Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Yes, that was the joke. Maybe too much of an inside joke, but isn't this supposed to be a nerd forum?

Disable, yes. Uninstall, no. If it's pre-installed it's part of the system image, which is mounted read-only and protected with fs-crypt. Actually modifying that would require root access to remount it rw and to disable fs-crypt.

That would also, of course, completely destroy the Android security architecture, leaving you wide open to all sorts of attacks. If you want to do that, get an Android device that has an unlockable bootloader (e.g. Google Pixel), unlock it, then do whatever you like. And be sure not to hire any evil maids.

I'd recommend ML-KEM and ML-DSA instead.

I also use the Claude Code extension with VS Code. The inline diffs it provides are quite clumsy compared to Cursor's.

The integration is a little better in Cursor; the main difference being the in-line edit diffs. But I bounce back and forth between Claude Code and cursor, so I end up just using the git diff view to look at changes about 80% of the time, so it's not much better.

Honestly, my reason for using it is that I have separate Claude and Cursor token budgets -- though I set Cursor to use Claude so I'm using the same model both ways.

If your government breaking into your house and applying hardware-level attacks to scrape your secrets out of the RAM of your running computer is seriously part of your threat model, it's almost certainly very, very far from your biggest concern.

Also, you should probably consider turning your computer off.

Entering and even taking the territory of an invader is fair and reasonable. If you don't want to be invaded, don't invade.

I'm not disputing the article's claims, just pointing out that it doesn't appear to be universal.

What I'm seeing is a significant uptick in job opportunities and recruiter pings coming my way. I haven't seen this much interest in several years. I'm a senior SWE with a focus on security and a solid resume.

My guess is that lots of senior SWEs are seeing this. Deep experience pairs very well with AI, making each engineer able to do what a team of several could do previously. This could obviously come at the expense of positions for the rest of that "team of several", though. Plus there's the other concern that if AI doesn't progress to be able to replace the senior engineer, too, the industry is eating its seed corn; when the experienced folks retire there will be no one to replace them.

That's not all companies, though. My own current employer (Applied Intuition) is hiring like crazy, at all levels and especially entry level. What's more, we're not the only ones because we're actually struggling to hire new grads. They come interview and things seem good, but then a large percentage of them decline our offer. I have no idea what we're offering new grads, but Applied's compensation seems generally good (I'm satisfied with mine).

My guess is the problem is that Applied falls into an awkward place in the Silicon Valley space of companies: Already quite big ($15B valuation) and close to IPO so the pre-IPO equity isn't likely to make you independently wealthy unlike an earlier-stage startup, but still pre-IPO so the equity can't easily be spent. So, new grads looking for a potential huge payoff are disappointed, and those looking for lots of immediate cash are also disappointed.

"I want to use claude code to run 10 unattended Chrome beta testers [more info about what is being tested and specifics]. Write me one or more md files to execute and give me instructions for enabling Chrome mcp, then give me an sh script to launch 10 separate Chrome instances on macos."

I wrote that exact prompt, more or less, a month or two ago, and then other iterations since then, and it's been working very well.

Using LLMs to create prompts for LLMs to use was a good realization.

This makes me laugh! I see classes at universities and colleges on using AI. Not just in the tech arena either, I'm talking liberal arts--med school, law school, you name.

As best as I can tell, "how to use AI" is more or less "don't be a dumbass."

To be succesful with AI, you need the same skills you need to be successful otherwise. Analyze problems, test solutions, think critically, etc. Unattended vibe coding or turning in of AI slop is the same as people who cribbed essays, copied and pasted from Wikipedia, etc.

IMHO, you still need to be a developer to be able to use AI effectively. If you start with a really solid schema, or an existing framework, AI is great at building on top of that. If you give it specific guidance for what and how you want it to develop code, it can do a good job. It is NOT just "lol write me a network utility lol" -- that is a path to disaster.

I've also had good luck with updating and modernizing older code, migrating to a new frameework, and refactoring.

If i'm using claude code, my steps go something like this.

1. Using plan mode, analyze the code base, create a thorough plan and testing strategy for XYZ (Or I provide SQL schema, or I provide a thorough plan of what I want to do, etc.)
2. Refine Claude plan mlutiple times until I'm happy with it
3. Start with writing a set of unit tests to confirm current behavior
4. Implement the first part of the project (this is not coding the whole thing in one shot)
5. Run unit tests, check for regressions.\
6. Rinse and repeat..

Steps 1 and 2 -- with no code being written -- are probably the most important parts.

I should also add that, imo, this will be a relatively short moment in time. I've seen people who are spinning up dozens of agents at the same time -- backend designer, frontend designer, security consultant, css specialist, etc -- that all work together and iterate amongst themselves.

We've been running a beta test of some new software, and one beta tester out of ~30 people hit an error. We could not reproduce it. Claude took ~5 hours, but using Claude to remote control Chrome, in conjunction with analyzing the state of the backend database, and auditing the codebase, Claude was able to reproduce the error and suggest a fix. In this case, we disagreed with the fix (rather, we went for a bigger logical change as opposed to a bandaid), but we've had really great luck with using Claude Chrome mcp as a beta tester.

I have 40 kWh of batteries in my home, for backup and time-shifting, and I participate in a grid-stabilization program with my power company. The grid never draws significant energy from my batteries -- grid stabilization doesn't need a lot of energy, just a brief spike of power to keep things stable while the operator makes other adjustments. Historically this has been unnecessary because generation was from big spinning turbines and their inertia was enough to smooth out spikes and dips in demand. But renewable-heavy grids don't have the tons of spinning steel, so batteries increasingly fill the gaps.

What do I actually see when the power company draws from my batteries? I see an otherwise-unexplained spike of 5-10 kW flowing from my batteries and into the grid, for a period of 2-5 minutes. 10 kW for 5 minutes is ~0.8 kWh, which is 2% of my house battery storage. I see a draw that large maybe once per week; usually it's much less. Bottom line: the impact on my storage is insignificant, and my house batteries are smaller than what most EVs have (my EV has a 100 kWh battery pack).

What do I get for allowing the power company to do that? For the first year of participation, I got a check for $2000. For subsequent years I'll get bill credits of up to $50/month, applied to energy charges only. I'm not sure how much that will translate to, since my net energy purchase is usually zero (thanks to solar panels). It's a great deal for the first year. Beyond that... we'll see.

True, except that gold's actual usage price -- for industry and jewelry -- hasn't been its trading price for a very long time. As long as people have viewed it as a store of wealth its price has been inflated by that perception.