Honestly, its almost a good thing.

A friend recently asked me to look into their kids laptop who had gotten around some age restriction stuff, and I was mystified. I asked the kid how they did it, and they laid out all the registry keys and the line of reasoning they followed to find them, and all I could think was this 10yo kid was as good a security professional as I am (he's not, but well, it was absolutely impressive work. ). I see this as a positive. The world of computers I grew in involved 10yos teaching themselves assembly to make C64 and Amstrad (I'm australian, so we got the same computers the UK folks did. BBCs, Sinclairs, and eventually C64s and Amstrads. Tandys where esoteric american imports) games. We started with basic, supplemented it with assembly we learned from library books and magazines (no internet in the 1980s!) and taught each other at school, then when we got to highschool and the fancy new IBMs we then learned Turbo pascal and got hooked on the possibilities. 40 years later I'm still at it.

But kids now, its internet slop, fortnight, and computers that dont require you to learn to LOAD "*",8,1 and tempt you with a manual promising infinite games if you learn to code.

But kids are resourceful, and if hacking their way around idiot-boomer designed age locks force them to actually learn how their computers work, then great.

I told my friend to download for their kid a copy of the Godot game engine, and look up the GDQuest lessons, because clearly this kids got a future, if he can be inspired to chase it.

Also, fuck AI, let kids learn.

I saw a pretty funny video on youtube (something like "creating the worst AI music") and they are just pumping more and more absurd prompts into it, and getting some pretty funny (and occasionally disturbing) results

He could easily have been a billionare with Jobs. Jobs wanted him by his side the whole way, but Woz is built different. He doesn't really care about doing the billionare thing , he made enough from his apple shares that he'll never want for anything. Hell, I doubt apple would even let him go broke, he was the left hand of their god-king Jobs.

He just wants to do cool tech and make the world around him better.

I dont expect that 2025 ruling to last forever. Other than flying in the face of a couple of hundred years of precedent it effectively leaves the supreme court as the only court able to rule against the government in countless cases reducing lower courts to only being able to say 'This unconstitutional law is bad but we can only block it for the person who made the suit" which in turn has absolutely flooded the lower courts with backlogged cases.

Needless to say, outside of a badly corrupted supreme court, pretty much every judge below that court thinks the ruling is bullshit.

Sure, you can use them for that.

But just go click on Kalshi's homepage and tell me what you see. Its sports betting.

So while sure you can bet.... er I mean trade... on market outcomes, you can also bet on sports. How is this different to what DraftKing or BetUS or whatever do?

These are gambling websites walking around in the mask of financial instruments.

And if the difference is the people betting have a stake in the outcome beyond that any other gambler would have, well we have a term for that, and that term is "rigged".

Again, your asserting something in the absense of a justification. Then pointing back at it to justify it. Its tautological.

More to the point, your making the descartian fallacy by assuming that body and mind are separate things. The human consciousness is not necessarily some aetheric essence that sits on top of the brain, its perfectly capable of being a *state* of the brain. Translated to computer, consciousness COULD be simply a specific arangement of software states. Trying to separate it out and say its something different without asserting why is fallicious.

Instead of taking this into account and putting more effort into single player games that were actually making them more money than they expected, they chased the fleeting extractor shooter market (which anyone could tell them is severely limited because its player base have to be cool with the risk of losing everything every time they play... that's a pretty acquired taste eh) on the premise that they might catch the next fortnite.

Theres always a flavor of the month. What the kids now call Boomer shooters, Doom, Quake, etc, where that flavor for years, Team shooters, ie counterstrike where that flavor for the longest time. Team shooters with classes, ie Team Fortress and later Overwatch, that was popular for a while. Battle Royale, ie Fortnite and PUBG , yeah that was huge. Now its Extraction shooters. These genres have *always* had the money because the finance dudes notice a certain game is making silly money and decide they want in. Meanwhile the lesser well known but still loved genres (I'm a big fan of survival games) just keep on keeping on getting ignored by the AAAs and.... I'm OK with that. Too much potential for micro-transaction hell, so the longer they fail to notice the genre, the happier I am.

A proper government or a government who pays the gangs/warlords to stay out of their city?

Its Kenya. There are no warlords, and gangs are kept out the same way they are in any western country, by the police arresting them.

What country is stable without being run by a white man? For that matter, which stable one is run by a white man?

Well, for one theres Kenya.

Typo: By "Roberts Administration", read "Roberts court".

But since it seems that the court has practically nullified any oversight by congress, it might as well be the Roberts Administration.

GG America. You got played.

At the moment the Roberts administration appears to be interpreting the constitution as "Whatever the administration says it is, because we've made it nearly impossible to enforce" thanks to a serious of malicious rulings that seem to mean that any decision that finds a law unconstitutional only finds it unconstitutional for the specific person suing.

Hell, legally Trump isn't even supposed to be president because he's convicted of leading an insurrection which specifically disqualifies him, but the roberts court decided that seemingly nobody is allowed to sue to enforce it.

America does not have a constitution anymore. Not in any sense that counts. Why americans are not flipping cop cars in open rebelion is beyond me. You had a good thing, then you let it go.

The africans (The Africa CDC specifically, not to be confused by the currently managerially incapacitated US CDC) have pretty extensive experience with this particular pathogen and keeping it under control under very adverse conditions. This aint their first rodeo. With that said with USAID being taken off the board , and the fact that there is a particulrly gnarly war going on in the Congo, the current scenario may well prove more challenging than previous outbreaks

I dont think any serious commentators thought there was much of a danger of hanta going pandemic. It was newsworthy because of the rolling horrorshow of a cruise ship stranded at sea filled with the disease.

But I cant remember any serious news outlet , and definitely no government, UN, or QANGO agencies suggesting it was going to going to go pandemic.

In a lot of juristictions there is a concept called the "natural lifetime" of a product. When you hear a product has a "lifetime warranty" thats what is meant by "lifetime" (its not YOUR lifetime, its the products lifetime). and largely thats a term of art that means roughly "whatever a reasonable person would expect that product would last for". For software this would be "for as long as a computer can still run it". So it would be unreasonable to still expect Powermac software to run in a world where you cant get Powermac's anymore.

And for single player games, a reasonable person would NOT expect that the natural lifetime would be "for however long the company could be bothered to run the DRM server for". A multiplayer game would probably have a different expectation, but the stop killing game campaign is mostly about single player games.

And in a *lot* of juristictions, Europe, Australia and *probably* many US states, all purchases have that "lifetime" warranty by law so there is definitely grounds to say that if a company intentionlly disables a product that otherwise would still run, then the customer is entitled to a full refund, even if its 10 years later.

Yeah. It's bloody exhausting reading articles with the singular they.

If you don't like english, there are many others to choose from. But the singular they has been with us since english was still laden with thees and thous with the oldest examples going back to the 1300s so I'm afraid the ancestor to which one should direct complaints died long ago. Probably aged 30 of some sort of medieval plague.

I have about $500 of vintage tools I ordered from ebay in the mail right now. I've also got over a dozen camera lenses that I purchased on there.

So your the bastard who keeps outbidding me on camera lenses. Hiss!