Everything is political. If you don't think that merely existing is political, you've a) got your head buried...somewhere; and b) you're probably some affluent dude that doesn't have to consider other people.

Either way, fuck all the way off.

Like, it's deeply obnoxious to me as a game developer that you can sit and say that huge sovereign wealth funds buying up studios isn't political. That allowing huge anti-competitive mergers isn't political. That workers and their rights aren't political. That the work and art that goes into games isn't political. Even trying to stay APOLITICAL is a huge political choice and is frankly, very difficult to do. Who's allowed to play them, what we consider appropriate for kids, whether or not they cause violence (they don't, demonstrably, but it's still a political football)--these are all political questions.

Games are culture, and culture interacts with politics. Go look up something on why and when zombie movies come into vogue. The movies reflect back to us what our worries are. So too with games.

The games industry has been bigger than Hollywood for years now and you have the gall--or simplemindedness, you pick--to sit and tell me that this stuff isn't political? Man, gtfo and read a book or something. Stop wandering through life so ignorant.

I feel like I'm alone in that I review and track every single expense in my household. It seems most people are content to just let their money flow in one hole and out the other. So do these people want AI spending their money for them...? Sure, why the hell not. Maybe it will result in some positive customer interactions.

It seems so elegant, wonder why it didn't arrive earlier. Google says Energy Dome (Italian co.) actually invented it in 2019 with a test in 2022 so I guess it is pretty new but still it seems so simple compared to stacks of lithium or whatever. Though gravity batteries are even simpler it seems.

You don't. The CO2 is reused.

I keep hearing it's great for boilerplate stuff. Okay, fair enough. But how much boilerplate code do I have to write before it becomes worth my time? I really don't spend much time bootstrapping files, and 95% of the time I'd rather just use a previous thing that *I* wrote that I know works.

just install Windows on it.

When was the last time you went to a movie theater? The one thing I find most notable about 2025 compared to the previous century is that the previous cheap fold-down seats in movie theaters have been replaced by wide, comfortable seats with plenty of legroom. In most of the theaters built recently the seats recline as well.

For the most part, you also choose your seat when you buy your ticket online, so if the only seats available are in undesirable positions relative to the screen, go to a different show.

In my fourth decade, but been in C# since 2013, had a need to learn Angular and .NET 8 beginning of 2024. Professional engineer since 2012.

Where chatGPT is an enormous help, is in the following:

• Asking questions to get documented answers. Much better than StackOverflow etc, where many answers leave out context.
• I mostly know what I want, but the details are sometimes difficult to find. E.g. most MS .NET classes documentation is sometimes just downright uninformative. Here AI helps to get simple examples.
• Rewriting simple code, like transforming the usage of building query string from + and StringBuilder to a simple, single verbatim string.
• Sometimes even just as a way to expand thinking about problems

But I wouldn't let an AI write all my code. I still needs to be kept simple, I need to be able to explain why something is done the way it is, and there is no formal way that you can trust an AI, which is really someone else's computer, with code from my customers.

Putting bean-counters as heads of tech companies almost always fails. It Killed Yahoo, the titan of the early web.

AI seems to be feeding the bloat habit instead of trimming it. It's becoming an auto-bloater.

Very few in the industry are interested in parsimony. Devs would rather collect buzzwords for their resume rather than try to trim out layers and eye-candy toys. It's kind of like letting surgeons also be your general doctor, they'd recommend surgery more often than you really need it.

The principles of typical biz/admin CRUD haven't really changed much since client/server came on the scene in the early 90's. Yet the layers and verbosity seem to keep growing. An ever smaller portion of time is spent on domain issues and ever more on the tech layers and parts to support the domain. Something is wrong but nobody is motivated to do anything about it because bloat is job security.

YAGNI and KISS are still important, but is dismissed because it reduces one's resume buzzword count. The obsession with scaling for normal apps is an example of such insanity: there's only like a 1 in 50k chance your app or company will ever become FANG-sized, yet too many devs want to use a "webscale" stack. You're almost as likely to get struck by lightning while coding it. They patients are running the asylum.

Humans, you are doing CRUD wrong!

The key thing that somebody reported was a suspicious gray Nissan. Once they zeroed in on looking for a grey Nissan at the crime scene, they looked at the surveillance cameras, found one that had in the right place at the right time, and used the Flock cameras and license plate readers to discover it was also present in Brookline at the MIT professor's shooting, then used the Flock cameras to follow it to the storage facility.

Maybe "regular police work" could have followed it through the change of license plates to a facility two states away, but maybe not. You do know not all crimes are solved.

Only micro-movements are necessary to avoid most space junk*, using tiny "cold" thrusters which are not enough to serve as a rapid-response spy-probe. High-end spy probes probably have lots of fuel and big nozzles.

Don's spy-probe: "Hey Xi, look, my nozzle's bigger than yours!"

* If they have short notice to swerve, then small engines are probably not good enough, but that situation is probably not (yet) common enough to justify carrying large thruster systems.

Equating "opt-in" with "just don't use these UI elements" is too coarse-grained to be a useful rule of thumb. At the top of that slippery slope is stuff like freemium applications - until you give them a credit card, various buttons/features just show you an ad and a buy button. I think this is perfectly acceptable, even if it feels a bit tacky to me. But once you accept getting a little more adversarial with your UX design, it isn't all that far from arranging buttons such that you can count on a predictable percentage of misclicks, Zuckerbook-style privacy-settings, and other shitty behavior like that.

I'm not some gnu-eyed idealist, but I do expect software I run on my machine to behave in ways that align (or can be made to align) with my slightly idiosyncratic interests. Software that behaves like a tireless nagging 3 year-old or tries to trick me in to doing what the developer wants is garbage that doesn't belong in my house.

It is harder to express, but I really think the bar for an application like Firefox needs to be, good-faith accommodation of a very wide range of people, in basically every relevant dimension, which is a lot, because browsers touch nearly everything. "I don't want to (I don't want my kids/people at this kiosk/whoever to) interact with your robots" is a perfectly reasonable accommodation to make. None of this is new - discussion about (un)ethical patterns of human-computer interaction goes back decades.

Now think about having this same argument over a feature that inserts free clipart into documents or saves the current page to a clipping service. The fact that this sort of discussion about UI is even controversial is a testament to how much the money people are desperate to shovel this stuff at you are.

...hide his farts.

There's like a dozen different ink cartridge gimmicks HP uses to fuck over consumers. In my case one had to press a "confirm" prompt every time one printed if the color cartridge was past an alleged expiration date even if I was only printing in black-and-white.

HP used to have a good reputation, then seemed to turn evil on a dime. Was there a board meeting where they had a "let's be evil" vote and it passed?