🤓 Um, akshually you still don’t OWN the games, it’s still just a license (has been since at least the SNES era if not earlier). The difference is that since you can digitally maintain your own complete DRM free copies of the install media, it’s the physical equivalent of “having the game cartridge” (for old systems without online patches). In other words, if the company says the license is no longer valid then they can’t prevent you from installing/copying/backing-up anyway.

It’s just important to note that depending on your local laws, it’s still not true ownership, but more like “possession”.

It’s something you can put on Facebook for some reason, or maybe it got it from some event planned/scheduled on Facebook.

Someone else mentioned Facebook Marketplace, if you have the person come to you for the exchange.

How would it prove they owned it vs. “they had it in their possession long enough to make a bit for bit copy”?

I mean, that’s hypothetically less invasive than requiring your photo ID, and it’s exactly what people have been asking for for stuff like Steam being required to identify a user’s age. If the account itself is over 18 years old, the user is. If it had an attached debit card, you can probably assume it’s an adult. Etc.

So on one hand, eww privacy. On the other, it’s info they already have on you and better than forcing ID.

You’ll want to make sure battery optimizations are disabled for them, so Android will be less likely to close the app for only being in the background. Sometimes allowing the app to keep a persistent notification going can help as well. A lot of the specific details can vary by phone and android OS version, so web search will be your friend on this.

I’ll warn you though, with some phones, you can do everything right and it may still auto-close them on occasion.

Rub it in why don’t you. :P

I had sporadic health issues earlier this year that weren’t consistent enough for FMLA and I’m down to 4 hours PTO. If I’m a good boy, I’ll gain maybe an hour a month.

Plus, the whole deal at my workplace was they acknowledged they paid under market rate in exchange for extra flexibility. Now we have new management who desperately doesn’t want to pay us for time on-call anymore, and doesn’t believe in time in-lieu (work after hours, get the equivalent off during business hours). I’m a full fledged systems engineer making under $90k. That’s a lot of money, but it sure as hell isn’t competitive for my skills, and more and more I’m wondering if it’s really worth what it’s costing me.

On one hand, yes, but on the other hand they keep building the text reguritators interfaces to interact with other systems and that’s where any danger comes in.

It’s still all a grift and a half, but we’ve crossed the line where these things can take certain actions past just barfing out text.

I figure the key would be finding a way to make these cost less (including upkeep/replacement over time) than the marginal energy generation capabilities.

On that note, I’m sure there’s a reason besides “everyone else is too stupid to think of it” but I wonder why solar window shutters aren’t a thing.

While I agree with you, a counterpoint would be that it further normalizes AI usage in general, which is a large negative as long as corporate AI is still the dominant force/incarnation of it.

People still made places for themselves, but it took some effort, and every personal site ended up being a reflection of the person who made it and their skills.

As far as I recall, the whole declaration that it was a hate symbol was pretty misinformed to begin with.

It was originally used by tons of people online, particularly by quite a lot of 4chan users. So it got mostly used for weird memes like ones about adult man children earning good boy points towards chicken tenders and being socially inept, and sometimes for weird alt-right bullshit.

Then during the horrid mess of GamerGate (which has direct ties to a handful of current rightwing grifters gaining popularity), at one point some rights advocacy group labelled it a hate symbol due to the association with GamerGate by way of 4chan. I mean sure, hateful movement, right? But they were using it like people use stick figures. In my opinion Pepe was more the medium than the message, and it wasn’t so overwhelmingly used for hate like twitter/x that you could legitimately make the argument that it hands down was a dog whistle or only used by those who would tolerate the hateful views.

Then again, I was a heavy 4chan user many many years ago (dropped off during the scientology raids), so my point of view is probably skewed.

I get that for a while a lot of the internet stopped using it due to the negative associations and news articles citing the original claim by the advocacy group, but it makes me happy to see the awkward little frog being “reclaimed” for general use again.

If they don’t love you, they aren’t the love of your life, just someone you were infatuated with.

Before I get to my actual point, a little background: The current LLM based “AI” industry is effectively a stack of cards with services sold at a loss to promote dependency. A lot of the companies are just barely backed by incredibly circular debt agreements. Unless someone actually manages to create the sort of self improving AI psuedo-god they all claim is coming, it is literally not financially possible for the current environment to continue forever.

That means that eventually, prices will catch up and the likely free or cheap LLM functionality can and will be suddenly ripped away. It will also force companies to eventually examine how much value they are actually getting out of AI vs the eventually enforced real sustainable costs.

