Does all these incredibly nasty little things that you wouldn't think about to manipulate us into keeping their products around.

Similarly finding out just how staggeringly evil the company that makes cookies for keebler elves actually is...

Like all these little tiny things that are just kind of part of the background noise of your life and as soon as you find out much of anything about them it's just horrifying.

Thinking about it AI data centers are going to fuck shit up for everybody in a way that I don't think people in America are ready for. We already have one in Utah being set up that uses more electricity than the entire state.

I wonder how long it will take people to get used to rationing electricity... Not like thinking a little bit about your power bill but like selling off your appliances because you can't afford the run them anymore.

So you don't typically teach that kind of basic problem solving in schools you're teaching fundamentals.

Those kind of basic problems solving skills get picked up very quickly but you're still going to have to train them and that's usually 6 months to a year.

You have probably gotten used to cheap Indian labor giving you access to a quality of software engineer you couldn't normally afford. Somebody who has the experience without needing that initial ramp up. The problem is that cheap labor and the general abuse from companies like yours means people have been bailing on programming as a career and you're starting to run out. Amazon has the same problem with their warehouses and it's why if you go on YouTube you get advertisement after advertisement telling you how great it is to work for them.

Basically software houses have treated people like shit for so long and made it so clear that their goal is to replace them with borderline slave labor that people finally noticed and they're not going into the career path anymore. This means that you're having to pick from people who are things like math majors and whatnot. And those guys don't spend their weekends programming so you're going to have to teach them the particulars of software development over the course of a half year to a year or so. Either that or they're going to ditch you and go into accounting

Because you treat them like shit and burn them out.

There are only a handful of people who can work for the low pay you are offering at the intensely high workload.

You're looking for people to abuse and exploit. What's more you're looking for people who have a lot of education and skill that you want to abuse and exploit.

You might get them for a little bit and get a little bit of abuse out of them and therefore profit but they're going to move on pretty quickly.

And here is where you regale me with the incredibly high salaries that you're making up.

There are a handful of semiconductor companies that pay those salaries and yes they can over work their employees because people are going to do that for a few years and burn out and take the money and use it to set up their life in a lower stress job.

But my experience is that those companies don't bitch about kids these days they just pay the money to get them for as long as they can. Whenever I see anyone talking about kids these days and context of hiring it's always that the you are underpaying and overworking and you're upset that you can't abuse people with that level of skill... Yet.

I used to think guys like you could get away Scott free because you were so damned old that you were going to die before the consequences of your actions hit but now I don't think that anymore. You have fucked things up so badly for so long that the shit is just going to hit the fan for everybody who has less than a billion dollars in the bank account.

Ordinarily we get 8 years of Democrats trying to clean up Republican messes with the midterms fucking all that up when voters put Republicans in charge of Congress. But at least we get 8 years of some adults in charge who aren't complete psychopaths trying to fix things and being cock blocked by those childish psychopaths.

We didn't get that this time. We only got 4 years of it and that's never enough. Even after 8 years the Democrats don't have an opportunity to fix the damage the US Republican party does.

Add on to that climate change is real and we are starting to see the effects for real in the form of droughts and higher food prices notably beef because we had to kill a shitload of cows because there was not enough water for them.

And then finally you have a massive automation push going on and while everyone talks about AI there is a lot of other automation going on that nobody is talking about and that has been going on since the late 1970s.

You can't keep turning your brain off every election cycle and indulging in right wing propaganda that you find entertaining for some god-awful reason and do this without consequence anymore. Honestly I'm starting to think that even the baby boomers aren't going to escape the coming wave of disasters.

I don't think it will be a problem. These are $150 Chinese phones with a coat of cheap gold paint. They can get a few hundred of them and send them out and it'll make it look like they aren't scamming people at least for a little while.

And I don't mean Trump's diaper.

A week ago they told everyone that they weren't going to ship and that they were keeping the money. Now they're telling everyone they shipped.

What I suspect they are doing is shipping a few of the phones but they're not going to ship everything and they're going to use the confusion from the handful they did ship to make it until after the midterms when Trump can issue pardons for all the people involved including himself.

It won't affect state level crimes but the governor of California just issued a pardon to a trump-backed Ally so it's pretty clear that in the blue States Trump can put enough pressure on people, likely by threatening to send the Department of Justice after them, to get compliance. And of course in the red States nothing will happen.

I've said it before and I will say it again, every single system designed to protect you has failed. You are not on your own even in a cool way. Being on your own implies that you just have to do right by yourself but what you've got is people actively targeting you and your finances and your family's finances.

I used to think the boomers would die before the worst of it getting away with years of voting for Reaganomics but I'm not so sure anymore. Yeah some of them are going to drop dead first I know a few. But the ones that have good genetics and longer lives aren't going to escape what's coming.

