Maybe if a kid is well off and has parents that can take them to the library constantly and isn't in a deep breath state or half the books have been banned because the letters g, a and y all appeared on the same page at the same time you might have a point but well that's not the world we live in.

As a dumb kid learning to program in basic I hit a wall for some reason on the concept of data statements. The idea that you would have data at the back of your program listing that you would read from the front of your program listing didn't make sense to my dumb kid brain. So I just kind of stopped because if your programming in basic you kind of need data statements to do anything at all cool.

At the time what I needed was something else to explain it to me in a different way but I just didn't have that. Single mom and all that working a lot and very rarely got to go to a library that wasn't the school library and I had already gone through the books they are. And I mean books plural they were like two very bad programming books.

Now if I had known and had the guidance to do so I could have asked the public librarian to get literally any book I want. There is a little library in a rural UK community that had the best collection of 8-bit programming books in the world because one of the old badass bedroom coders just kept asking the librarian for books and they kept getting them. But again it just didn't occur to me.

The internet lets you interact with thousands and thousands of information sources to explain things in different ways and give you different ideas and that's before you start digging into forums. Although thanks to political bots and the Russians you really have to dig the find good forums they are still out there.

Learning basic stuff is still better done on paper but there is no better way to get over a wall then with the help of the internet. And every person is going to hit a wall at some point

Cheating is a business. A pretty large one. People will pay entirely too much money for the ability to cheat in online games. Streamers and want to be YouTubers especially because viewers expect them to be able to carry on a conversation and parasocial bullshit while playing at top level

So you need ridiculously complex and sophisticated and unbreakable anti cheat to make online games playable with anyone but a small group of friends. And it isn't really practical to build a online game Community around the small group of friends who can't all game on the same night every night.

Do you have something that can operate above kernel level and that is difficult for professional engineers to break? It would be one thing if it was just hobbyists writing cheat software but it's been professionals for quite some time.

And if you want to have alternatives to Windows games are essential. That's what's going to start moving people away from windows.

Kind of Trumps the rest, pun intended. Europe could cheerfully look the other way at America bombing the shit out of a Middle Eastern country God knows they have before. And the tariffs wouldn't be expected to last past Trump's administration. More nuisance than anything else. Remember Tara tariffs are tax on the local population, Europe doesn't care if Trump raises inflation on American citizens. They know damn well that the factories aren't coming back.

So I think the main problem is the whole threatening to invade a NATO Ally in order to snag land from them. Land that they have to know some people here in the states are planning to use to launch an invasion.

It is strange to watch parts of Europe gradually realizing how batshit insane Americans are and then they're response to that isn't to try to get our Insanity under control before we start nuking people but to try to take advantage of it so that they can make a quick buck.

But I guess that's just how the Epstein class thinks.

They are telling you to fuck off. They are putting in unreasonable cost onto the cost of doing business in Europe with the expectation that you will try to pass it on to them and then that will give them the push they need for homegrown software and data centers.

Next time you want to do business outside of the United States don't allow a known pedophile and rapist with clear signs of dementia to become president of the United States just so you can get some tax breaks and a little extra corruption. Long-term the trade-offs probably aren't worth it.

We put a pedophile rapist in charge. This was entirely predictable. Literally the king of debt who bankrupted every single company and his sales pitch to us was he would run the government like a business.

I can just barely forgive people for 2016. There is no excuse in 2024. I would love to ask Trump voters what the fuck and then get an honest answer.

Shit it's only going to get worse because the Democrats are on track to barely take the house and probably lose the Senate. If there is a fuck ton of voter turnout, so much that over suppression can't counteract it,, the dems will just barely take the Senate but there's not a lot they can do with a micro majority like that except stop the worst of the bleeding and of course voters will blame them in 2028 when things don't turn around even though they gave them barely a majority in a political system where a supermajority is needed to get anything done besides making things worse.

That's the real problem. Our political system lets the Republican party crash the economy and sabotage our lives and jobs but it doesn't let the Democrats fix it. So it's like a ratchet. And every time the voters blamed a democrats for what the Republicans did

It's because of Trump. He threatened to invade Greenland for fuck sake. They do not trust America anymore and frankly I cannot blame them. We elected and known rapist and pedophile to be president twice.

One of the things Americans do not understand, and the number of things Americans do not understand could fill volumes, is that we are a military empire and that your standard of living depends on that military empire extracting tribute from the rest of the world.

We have mostly been able to get away with that by leveraging our military bases in a way that makes them appear and even at times b useful to the locals in foreign countries. Look into the Petro dollar if you're confused about what I'm talking about here.

The Epstein class over in Europe does not like this. They would like to be the ones with a nice big military empire that gets to extract tribute. And it doesn't help that increasingly the regular Americans do not see much of that tribute, although you do still see some of it.

What I'm saying is that you can't break all these complex systems that were built to build up the American economy at the expense of the rest of the world without consequences back home. Even if you're not really getting any of the money from that anymore because we have allowed the Epstein class to take it all that Epstein class is not going to sit idly by as they lose access to that wealth. They are instead going to try to take it from you because if they can't get it from parts of Europe and Asia your next on the menu.