It’s also worth noting that the current burst of AI tech (mostly just LLMs) is still very new. There’s an argument to be made that we’re in the dotcom boom, where everyone is convinced it’s the wave of the future but very few have concrete plans about how and where to best use it.

So even ignoring the apocalyptic speedrun of killing the planet to try and squeeze better performance out, we can reasonably assume that a full AI future with countless jobs displaced is not likely. Prices will eventually rise, free money printers will eventually jam, and eventually it will start to be seen as a tool rather than magic.

It is my personal opinion that this is the best case scenario that we can find reasonable evidence pointing towards. Maybe we all die from climate change first, but at that point you’ll have very different concerns.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I’ll get to my point after the line

I’m going to go a little against the grain here. Until the inevitable bust happens you likely will be expected to use AI to some degree in your job. Especially if you’re looking to do software engineering.

With that in mind, it makes sense to try and learn how to do it well. You don’t need to cut it out cold turkey, but you need to pull back and try to do things the hard way more often, and you need to stop and take time to think critically about how and when you do use it.

Don’t use it casually. Don’t use instead of more traditional web searching. Use it as a tool to search in natural language if you don’t know the specific terminology, and when it points you at a good source of information, you start building up your own knowledgebase.

Take your own notes. It’s been proven over and over again that the process of taking notes helps to cement the knowledge in your head.

Track your time. Deadlines have and will be present, always. Sometimes you won’t hit them. But if you practice planning you will get better at it over time. Then you can start planning how long you can afford to spin your wheels with any specific approach before you try a different one. One of those approaches can be AI, but it should never be your first one, and you should always strive to work through the problem and results yourself to ensure you fully understand it.

Any and all skills are like muscles. You can’t just wake up one morning and bike the tour de france. You practice. You’ll probably suck at first, but you can find ways to improve after each time. Eventually you’ll get better. Some skills won’t leave you even without regular practice, some will. But you’re never just completely incapable of doing something just because it’s hard to do now.

And some rambling asides: I dropped out of a Comp Sci degree, eventually found my way back to an IT help desk job, and worked my way up into Systems Admin/Engineering with a heavy focus on scripting automations and tools.

I had an almost five year gap between the last time I programmed and when I first started scripting things to make my help desk work easier. I remembered basics but I had to relearn a lot. I’m still relearning certain things like good organization of projects, properly psuedocoding and planning before starting to type out code, and splitting things into functions.

But it is possible. And I do occasionally use AI, but mostly to help point me at things I need to learn to fill gaps, or for assistance on the shape of a general approach to a problem I haven’t dealt with before (dependency resolution can be hell, and Microsoft doesn’t always make certain base level functionality with checking remote disk space straightforward).

Plot like they’re all out to get you

Oh boy yes, but mostly early internet memes, when 4chan was the bleeding edge of internet “culture”. Shit like advice animals were spammed to hell and back until they got enough natural momentum.

Holy shit #5. “And now my love, it is time for you to don the coital basket”

God I hated questions like this in school. There’s always something specific the teacher is looking for, but nothing to point you towards it.

Don’t forget the step in the middle that led to the cornposting: OOPS! All US Federal Politics!

I ended up on a project to integrate an HR system with Active Directory.

Did we technically have to insist that the HR system became the source of truth and we would never make manual changes on the AD side? No.

Did we have to use the new integration and automated new hire account creation process to punish the managers who kept trying to get new hires processed at 4pm Friday to start Monday, claiming no way to rush the processing so the previous “rule” about lead time was now set in stone? No.

Did the integration actually force the reorganization of our Active Directory to clean up a decade of band aid fixes layered on top of each other? No.

Did we have to finally implement a proper data retention process including deletion of former user accounts and mailboxes for the integration to work, along with formal methods to request temporary access to old mailboxes that included an automatic time limit? No.

Did my boss and I use it as a golden opportunity to push all of the above and more into official standards, saving an absurd amount of man hours since? Fuck yes.

Not all of it was tech debt, sure, but in short you should use a available opportunities to improve as much as you can, instead of always defaulting to “I do exactly what was requested”. If for no one else, do it to save yourself pain in the future.

Possible, but I feel like a lot of effort went in for it to only be satire. No obvious AI images, multiple views of the thing including close up of the “hand” and they’re all consistent. Could be made as an art sculpture and this is the satirical product page, maybe.

Looks like all the current news coverage of it is reacting as if it’s real/credible as well.