You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

I think I remember some doge goon asking online about using an LLM to parse JSON. Many people don’t understand things.

Was this the one with the weirdest camera system I’ve ever encountered in a 3d game? I remember just constantly fighting with it.

Also D&D 3e is not something I want to go back to. What a janky system.

I’ve always been kind of a cheapskate. I’ve never wanted to go to a generic club.

But I will happily go to a party at someone’s house, or a hangout at the park, or even see a band I like playing live.

Depends on what you mean by “own”.

Buying the CD has a key difference from Spotify in that no one can (typically) take the cd away from you. Music disappears from Spotify all the time. You can also (typically) copy it to other storage. And, most relevant to the topic of rent vs buy, you just pay for it once and you’re done. No subscription, no ads. That stuff is important to me.

You can’t usually take music you got from a CD and put it in your movie, for example, but that’s a whole conversation about fair use and copyright.

It’s possible to buy music, too, but most people rent it from spotify. Most people aren’t going to do the comparably hard thing of setting up their own LLM.

And even if they did run their own well tuned, ethical, LLM to write letters for them, that still leaves us with the problem of “people aren’t developing core skills like writing”

Someone pointed out that capitalism loves subscriptions and rentals. They can sell you a widget, sure, but then they only get money once. If they can rent you a widget, then they get money forever.

AI is a path for rent skills to people. You don’t need to learn to write python or learn Spanish. Just pay for LLM access. Rent the skill.

It is extremely dystopian.

Unfortunately, most people don’t care about much of anything. You could tell them, with undeniable proof, that every AI search kills a puppy, and most people would be like “well puppies die anyway and I always use Google, so…”

Also the text says

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

That’s not a metaphor. The camel thing was a colorful metaphor to demonstrate the point.

That’s luke 18:22

Most people who call themselves Christians do a piss poor job of it. Some of them then go “oh well I’ll be forgiven it’s okay”. That’s not really following the intent. That’s trying to take advantage of someone’s kindness.

“Use a different language” is a common defense of javascript, but kind of a weird one.

Yeah. My last job, a PR with commented out code typically wouldn’t get approved. Either leave it in version history, or stick it on a branch

Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.

Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.

Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.

I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.

We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?

No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.

I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.

This is a capitalist hell

If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.

I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.

But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.

I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.

I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

• upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
• related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
• a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.

One of the reasons UBI games are trash

I parsed that as “universal basic income games” and was really confused. Ubisoft makes more sense

I’ve always had trouble finding players, not DMs, but yeah could be.

I found the solo play of both Remnant games really unsatisfying. Slow pacing, uninteresting enemies. Is it much better with friends?