It's a classic case of a chesterton's fence. We took the fence down and we didn't know why it was up

Texas is just refusing to register people to vote. Paxton and his cronies control the voter apparatus and they have just ground everything to a halt in blue districts. You combine that with illegal challenges to signatures and multi-hour wait times to vote on election Day in blue districts and the corporate Republicans win every single election even when the Democrats are three to five points ahead.

Paxton is so hated and has so many scandals there's a microscopic chance that talerico will beat him because he is pulling six to seven points ahead. But that's the kind of margin a Democrat needs now to win an election. I don't understand why they won't do anything about the cheating. I do know when anyone on the left wing or the conservative Center tries to organize against the radical right the right wing immediately recognizes them as a threat and shuts them down. Like what they did to acorn. On the other hand if you're a useless dipshit or you're getting money from China or netanyahu like those two YouTubers you can do whatever you want. Butf the moment you become effective they come down on you like a ton of bricks

It looks like they used a fuck ton of Ray traced light effects to make the game look more natural and realistic. And yeah on a base PS5 which is basically running a RX 6700 or maybe a 3060 equivalent that's going to choke out. I suspect that they thought the PlayStation 6 was going to be out. I don't think anyone saw how much damage AI was going to do to our hobby. And they probably figured by now somebody would be making more RAM but with zero antitrust law enforcement nobody is going to take any chances...

If there was competition in the market then no it wouldn't have done that but the same handful of people own all the grocery stores. Remember we put everything on the stock market and only a handful of people own enough stock that they actually have any kind of a controlling interest. Your 401k does not mean you have a controlling interest..

What does this means in practice is that there is zero competition in grocery shopping. The only limit on prices is the point where people actually start to notice that and stop voting Republican.

So they can fire a whole shitload of people and yeah it's slower for you to sit in the line ringing and bagging your own groceries and it's slower for everyone involved but you need food and they've got it so you have to put up with it.

There are a handful of alternatives but none of them at scale. You can drive an hour or two to a farmer's market I guess. There are expensive boutique grocery stores. Stuff like that. But realistically you're not going to be able to keep yourself fed with those. Not unless you have special circumstances. The majority of the population are stuck with the large grocery chains and they know it.

You could of course try opening your own grocery store chain to compete... Except they will run you out of business with low prices just long enough to bankrupt you and we don't enforce antitrust law.

We spent the last 50 years dismantling our Democratic institutions so that we could indulge in Petty moral panics. We are only just now starting to see the consequences of that. The real fun comes when the stock market finally collapses after the Epstein class is done looting our 401ks. If you're a baby boomer good luck dying before that happens because God knows you can't stop it.

It's just outsourcing, H1-Bs and age discrimination fueled layoffs. AI is a great cover for that.

Also Trump is wrecking the economy and nobody wants to acknowledge that because he's a vindictive psycho that nobody will stand up to.

We all know what they're doing.

Oh I'm still bad at it it takes me an inordinate amount of time to make something that is barely presentable.

The fact that I can make something barely presentable in entirely too much time doesn't make me good at it.

I still just don't understand what Torvalds is saying here. It doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of AI. It sounds like he tried to use it and it didn't work. Maybe he just thinks it's a cool new thing and he doesn't fear it taking his job or his water and electricity since he's pretty high up on the totem pole...

And one damn thing I wanted AI to do for me was to make lovely documents for me so I didn't have to try doing it. So far it can't really do it. If I really screw around with it I can get it to do it but then I could have just done it myself.

And that's been my experience with AI so far. If I really screw around with it I can get it to do what I wanted to do but I could have just done it myself in the first place. And since I have to check all the work it's doing it's just not worth the effort.

I've been told if you put a bunch of effort into getting it to work it will work but what the hell is the point of that? Meanwhile eventually it's not going to be cheap and unless I want to spend 3 Grand on video card that can run one of the models I'm stuck paying through the nose...

I'm not sure I get what Torvalds is saying here either. Did I misread it? He said he gave AI The prompt and it did it but it was horrendous. Implying that it was worse than the work he did himself. What's the point then? If it can't solve the part I don't want to do and it's incredibly expensive doing that badly I just don't see the point... I guess it takes people who can't do a thing and makes them feel like they could do the thing. And I guess if you're a business man that's a good thing because you can theoretically expand the number of people you can hire to do a thing or just get rid of them all together plummeting wages.

But again, I don't see how that's a good thing either. Especially in a world where if you don't work you don't eat and people tend to start wars when they can't eat...

Even before AI they cranked out nothing but slop for fortnite. Skin after skin after skin and they only started making anything else when fortnite skin sales started to drop and like every publicly traded company on Earth they have to grow endlessly and at the exact same or better rates than they did last cycle.

Our entire economic system is built on endless highly rapid growth to keep the Epstein class fed. Basically we're all running from the dragon hoping it eats The Hobbit before it eats us. And it's looking like it's done with all the hobbits and we're next on the menu...

The ruling class has decided AI is going to replace us. One of them just casually spent close to $300 million on the midterm elections without so much as a second thought. Your individual purchases are completely irrelevant to the face of that.

This isn't something the free market can solve. It is a fundamental shift in human society and culture. Rugged individualism can only take you so far. And it turns out you can't actually pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That used to be a joke but we took it way too fucking seriously...