So, someone's moved on to anger. I mostly see denial and bargaining. The anger is there, but normal people have some checks and balances on anger-driven behaviours. Apparently, this person did not. I was surprised to read that the crowd was cheering on the attacker. For most of the western world, threatening murder is a crime. I guess the rule of law really has become optional in the USA.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

I think VPNs are a little like black market trade routes. To criminals, they're handy. To governments, they're evil. To aid organisations, they're an essential way to support oppressed civilians. Anyone who thinks that they're necessary for internet security shouldn't be allowed near keyboards.

Blocking them (or regulating them, which I think is more likely) will drive them underground - which is really where they belong anyway.

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

I get mine to call me Moles FTW

The best devs move on of their own accord.

Its the less desirable employees who have to be moved on.

Anyone who works for a game company needs an attitude adjustment if they think they're going to be there for more than one project.

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

I've already blacklisted Sony games on PC. They're all the same. They're the same as they were 20 years ago except that now, they have better eye candy. But the gameplay is almost identical. Its very droll. There's plenty of new and refreshing indie games on GOG and even some on Steam.

At some point (many moons ago), there was a senior architect at M$ who envisioned a blank slate interface with totally customisable menu options and button bars in ribbons that could be context sensitive. It was visionary.

Unfortunately, the implementation was not. The implementation of the function points in VBA was a mess, and the context sensitivity of the ribbon (which should have been strongly event driven) was botched.

And now, 40 years into the game, Microsoft still can't make a settings/configuration page/form for a damn.

It could have been beautiful. Instead, its horrible.

We switched to LibreOffice years ago, and have never looked back. Every further iteration of M$ Office, 365 and their Onedrive abomination confirms that it was the right choice.

Just testing