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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’re being downvoted, but it’s true. Will it further enable lazy/dumb people to continue being lazy/dumb? Absolutely. But summarizing notes, generating boilerplate emails or script blocks, etc. was never deep, rigorous thinking to begin with. People literally said the same thing about handheld calculators, word processors, etc. Will some methods/techniques become esoteric as more and more mundane tasks are automated away? Almost certainly. Is that inherently a bad thing? Not in the majority of cases, in my opinion.

    And before anyone chimes in with students abusing this tech and thus not becoming properly educated: All this means, is that various methods for gauging whether a student has achieved the baseline in any given subject will need to be implemented, e.g. proctored hand-written exams, homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.


  • We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays… destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.


  • It’s terrifying, honestly. As sociology, psychology, and neurology research becomes more and more understood, feels like it enables governments to become more and more effective at mass manipulation.

    The worst part is, there’s barely anything that can be done to combat it. The general population can’t be assed to give up the worst offending platforms that enable it (e.g. Twitter, Meta, TikTok, etc), despite the plethora of warnings that have been issued over the last 10+ years. The one sliver of hope is the youngest generation not using those platforms because, “those are for old people,” but it’s just a matter of time for the next “cool” social platform becomes just as corrupted/infested.


  • 100% this. Our local cable company, a subsidiary of Spectrum, refused to lay fiber to anywhere but our core metro centers and even then, only to businesses. It wasn’t until our metros collectively agreed to subsidize another, smaller ISP to come in and lay fiber to every neighborhood across the region (I live somewhere that has like 6 cities all closely clumped together). The monopoly cable company sued for years trying to block it. They allllmost succeeded, too, until a state appeals court finally overturned their injunction. Now we finally have competition and it’s glorious. I pay less than half what I did before and get twice the speed.











  • Boomers will be long, long dead by 2070, so that statement is idiotic. You’ll be the old boomer needing their ass wiped by then. And I’m not saying that children are only useful for that, I’m saying new generations of children keep civilization going altogether. But you don’t like civilization and think it all sucks and want it all to die, so your views are simple and two-dimensional, lacking any compassion or empathy to those currently alive and sparing it all for those who don’t even exist.




  • Such deep moral philosophy over here.

    Humans are mostly sentient biological machines at the end of the day, hard wired for an instinctual need to reproduce. Without children, everything falls apart. South Korea, Japan, China, Germany, US, etc etc all have declining birth rates. Fortunately for many Western countries, we’ve had immigrants to provide a buffer against the inverted age demographic pyramid crisis. South Korea, on the other hand, is looking at essentially a full economic collapse by 2060 because their birth rates have continually declined for so long and right now is at 0.76.

    So tell me, when millions of old people are dying from neglect and no access to healthcare, food, etc. from lack of workers in 2070, will you be sitting there with such a mighty, holier than thou attitude? Probably, because you likely just have an edgy hot take that humans are garbage and deserve to go extinct. Such deep moral philosophy, you should teach in college.


  • I got into it for the first time back around this last December/January. I was amazed how active the community still is. I didn’t even play on the most populated English server, and chat was always active. Sidenote: There’s only a quasi-global chat thru Yelling while in cities, you have to join Linkshells for more consistent chatting (that game’s version of guilds, and yes you can have more than one linkshell at a time).

    As for the gameplay itself: It’s a very clunky game, and it’s very slow. But, that’s part of the charm when compared to today’s MMOs where everything is designed for instant gratification. Fortunately, there are tons of add-ons the community has made to enable some Quality of Life features, such as updated HD textures, a minimap, auto-inventory manager and sorter, etc. I got to around level 70 after about 6sh weeks/120 hours of game time, until my annual MMO interest dried up. I might dive back into it again next year whenever the MMO itch hits again.

    Supposedly Square was working on a remaster of the game back around 2018, but it got scrapped a couple of years into development. Which is a shame, because the game with some modern UI sensibilities and graphics would be really nice (as long as they didn’t change hardly anything of the core gameplay).

    Overall, it was nice/kind of sad to see it still had a lot more depth than FF14, which I consider to be very watered down nowadays even compared to its 2.0 re-release. But again, for anyone considering trying it out: It is a slow game, and it has alllll the jank of a 2003-era MMO. Just getting it installed and your account setup is janky, so make sure you watch a video before even attempting it.



  • I don’t disagree that Epic could definitely be doing better with their storefront. They have made improvements, albeit at a glacial pace. They’ve added achievements and reviews, but it’s still a pale comparison to what Steam offers. That being said, no one seems to dig at GoG’s shitty storefront and app nearly to the same degree. Luckily, GOG allows third-party access, so you can at least replace their app with other alternatives.

    Regardless, I’m not defending Epic, I was simply trying to avoid doing the mindless “fuck Epic” and offer some counterargument. Epic is a shitty company, but some competition is better than zero competition. Yes, GOG exists, but they hardly have any marketshare at all and if CDPR ever stops supporting it as much as they have been, their future likely isn’t looking so great. It’s like AMD vs Nvidia. Both companies aren’t great, but I’d rather both exist than only Nvidia and/or AMD; and of course, even more competition would be even better.