It’s pretty ball-sweatingly hot here in the Netherlands as well. Expecting 35c tomorrow and 36-38 on Wednesday.

Problem is, few houses and buildings are equipped to deal with heat like that. Everything’s well insulated, but built more for cold winters rather than hot summers. Every year, more people get air conditioning. Because you need to. It’s that or be miserable for two weeks straight. Anything above 20 makes me want to hit people.

For this comment, I want to be absolutely clear that I do not give a shit about AI, and that it in no way factored into my decision to buy this iPhone 16 Pro Max.

With that disclaimer out of the way:

I very much look forward to a class action lawsuit. Apple advertised specific features as coming ‘very soon’ and gave short timeframes when asked directly. And they basically did not deliver on those advertising promises. Basically, I think there’s a good case to be made here that Apple knowingly engaged in false advertising in order to sell a phone that otherwise would not have sold as well. Those promised AI features WERE a deciding factor for a lot of people to upgrade to an iPhone 16.

So, I’ll be looking forward to some form of compensation. It’s the principle of it.

Even my local supermarket has like ‘258 vendors and affiliates’ as their cookie listing.

Can you imagine shopping in person there, and the entire supermarket packed to the gills with dudes in trenchcoats and magnifying glasses, taking a peak at the exact product that I might consider buying? That’s what they’re doing. Fuck all that bullshit.

I’ll check out Brave, it’s been mentioned a few times.

I don’t mind companies making a dime, but now it’s really devolved in bad results that are profit-driven.

What’s the best alternative, in your opinion? I’ve tried Bing and DuckDuckGo, but both showed me worse results for my particular searches.

I just want classic Google Search back, before everything got turned to shit. But I fear that doesn’t really exist since there’s such an economic incentive behind how search engines rank and show results.

That fucking AI thing absolutely sucks for anything factual. I’m a journalist and noticed that it gleefully listed all sorts of factual errors in that AI summary. Stuff that you can see correctly on the original pages, but it somehow manages to misinterpret everything and shows incorrect information.

And knowing how lazy people are these days, most will happily accept Google’s incorrect information as fact. It’s making me very, very nervous for the future.

And one funny addendum to that story is that someone COULD reasonably think that Pepsi had an actual Harrier to give away. After all, Pepsi once owned an actual navy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PepsiCo

In 1989, amidst declining vodka sales, PepsiCo bartered for 2 new Soviet oil tankers, 17 decommissioned submarines (for $150,000 each), a frigate, a cruiser and a destroyer, which they could in turn sell for non-Soviet currency. The oil tankers were leased out through a Norwegian company, while the other ships were immediately sold for scrap.

The Harrier commercial aired in 1996. The Harrier jet was introduced in 1978. It wasn’t too unreasonable to think that an 18 year old jet aircraft would be decommissioned and sold, especially after Soviet tensions eased. And if ‘they’ let Pepsi own actual submarines and a destroyer, doesn’t that seem more far fetched than owning a single old jet aircraft?

Guy should’ve gotten his Harrier.

If you don’t hate AI, you’re not informed enough.

It has the potential to disrupt pretty much everything in a negative way. Especially when regulations always lag behind. AI will be abused by corporations in the worst way possible, while also being bad for the planet.

And the people who are most excited about it, tend to be the biggest shitheads. Basically, no informed person should want AI anywhere near them unless they directly control it.

God I miss the pre-9/11 US, when the worst thing happening was bad jokes on SNL about Bill Clinton and cigars.

Uh, do the kids these days really not know about the post-9/11 Patriot Act?

I’m designing the 3D-printable fleshlight mount right now. Hold your horses and give me ten minutes…

God I miss Quake. That was such a great series. Can you imagine what they could do with that on modern tech? I’d love to see a quake reboot a la 2016 Doom. That would be fucking awesome.

I honestly don’t mind some story in games. Heck, I’ve got hundreds of hours in Skyrim and other RPG’s. Doom to me is run & gun. Doom 2016 had the perfect amount of story for a Doom game.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything else quite like it. If there is, I don’t know it. Most other shooters are either COD, SciFi, retro FPS or stuff like Borderlands that leans into comedy.

If this was ‘back in the day’, closest recommendation to it would likely be something like the Quake series. That’s id’s own successor to the original Doom. Sadly also long dead.

Honestly, Doom Eternal really soured me on the franchise. I loved the original Doom games, loved 3 and played the absolute shit out of Doom 2016.

Then Eternal turned into a fucking frustration fest with all its platforming. I still haven’t finished it. Now the new one reinvents Doom yet again. And there’s somehow dragons?

Man, I’m fucking done. Give me more of that 2016 Doom or don’t bother.

Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap. God knows why.

Just look at the trending / best selling lists on Steam. There’s shit on there that I wouldn’t play if you paid me. Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.

Honestly, Steam should look into setting a minimum quality level for things sold on the platform.

It would also be great if devs added things during development that should simply be there at launch. Instead of that, shit gets rushed out the door with promises of future fixes and updates. And then devs get all huffy when people rightfully ask for things to be added that are supposed to be basic launch features…

The narwhal shall forever bacon at midnight, even if its home has turned to shit :(

It all comes back to community. Back in those days, forums and platforms like IRC were great. They had a human scale; you quickly learned about the regulars, their personalities, likes and dislikes. Heck, on most forums that I visited, plenty of people used their actual name - including myself. The internet felt like a nice, safe community, like its own digital suburb.

Sometimes that was even literal. I used platforms like Cybertown and later on Second Life. Those let you own actual houses and and build stuff on there. In Cybertown - we usually just called it CT - I knew every resident on my block. I hosted house parties, had giveaways. We’d even have commemorative digital statues as gifts for guests. I still kept in touch when CT died. I still miss it.

We’ve made tech way too accessible - and now we’re paying the price for it.

Back in 1995, we got our first family PC. Dad was never able to use it; despite our efforts to teach him. Couldn’t grasp left and right mouse button, much less concepts like directories, installing software, drivers, etc.

But on his iPad? He can do almost everything: e-mail, Facebook, watch TV, YouTube. And get subjected to boomer brainrot. Just like a toddler.

Is he more tech literate? Absolutely not. In fact, he’s regressing if anything. But we’ve made it so easy, even my completely tech illiterate dad can now argue with strangers on Facebook or post dumb shit on YouTube.

And it fucking shows. The amount of goddamn complete idiots online is shocking. I miss 1995, when you had to be a nerd to get online. It filtered out a lot of folks who simply shouldn’t be online.

I’ve been online since 1995. And back in those days, about the worst argument people had was Star Wars vs Star Trek. That’s because the general online population at that time valued fact-based discussion and proper sources. Not like today, where someone’s feelings seem to trump actual fact.

If I post 1+1=2 with proper sources, some idiot is bound to come along to argue that 1+1=tomato soup, that the moon is made of aged brie and that 5G on phones is turning frogs gay. It’s exhausting.

There’s simply too many blithering idiots online who reject facts. And unfortunately instead of blocking them, people engage. Thus giving them incentive to keep doing it.

The Netherlands also shipped a large amount of anti-tank, air defence missiles as well as a hundred sniper rifles and 30.000 rounds of ammo to Ukraine. And that was just the start.

You need to walk a fine line in international politics as a country.

But here, just you and me talking: as a Dutchman I remember those victims. And I hope every single one of those 30.000 rounds finds a loving home in the brain of a Russian. Fuck the lot of ‘em. You invade a country, you deserve to get a Dutch-sponsored surprise lead injection.