I agree that it’s artificial scarcity, but I don’t think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.

It’s the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.

As a user and contributer to open source, I’m loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn’t as much ability to make a living in it.

Software patents can fuck off though.

I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.

That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”

I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.

Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…

Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.

The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it

City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.

It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.

Okay, but trying to guide a braindead little sim automaton through basically playing factorio would be incredible. “Oh my God, why are you running the blue circuit belt through there? Stop it! No! STOP CRYING DIANE, YOU CHOSE TO SKIP EATING AND USE A SUSHI BELT. Stop eating off the floor, there’s coal everywhere”.

Why do you think violence would accelerate things? They don’t need the violence to be real to react to it, so if it would accelerate things for them they would just do it. Likewise, protest or strikes aren’t going to magically be treated as peaceful. They’ll just call it an insurrection regardless. . It’s why a lot of people hesitate to act. There’s a big difference between a protest where your local police department might use tear gas if you stick around after they tell you to leave and a protest where the president is encouraging random nut jobs to hit you with a car, has encouraged your police department to shoot you, and is sending the national guard to shoot you.

Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.

Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.

The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
“Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.

On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.

Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.

We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.

99% agreed, but I’d increase the number a bit. With inflation and rising costs $10 million in net worth isn’t always an obscenity.
It’s unquestionably wealthy, but still in the realm of attainable by an individual without being a bastard. Owning a single family home and a gas station in the San Francisco region and planning for retirement could put you in that realm.

I don’t begrudge someone who worked hard having nice things. I don’t even begrudge luck, inheritance, or nepotism getting luxury. It’s when it’s beyond luxury and no one could get it with any amount of work.

Tie it to the consumer price index or some such.

Right? I work for an actual megacorp and our policy is almost the exact opposite on every point.
Sick workers make more sick: don’t work and feel better faster. Distracted workers makes mistakes and cause problems: don’t work and take care of your kid. Rested workers work better: take the time around the holidays off entirely. Productivity is crap then anyway and with so many vacations it’s easier to plan around a block where nothing happens than to deal with random teams having unpredictable delays. Car broken? Expense a Lyft. We have a corporate account and your ride to work is a rounding error compared to the sales visits.

If you’re going to invoke money you should actually understand how big companies function and view money.

We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.

Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.

My standard for an orm is that if it’s doing something wrong or I need to do something special that it’s trivial to move it aside and either use plain SQL or it’s SQL generator myself.

In production code, plain SQL strings are a concern for me since they’re subject to the whole array of human errors and vulnerabilities.

Something like stmt = select(users).where(users.c.name == 'somename') is basically as flexible as the string, but it’s not going to forget a quote or neglect to use SQL escaping or parametrize the query.

And sometimes you just need it to get out of the way because your query is reaaaaaal weird, although at that point a view you wrap with the orm might be better.

If you’ve done things right though, most of the time you’ll be doing simple primary key lookups and joins with a few filters at most.

They likely did do actual training, but starting with a general pre-trained model and specializing tends to yield higher quality results faster. It’s so excessively obsequious because they told it to be profoundly and sincerely apologetic if it makes an error, and people don’t actually share the text of real apologies online in a way that’s generic, so it can only copy the tone of form letters and corporate memos.

You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?

And one of the first steps in artificial insemination is giving a guy a handjob.

The annoying thing is that the credit cards fully support authorizing for some amount likely to cover the transaction and using the same transaction to capture so no lingering auth sits around.

If a merchant has captured the funds and still has a hold sitting around the someone has implemented something wrong.

And they clarify that you can choose to have them not do that.

They don’t. They’re saying they don’t have it.

It’s because people looked at a line of a diff without looking at the actual context.
It’s like finding the line in a diff where someone deleted a call to “check password” and concluding that this means the service is no longer verifying passwords.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/

We never sell your personal data. Unlike other big tech companies that collect and profit off your personal information, we’re built with privacy as the default. We don’t know your age, gender, precise location, or other information Big Tech collects and profits from.

Basically, they consolidated and clarified their data privacy policies to be legally accurate. People took a content change to be a policy change on the assumption that you can’t just delete words in one place and put new ones somewhere else.