I’m glad someone else is calling this out. He seemed so thoughtful and methodical previously.

So for the guy to get busted because he eats in a public place, while a huge manhunt is ongoing, and he happens to have on his person: the gun, the fake id previously used, and a manifesto expressing his motive? It’s ridiculous! He could have tossed the gun into a body of water anywhere on his route outside NYC and it would never be found. And why reuse the same ID if you had several? Why not burn the associated IDs after they’ve been compromised?

It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve seen suggestions that this could have been a state hit, maybe to destabilize the country further? Would our spooks make up a lazy narrative to cover up for their spooks?

Nice! I’m playing through TP2 right now and it’s great fun, though I did enjoy the mystery of the first more I think. How many laser puzzles does a person need in life though?

Surely some of these are fannon? Also, do the robots next!

People with no money have one big problem, people with money have many small problems.

I first heard of it from Joel Spolsky’s blog and wikipedia also credits that article with popularizing the concept. In it’s original formulation, it was based on remote procedure calls being hidden in APIs. Because a remote computer call has all these limits of latency, packet/info loss, and possible connection loss, it is impossible to make a perfect abstraction that allows the programmer to treat the remote call as though it were local. The reality the abstraction tries to hide “leaks” in those fundamental limits.

All of contemporary global society is such an abstraction; that’s one of the principles of post-modernism. When you buy clothes online an entire invisible work force of shippers, manufacturers, resource procurerers, and more lies beind each article of fabric.

Pressure from climate change, tariffs, global war, and more are straining the foundations of society and the comfortable abstraction is starting to crack.

Live by the dollar, die by the dollar

The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.

I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.

As Abraham Lincoln famously warned, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!”

Every 5 minutes, at max volume:

YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. ALL AVAILABLE OPERATORS ARE HELPING OTHER CUSTOMERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE.

2 minutes later:

DID YOU KNOW <COMPANY> IS WORKING TO SAVE CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MONEY? UPGRADE YOUR PLAN TO ULTIMATE TODAY AND SAVE! YOU CAN ADD BASIC CABLE TO YOUR INTERNET PLAN FOR FREE FOR 3 MONTHS. MAKE ANY SOUND AT ALL TO LEAVE THE SUPPORT QUEUE AND SPEAK WITH A NEW ACCOUNT SPECIALIST RIGHT AWAY.

returns to playing compressed elevator music through an old can

Ah, the WSJ, bastion of level-headed reporting. Since I clicked through to the article and read the one paragraph us free-tier losers get (one more than the rest of you read) I know that it was Huawei trying to recruit semi-conductor manufacturing engineers from Germany.

So settle down, China isn’t trying to pay you $240K a year to make wordpress sites for them, it’s just another front in the ongoing microchip wars.

Thank God for Stephanie Motherfucking Sterling! Other game “journalists” barely cover the blatant evils of the industry, it saddens me to think that she’s probably looking for an exit and may not be reviewing for a lot longer. No one is going to fill those fabulous boots.

Thish posht… isht very intereshting sniff what ideology can we ashsume from it?

I like how I know this story didn’t happen anywhere close to me since: no one calls them “cycle paths”, we hardly have any “bike lanes” anyway, and we definitely don’t have any trains to ride while discussing biking.

Now, if this had been a story about guns, trucks, and psychopaths, it would have been very relatable.

The book is very good! I happened to catch wind of it right after it came out. Its a great mix of Visitor’s personal experiences in TV, and her research and interviews with many women who’ve worked in Trek over the years. She writes well and the stories are both personal and educational about the history of the show and the medium.

He likens Arkane’s approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: “Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that’s what Arkane had to do.”

Damn, what a concept: doing the same kind of game multiple times, iterating on the design to perfect it. Obviously Bethesda gets releasing the same game over and over again, but this idea of “improving” the design is so alien to them. Wouldn’t adding thousands of microtransactions be an improvement?

I figured you might have read it, as your comment had evoked it for me.

I really like the reading of Waluigi as a kind of perfect symbol for our post-modern times. I don’t think the article goes quite far enough. Mario is already a simulacra: a stereotype that doesn’t really exist, certainly not anymore and never really did. So Waluigi is the reflection of an inverse of a simulation without a base reality.

It’s very relatable, as you say, an apt metaphor for how our cultures treat the common person. Maybe the right Waluigi game isn’t one that fleshes him out and brings him closer to the audience. Maybe something like Krusty’s Fun House or Lemmings: burning through legions of Waluigis (1up mushroom clones? robots? one person somehow split into a multitude?) to accomplish trivial goals for Wario, the stand-in for the corporate overlords?

https://theemptypage.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/critical-perspectives-on-waluigi/

I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi by Franck Ribery

Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario – the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi – the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario – Mario turned septic and libertarian – then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigi’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi.

There is apparently a sequel post now as well.

Because it got 7/10 average review scores and didn’t sell as well as GTA. Then GTA3 (and its immediate spin-offs and eventual sequels) came out and started breaking all time sales records. So retroactively, GTA 2 was “a mistake” for not being GTA 3 two years early.

But like the guy says, the point of the article even, is that you don’t create run away successes without experimenting on the formula to find what’s good, without “failures” like GTA 2 to learn from.

IBM provided business machines (internationally, even) to Nazi Germany, probably a big help in bureaucratically processing those millions of murders they were doing. I can’t (or perhaps, “won’t” is truer) imagine how much cloud compute a modern genocide requires.