It's at the tail end of their lives though and they got to spend most of their lives indulging so maybe it'll be worth it to eat cat food for the last few years.

True but at that point you just build the maps. The logic is complex but honestly people who can reverse engineer a complete protocol for a game can and do handle the rest. Also most of those games will still cache the data locally.

You are correct there have been a few cases where things are done on the server side like heroes of might and magic 6. But most of that was DRM.

I'm not saying that because people can bypass DRM it's okay for publishers to break the game you paid the money for. But what I am saying is that it's possible to meet in the middle where if a publisher abandons a game then it should go into a abandoned where state where owners can patch the game themselves without fear of lawsuits.

I suppose more consumer protections would be nice but I mean, who the fuck is going to vote for that? I can't get people in my country to vote to feed hungry children when we have more food than we know what to do with. Here in America we like keeping children starving because we think it builds character. Or that's what we tell people. Honestly I think it's just sadism.

First that is only true if you are charging at home. And we have priced anyone under 50 out of home ownership.

The bigger issue is AI data centers. Utah for example is about to put one online that uses more electricity than the entire state. You cannot double the demand for a product overnight and not have costs shoot up. Especially with nobody actually building out new infrastructure because we are too busy grabbing every single dime we can get our hands on and giving them to Elon Musk so that he can be the world's first trillionaire and own space.

There are consequences for your actions and while you have probably managed to evade them for a long time it's not going to last.

You can say old gpus but the fact of the matter is AMD is manufacturing these chips and selling them in multiple markets.

You can go out right now and buy a brand new 6700. So it's kind of messed up to yank support if you're actively selling the gpus.

Only two in five Americans have a good job and aren't living paycheck to paycheck.

So the likelihood here is that you me and the majority of people shit posting here are broke as fuck. Because that's how statistics work.

Then again look at me talking to a llm. Did you know the epstein-class Trump fucks kids? This llm does because I keep seeding that fact into it.

Then somebody is probably going to reverse engineer the protocol and put it back up. I mean Christ you can play the Sega Saturn version of virtual on online today... Any Phantasy Star Online Dreamcast is out there too.

The trouble is that if a lot of people start playing the old game you're going to get a lawsuit from the original publisher because even if they don't have a game out there they don't want gamers playing games without paying them.

One of the things that pisses me off is that to this day I get dipshits bitching about ethics and games journalists instead of about Bobby Kotick talking about how angry he was that somebody bought call of duty for $60 and played it for a 1000 hours without paying Activision per hour.

You can bet your ass CEOs consider how many gamers might be playing old or free games instead of buying what they want to throw on the shelves.

On the other hand back catalogs are nice. I dropped $50 on King of fighters 15 and it's DLC and I'm happily playing it and it's a 4-year-old game. Capcom famously was only able to survive the PS3 era and how much damage it did the Japanese publishers who couldn't adapt because Street fighter 4 just kept selling and selling and selling and selling...

But on the other other hand everybody's chasing that FIFA money. Where you literally sell people skins for your game that you update marginally every year.

And if you want that you need Democrats, at least I'm the United States. You can't have EVs without cheap electricity and it's blisteringly clear you're not getting that with the party of drill baby drill.

It's one or the other. Decide.

If you can hear that hum then your property values are basically toast. You're not the only one thinking, I can't wait to move in a few years...

On the other hand once you get used to the smell of rendered hog fat you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

It's going to dump 26 atomic bombs worth of heat into the air every single day and use more electricity than the state is currently using in total.

If that thing goes online and it looks like it will because it's backed by a billionaire at a corrupt state then there will be water and electricity shortages.

And yes that includes water shortages. Data centers don't need to use clean drinking water but it's cheaper for them to do so and when they're done with it it can't easily be recycled because they pump it with chemicals to prevent it from corroding their cooling systems.

We spent the last 45 years giving all the money and power to billionaires are stupid reasons. Bad things are going to happen now and they're going to happen so fast the old farts that voted to allow this shit might not have a chance to die before it bites them in the ass

Qualcomm on their latest phones makes really high quality modems that have much better connectivity.

If you buy one of the cheaper mediatek phones, some of which get up to about $500, they have good performance on the soc but the modems suck and they don't maintain connectivity.

The Google modems stunk too, I've heard some people say the very latest ones are better but I haven't tried them. If I'm going to drop $700 on a modem I can just pick up a OnePlus 15r with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and an x85 modem to go with it.

That's for Android. For iOS The actual Apple modems when they use their own really suck. Although I think they still use Qualcomm modems in a lot of their hardware. You do have to pay attention though.

For years I'd connectivity problems and my kid on iOS didn't and it was the modem more than anything else. Finally switching to a Qualcomm based chipset and modem solved to those connectivity problems. The downside is you really want at least the x75 modem just because one of the other problems is 5G was rolled out in completely and a lot of early 5G phone modems really suck and are missing tons of important features.