Good advice.

Of course, some developers circumvent this by not adding DRM to their game.

Can’t waste dev time fucking with an esoteric key system if they don’t first waste dev time writing an esoteric key system.

I figure the engine swap business has got to be booming right now.

Was it pre-spyware? I’ll pay extra for pre-spyware vehicles. I work in IT, so I value my privacy.

Five now. It’s good money.

Or one Google employee who is particularly lousy at building social media bots.

Yes. It’s somehow a fucking race to build the Torment Nexus from the classic science fiction novel “Do not build the Torment Nexus”. It’s almost unbelievable.

You just know a bunch of these assholes are going to turn Cube into a reality, and then act surprised when they wake up inside the death trap.

Very strange when they dropped the slogan, like being honest about being evil got them brownie points.

I thought it was strange too, until I realized - I think the slogan change was a deliberate message to court a specific type of investor/customer: Epstein’s billionaire pedophile friends.

I kid you not, I bought a DVD player over this nonsense. Now my kids watch the same few used Disney movie and show DVDs however much they like, and I’m not paying these clowns monthly to be abused by them.

As long as our health is perfect, of course.

Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

But sometimes we get…

• Agentic AI: A list of traditional IF THEN statements that do things based on the output of the magical LLM and then create a new prompt that they feed back into the LLM in a never ending loop, with the aim of consuming as many tokens as possible.

It’s so much worse than that. We use the pleasant answer predictor to predict what function calls and arguments passed to those functions might be the most pleasing.

It can provide all of the capabilities of piping curl into sudo with none of the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing I’ve turned over control of my computer’s fate to a stranger on the Internet.

Instead, I’ve turned my computer’s fate over to a statistical approximation of the slurry from mixing together the outputs of every stranger from the Internet.

Exactly. And they need to make back the biggest up-front loss in the history of investment, and probably - even adjusted for inflation - in the history of currency.

And all that on a product that people don’t want.

I agree! There’s no shame in being a forever- Ensign.

“You’re absolutely right. I did hallucinate sending an ambulance, more than once, earlier. Let me correct that and dispatch an ambulance to your location.”

I had to read that twice, but yes, exactly.

Let’s not give the idiots more ideas. haha.

Yes. And perhaps, given time, accessing the wrong version of certain sensitive historic events could even be tracked that way.

Strictly speaking, we only have to govern the billionaires if we don’t just eat them…so it’s kind of a run-off between how easy to govern they decide to be, and how they taste…

(This is solely meant to humorous, officer, your honor.)

If I were to hazard a guess - probably just different interesting and worthwile things.

The result gave lloD his first major title more than two decades after he began competing. It was also the first time a Peach player had won a Melee major since Armada claimed Super Smash Con in 2018.

So close, damn it.

I hope Dr. lloD respects their moral obligation to crush people - at least in casual games - while playing as “Dr Mario”.

Thought about a couple cases of his favorite beer. Still might do that. Any other ideas?

Consumables that the person already likes make great gifts, since they will get used up and not sit around.

I usually avoid abusable substances, just in case the person has a carefully balanced relationship with that substance.

But you know your friend.

Sometimes I just ask first. No real reason this needs to be a surprise.

“I know you said you won’t take cash, but I’m going to grab you two cases of X as a thank you, on my way back.”

Then they get a chance to call me off, or redirect me if it would be a problem.

And I’ll always let them call it off with even a mild “no thanks”, since they might not want to say to me “I have a real problem with X and I can’t safely have thay much on hand.”.