simply swipe some deposits “accidentally”.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It’s a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the “literacy” problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.

Of course they are. Citizens can be conscripted.

A misplaced comma doesn’t trump 240 years of legal precedent, no matter how much Alioto might wish it did.

Fortunately true.

Unfortunately, in the larger court of public opinion, it can very effectively be used as basis to rile up and outrage the domestic terrorists loyal to the corrupted judiciary, so there will most likely be some trepidation about clarifying this.

do I have a case against either my institution, the professor who threw it out or OpenAI?

This all seems like such recent technology, I can not imagine this question being very answerable except via the long way: a courtroom. I suspect it would take someone trying in order to set precedent.

Just being able to tinker is kind of like my stim.

100% agreed. My main computer is a beast of a Linux system that is in a state of continual improvement. If I’m stressed, I just make little fixes here and there… try new things, create new little tools. It’s extremely relaxing to have something to dump one’s tinker energy into!

I want to take a moment to wish you luck! I’ve always believed anyone can program, even if not everyone can program everything. Modern web development can be very profitable, but very overwhelming. It is a constantly-shifting landscape of new standards and practices and tools. It has rebuffed many people due to this, who often become dejected by its complexity and dynamism.

If this is not you, then that’s excellent! However, if you feel this way, you should know that a different, slower, more stable version of web development still exists, which more closely mirrors conventional software development and even the shell scripting you have experience with: older style monolithic web applications are everywhere, and more continue to appear. Written in PHP, C#, ASP, even Perl (old!), these older web applications tend to have fairly stable ecosystems and documentation. You rarely find the biggest industry names like Microsoft and Apple and Netflix touting its engineers as having expert level knowledge in these languages and ecosystems, because they’re seen as somewhat old-hat, but they have a massive industry presence nonetheless… and fewer and fewer competent programmers exist to maintain and improve these systems.

Facebook is still largely comprised of PHP code, I believe - though they use a different runtime. WordPress is still a staggeringly massive presence on the Internet for anything from business sites to e-commerce shops, and it has a huge (and profitable, if you find a niche!) ecosystem of plug-ins written in PHP and Javascript/CSS/HTML. The new fediverse software (kbin) I am writing this post on is written in PHP! It is still easily possible to make a comfortable living doing nothing but quality PHP, especially if you can find a nice niche. It has a (relatively) undeserved bad reputation amongst modern programmers.

Anyway, thought to mention this. Good luck!

I’m convinced this is a major great filter event for all intelligent species. “Can the natural consolidation of power and resources in the world be sufficiently counteracted to avoid massive cataclysmic population crashes?”