I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.

... and in 2020 it was "anyone but Trump", as it will be again in 2028, assuming we still have elections then.

Step back a bit, and you realize the real voting pattern is "anyone but the incumbent", because the system has deteriorated to the point where problems don't get solved anymore, so voters are just blindly switching back and forth from one party to the other in the hopes that doing that will somehow lead to improvement. American Democracy has devolved into the world's most elaborate ring oscillator.

Did you understand anything in that marketdroid BS? I didn't.

All this screams to me is: avoid - avoid - avoid.

That's true, but some people might be sad if they previously were able to pay their rent and now they cannot. Hopefully there will be other jobs available for them to move to.

and summer is ultra-messed-up too here. We've had 2 days at 64 degrees this year, but otherwise it barely goes above 50. It's really rare here to have such a long, sustained bout of cold weather around midsummer.

Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.

The tech world isn't the "intellectual" class. It's the crass profit-at-all-costs business class. That's why they market AI: they know perfectly well AI is shit and nobody but corporate bean counters want it, but corporate bean counters is where the money is.

It's becoming a selling point.

Hell, I even watched a video leaked from some OnlyFans account that had the preamble "This content creator prides herself in making her own content herself entirely: no AI bullshit involved!" If the porn industry rejects it, you know it's bad for business.

My #1 use for ChatGPT is "show me an example of some C code that implements functionality (X)".

Then I can read that example, research the APIs it is calling (to make sure they actually exist and are appropriate for what I'm trying to accomplish), and use it to write my own function that does something similar. This is often much faster than my previous approach (googling, asking for advice on StackOverflow, trial and error).

I don't want AI slop in the kernel I rely on for work. Fuck that guy.

If bottom-up coding is a fallacy, someone has forgotten to let evolution know that. Here we all are, bottom-up coded, for better or worse.

People who live far away from a hospital and don't have much gas in the tank?

Yes, it is exactly the convenient avenue of the day, and that's the problem. People who own a gun are eight times more likely to die of suicide than people who do not, simply because they have easy in-home access to the most effective tool for the job. People who live in "food deserts" have poorer diets than people who have convenient access to healthy food, because nobody wants to travel across town when they're hungry. People playing video games solve most of their in-game challenges through (virtual) violence, because violent actions are what the game designers have mapped to the most convenient and obvious game-controls, while non-violent solutions require a lot more thought and contrivance, if they even are possible at all.

Convenience matters, because people are more likely to do something when it's convenient than when isn't. So in this case, ChatGPT gives mentally marginal people convenient access to an encouraging, enabling, delusion-reinforcing "friend" 24/7 in their own home, for free, with insufficient guard rails, leading to the outcomes we see reported here.

It's incorrect to think that mentally ill people are doomed to madness no matter what, just as it's incorrect to think that people with weakened immune systems are doomed to die of infection. They have a higher risk, certainly, but whether they actually fall victim or not depends a lot on what's going on in their environment.

You've misunderstood Darwinism. Natural selection has nothing to do with who "deserves" anything; it's only about whose genes get propagated forward and whose do not. And it's not (necessarily) the stupidest among us who will likely die off, it's the least fit, for whatever definition of "fit" is pragmatically relevant for a genome's survival and reproduction under current circumstances. In today's world, stupidity might actually be a reproductive advantage.