Yeah that’s a big one on the list definitely, thanks!

They really seem to want to shake me out as a customer. The union busting, the trump asslicking, and now this.

Well, happy to oblige. Already replaced my macbook air with a pallet unit lifebook, and have my sight on the new framework laptops for the trackpad haptics and general principle of serviceability, even at the premium. I was an apple customer, I was always willing to pay for the premium to get a more consistent, robust quality experience. Framework really saw the writing on the wall, and I love it. Finally there are starting to be actually valid options for running Linux with the qol of apple hardware besides asahi.

On phone frontier I have zero clue where to go, but this is really just sealing the deal of me dropping apple there too whenever this one breaks. Motorola seems promising though, we’ll see…

Where I live, xylitol has been a staple for decades and decades. It’s good for mouth hygiene, too. A correlation like in the article would probably show as a perceivable difference in overall strokes of our country’s populace as a whole, comparing to others, if it really was a thing that mattered. Might be, haven’t checked, but pretty sure we aren’t any more prone for that than any others. And here we eat xylitol from child up, usually several a day, after meals as gum (not the sugary candy-like gum, but the one intended to stop the acid attack) or pastilles. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t honestly. I don’t even know if you can get sugar gum anywhere, it’s so ubiquitous to xylitol and mouth hygiene.

So I mean, be suspicious, sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s highly tested and kept tracked here, because it’s a daily thing for everyone basically.

“Veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short)

Sounds like normal human speech

I can give a lot of benefit of doubt to independent open source projects feeling vibecoded or ai assisted, I’ve had to partly try and get into it myself because the job market currently just demands showcases for that in the portfolio.

But the moment they ask money and get corporate, all bets are off. Fuck that. When it becomes “serious” like that, it should also be serious in how it’s built and presented. And gating something built using a tool trained on public corpus and the shared knowledge of the humankind, in good and bad, behind closed source and payments is exactly the kind of shit that makes it feel wrong too, not just embarrassing or questionable.

At this point I’ve had to accept some ai use in development is unavoidable when looking at cool projects, I use a tui editor called fresh that smells absolutely vibecoded, but it actually is decent and in my experience best in class for non-modal. So I am starting to feel less and less embarrassed or suspicious as a gut reaction, when I see one, and more inquisitive if I am interested, otherwise just move on without extra feelings about it. Unless it’s obvious slop that is. There are tiers to that shit too.

But if it’s closed source and paid for, it just feels lazy, embarrassing and actively annoying to me…

Oh fuck this is embarrassing

Yeah I relate strongly with this. Once you get used to having more time and energy for the tough problems, the interesting stuff, it’s hard to go back to the mechanical and menial.

But I’ve found it’s a lot like riding a bike. You don’t really rust, because the stuff the agents can handle today are the kind of shit that you’ve done so much and from the start, that it has become menial and boring. Which means it’s pretty ingrained into the backbone, at least that’s what I’ve found.

But damn if I don’t feel bad about it, recognizing and being conscious about the societal and environmental cost the convenience has.

Voting for a third party is only valid if a movement, a real one, forms around it. It will never work if it only siphons votes out of the dem bucket and lets republicans to kind of win by default. It has to have real momentum, real commitments, have visibility and voice across the states, so everyone will know they will not be just giving the republicans the win, rather, committing together as a big one, to something better. Even better if the various ideologically motivated but distinct camps within republicans would join the effort. Libertarians are the classic example, but I bet if things get momentum and it looks like the two parties are simply getting fractured either way, a lot of people will jump on the chance to get actual real representation and voice, not just a small camp within a big ambiguous mess the two parties kind of force.

So instead of just voting for a third option and wasting your vote in the current system, organizing would be the real answer, the prerequisite for the third options to be valid. And it’s not that complicated, just needs to get viral and real commitments

But isn’t it kind of a game of chicken then for the consumer markets? Whoever gambles the other way, can win in both volume and availability, being able to cut the others off market just by pricing, enabled by the prior two points, get brand points by the ladle while at it, and kind of become a staple of the consumer market. When the bubble pops and others return, the market isn’t the same and everyone else sits at a disadvantage?

I don’t know many personally that choose the installment contracts, but I can see it can be convenient for some. But “you don’t own it” only applies to that case, which from my point of view, seems the rarer case than just you know, buying it.

It’s inexcusable, too, but pales in comparison of what the Russian side is quite literally doing, as in, invading a neighboring country, while doing the very same thing you highlight Ukraine does, but in larger degree. At least the Ukrainian side can be understood (though never accepted) as desperation from trying to defend yourself against a much larger invader. Russia still doesn’t have any excuses, they are the aggressor and the invader.

We can both-sides every little thing here, and agree that neither side is flawless, nobody in war ever is, but the main point stands: The one is pillaging and raping a sovereign country, the other is trying to defend against that.

It might even be intentional cultural and ethical cleansing, by disproportionally sending out the non-white non-“Russian” population to the meat grinder…

I have to say, this is so strangely captivating, I can’t stop looking at it honestly! Weirdly in sync between the two very different approaches! I have zero idea why this is so enthralling but I couldn’t just scroll away without explicitly voicing my confused enjoyment, so peculiar

Bad analogy perhaps. But I mean, sometimes games are shit, but look good, and people buy them due to that. Then the sale is made, even if the game is shit.

Perhaps the smell thing was off, but the sofa breaking right after buying or having sharp spikes under the mattress that poke you if you sit wrong, would not work because things like sofas have warranty for those kind of things. I’d bet smell wouldn’t pass so easily there.

Anyway, point was, good games need not look so pretty and “modern”. Bad games can entice you to buy even if they are bad, if they look good enough. Nothing deeper than that

The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.

If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.

You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.

That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!