Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

Good sir, this is clearly a desperate cry for help... This "national centre for gaming disorders" seems desperate for people to learn that they... erm... exist.

More Americans seem to be aware of Milton Keynes than people who have heard about this place, probably because Britain's most unremarkable town has more functions.

Fun fact: there are over 140 roundabouts in Milton Keynes, giving you ample opportunity to turn around and get the hell out of Milton Keynes.

The irony of that I sense will be lost on you.

Crocodile Dundee were American films. The stories were American, the language used was American (they're called prawns, only Seppo's call them "shrimp" and no-one in Oz BBQs them), even Paul Hogan had left Australia (albeit for the UK). This is exactly the kind of thing that these kinds of legislation are meant to stymie.

If you'd like to watch a few Australian films, I'd recommend "The Castle" as a light hearted drama, "Chopper" as a more gritty comedy based on Melbourne gangland figure Mark Brandon "Chopper" Reid (both films feature Eric Bana) and "Bad Eggs", Australia tends to do comedy well. Although I suspect a cultural references will go straight over the heads of many.

As a former Australian, the culture is being subsumed by the worst parts of American culture.

Long gone are the days of the knockabout larrikin culture of my youth (we're only talking 20 odd years ago too) which has been replaced with American style selfishness and ignorance, a grab, snatch and take followed with "I got mine, fuck you". If you aren't old enough to have 20 houses, there's nothing left for you to grab, snatch or take either. The old "laid back" Australian image is just a myth these days, "She'll be right" has been replaced with "I'm alright Jack".

As for this particular move, the old system is dying, by that I mean broadcast TV and it was broadcast TV that used to pay for all the local production. This is again Americanism creeping in with a little help from the British, TV is little more than cheap reality TV any more. If it isn't American style reality, they'll steal things from the British (Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off, Love Island (which was only named such because Chlamydia Peninsula was already trademarked)). There is little in the way of local drama and local comedy produced these days. I'd hazard a guess that is the kind of thing this move is trying to stymie.

I've long since moved away and found something in the UK I realised Australia lost, it could still laugh at itself, it wasn't taking itself too seriously and sadly that seems to be dying out in the UK now.

crystal in your hand all turning black...

I largely agree, however one minor point of order is that banks rarely make interest off people who don't repay their debts. So someone who is at risk of defaulting is going to cost, hence organisations that give easy credit to anyone like Klarna are in dire straights. Whoda thunk you'd lose money by lending it to people who wouldn't pay it back.

What they want are people using credit (preferably exclusively) but paying it off every month, hence people who have credit cards but don't use them are often called "deadbeats".

I'm just glad I don't live in a country that judges me on a credit score. It seems pretty Orwellian to me. Lenders have to make their own decisions when someone applies for credit which means the lender must accept the risks (the likes of Experian have tried to set up credit score like systems here and failed as no one would buy them).

Yet.

They're not going full Stazi on white people, yet.

It'll happen, first they'll say it's just the "Lib'rals" and the ignorant sleepwalkers will just keep watching Fox News and swallowing their State Approved bullshit... however it'll start applying to them too and by that point, it'll be too late as "no one was left to speak out for them".

People who support the mechanism of a police state, especially out of bigotry, rarely seem to understand that the same mechanisms will be turned against them in due course. Well, not until it's too late.

At least they still managed to break my Taylor guitar.

Spain doesn't really benefit from DST because it's highest latitude is still so low that there isn't a huge difference in the hours of daylight between summer and winter.

The UK has an 8 hour difference between midsummer and midwinter. Yes, July has 8 more hours of sunshine than December. If you stuck with permanent summer time, the sun wouldn't rise until 8:30 and would still be dark by 5 in midwinter. If you stuck with permanent GMT, in midsummer the sun would be up around 03:30. Without DST, a whole bunch of seasonal issues (in particular S.A.D.) will get a whole lot worse.

Most clocks adjust themselves these days, so there isn't even that excuse any more.

I think that Too Big To Fail has become Too Big To Fail.

The whole point of a free market economy is to foster competition, if one entity becomes so large or controlling over a market segment that it can cause a serious disruption then the free market has failed, so that entity needs to be heavily regulated, nationalised or broken up.

That being said, I don't think any AI company is too big to fail... I suspect their failure will be too small to notice except by people who have foolishly invested huge sums of money in white elephants.

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

Sometimes experimentation is the only thing standing between you and certain death. None of us would be surviving cancer if not for patients being experimented on.

Beyond terminal illnesses, the regulatory burdens should be very high and not lowered because something shiny and new comes along.