Heh... understandable

Personally I'm actually here *because* I wanted to see what the Slashdot takes on the current AI panic are. I haven't been on here except in passing for some time, having drifted to sites like Reddit - honestly I'd say that was a mistake. Let's just say Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation system seems a lot more resilient against echo chambers, brigading, bots and the Dunning-Kruger effect. That and I've always quite respected the technical minds who post here. Maybe it's rose tinted specs, but I'm glad to see it being discussed somewhere I consider relatively sane. Perhaps the site is just long overdue topic filters!

It's a shame what happened to Vanguard, but I don't think that'll go down as anything he's particularly remembered for (for that exact reason I suppose), it ended up a bit obscure and forgotten. For me it just came at a time when I stopped having several hours at a time to set aside to play MMORPGs (just can't do it any more... with all the prep, travelling and group assembling at the start plus goodbyes, wrapping up and finding a safe place to exit you're really talking an hour bare minimum to make it worthwhile, 2+ ideally) plus the system requirements were a bit ahead of their time IMO so I struggled to run it. But I did enjoy the brief time I tried it out. Seem to remember I played some kind of diplomat!

This. 51 is young! I'm only 14 years away from it myself... now, that's 7 years past the regime of Logan's Run but I'd rather not only have 14 years to live either. Still feel I have plenty of life ahead (and apparently look it, I still get ID'd for alcohol).

Same here considering my parents (who are also my friends) are past that age!

Things can happen at any time of course and yes there's a dodgy hip and a faulty non-return valve involved but at 66 they're still thankfully quite happy to stick around (in fact they're both avid gamers, my mum still plays a few maxed-out toons in WoW...)

Something I never expected to see any time soon.

I remember his legacy well. EverQuest was a BIG part of my life in 1999 and the early 2000s, many hours of excitement and adventure in Norrath are down to him. His vision early on was to make people put real time, effort and social interaction into EQ! Something which seemed a pain at the time and earned him notoriety for "The Vision (TM)" (the joys of chasing around asking if any mage could be kind enough to bind you to a new location when you just wanted to get on and play) but exactly as designed, created a lot of friendships, co-operation and memories. IMO it did lose its way a bit when he left.

Might have to pop in to EQ, dust off one of my old toons and raise a glass in his name. Cheers Brad, RIP

To disassociate 'UFOs' from 'Aliens' in people's minds? I mean it's been a while since shit like ET and we've had it drummed into our heads for ages now that UFO simply means an airborne object that wasn't identified but people still see it as "ooh aliens!"

It saddens me greatly that the highest related results on YouTube for Star Trek are stupid right wing twats like Nerdrotic and Dave Cullen. Yes there are women and POC in Star Trek, guys - been that way from the start

Europe is about to be hit with a heatwave pushing some areas up to 40C. Every year we hear more and more of "most extreme since records began" (including extremes in winter due to various knock on effects) and I'm honestly surprised that anyone with eyes isn't alarmed at how much all of this is accelerating. Attempts to prevent mass panic appear to be remarkably successful, to the point that I wonder if when everything's on fire around us everyone is still going to be in this state of denial.

Yep, just like Gab. Spent a few minutes there out of curiosity and noped the fuck out.

Of course you have a right to get paid for good content (though so many just do things like reading aloud some instructions for something and then begging for likes/subscribes/notification bells I.e. low effort optimisation stuff)

But mostly because YouTube (or anything Google) isn't a stable platform. They can demonetise you at any moment, lower what you get paid, suddenly decide to go by a different metric than number of likes and subs to decide how much you get, etc. It seems very unreliable to me as an income

Those who are truly entertaining enough to be worth enough subscribers to make money should probably just go into the proper entertainment industry instead, rather than propping their livelihood up on Google. I wouldn't rely on them to provide me with any service that doesn't get whisked away or changed unrecognisably at a moment's notice, so I sure as heck wouldn't rely on them to pay the bills!

Then we can all use some alternative to Youtube and just be happy with the old idea of making videos because you genuinely want to entertain, educate, vlog etc for the fun and benefit of other people, and not having to slap a "please like, comment, subscribe and hit that bell icon" at the end of every pointless 5 minute video telling you something that could've been typed in 5 seconds.

Funny you should mention xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1732/

You obviously don't. But a lot of people do because if not us then any kids we have, are looking likely to experience our own extinction unless there is drastic action (which is very unlikely, as humanity simply doesn't change that quickly). That's going to be no picnic for anyone

Voted no expecting to be in the minority, pleasantly surprised.

1) We don't need everyone learning what is basically a trade. Even if people's minds did all work in a "programmer's way" (unlikely I think, a lot of people just wouldn't get it), frankly it'd devalue my job. I'm paid pittance as it is.

2) There are other, higher priority things people could have as a universal skill like cooking, other languages, personal finance, and so on - worry about making sure everyone can code when you've already made sure everyone can cook, communicate and support themselves.

Seems a bad idea. I'm on EE (UK) and my choice is either EE or EE.. it can't be unlocked.

Also if not topped up for a 6 month period they deactivate the internal eSIM - permanently. I was very lucky in that I caught it in a limbo state (lasts about a week) so they could reactivate mine. I now have a reminder set to put £1 on it every 5 months.