Right, but that all comes from upstream, with Conservative media (and politicians) focusing all their attention on “wedge issues” to distract their base from their ruinous fiscal policies, gutting the government services their base would benefit from to steal more wealth for the ultra wealthy.

I’m almost exactly in the same boat, except even at my desk I want wireless. I often turn my camera off and get up to make coffee or go pee in big meetings. It’s great. Even when I’m presenting things, it’s usually only at a specific time, and I can still talk when I’m away from my desk (flip-to-mute microphones are great.)

I have several sets of wired headphones I used to love. I’d buy several sets at once so I already had a replacement when they inevitably broke But I literally can’t remember the last time I used a pair of wired headphones. I only miss 3.5mm on my phone for plugging into my car’s aux port.

OpenAI has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. LLMs cost a lot of compute. They’re burning through cash. Operating costs are more than double revenue. Their net operational losses are about $1 million USD every 40 minutes.

And somehow they’re trying to put half a trillion USD into building more datacentres to make even more advanced models, which will be even more compute intensive.

Meanwhile, as venture capital has been committed to a whole series of AI companies and data centres, venture capital is dying up. Nobody has gotten a payout yet, since there’s no path to profitability for any of these companies.

And it’s coming to a head this fall, when OpenAI needs to pay their suppliers for the expansion they’re building, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to raise enough more investment to cover their costs.

It doesn’t even take OpenAI failing, either. There’s so much debt (“leverage”) and circular cashflow going on in this space, between the AI companies, data centres, computer hardware manufacturers, and construction companies, that any one of them failing could cause cascading failures, like dominoes. Worse than the '08 financial crash, most likely.

So no. It’s not going to be like YouTube. YouTube is cheap to run, compared to LLMs.

And the worst part of it all: LLMs aren’t even very good! It creates an illusion of productivity, but it’s all bullshit, either doing a shitty job, or taking more time to prompt fondle than it would have taken to do the job by hand, or building up tech debt that’s going to make massive projects unmaintainable.

It has some use cases, sure. I use it almost daily, tbh. But only because someone else is footing the bill. It doesn’t produce nearly enough value to justify its costs.

I read a previous article about this: importing any sex toys (including butt plugs, but they get the headline because the Republicans in power being squeamish about the existence of gay soldiers) are illegal in the country where they are stationed, so they’re getting seized by customs and it’s awkward since their soldiers are violating local laws.

As a completely free project for an online game, those are both reasonable requirements.

It’s hard to police repeat offenders for various types of abuse with anonymized IPs, and it’s an online-exclusive game… Of course you need an account?

Which you’re going to rip as .flac and .mp3 and share/upload somewhere for preservation, right?

Thanks for making this. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think this would be great for playing a lot of more complex games cooperatively with my kiddos, like effectively adding back the “split roles” multiplayer of Cook, Serve, Delicious 1 to later titles in the series (one player controlling tickets, the other controlling cooking.)

Black & White did really cool things, but they didn’t really work. You could try hundreds of times to show your creature how to do something, but the learning didn’t work.

Cool concept, but it was puddle deep. And no fun, for me at least, once I realized the game didn’t come close to the hype.

Maybe this time will be different, but I won’t hold my breath.

What are you in about, mate? Of course they “don’t have a problem” with being in Steam—they have almost all the marketshare!

Humble is a Steam key reseller.

GOG is a completely different, DRM-free storefront.

Sure, Humble has limited marketshare (just like GOG), but with Humble, they just send a batch of keys and wait for money to come back. With GOG, they’d need to support an entirely different storefront for, potentially, the same limited revenue potential they’d get from Humble.

Not at all comparable. And totally reasonable that some publishers/indie devs aren’t willing to put their games on GOG. Disappointing, of course, but not hardly surprising.

He completely misread it. But it’s also grammatically ambiguous. It could be interpreted as a non-essential clause, essentially giving extra information about Valve that isn’t necessary to understand the main sentence.

It would be weird to include a non-essential, highly editorially clause in a headline, though, unless it was a direct quote. But, in that case, it should be in quotation marks.

That interview makes me very, very hopeful for GOG’s future.

We’ve seen, with Valve, how a private owner with vision for creating value for their customers can make waves. GOG is now in a similar situation and the owner clearly understands that directly competing with Valve (Epic style) is a fool’s errand. He had his own vision, distinct from what Valve is doing.

I feel a bit badly that I don’t think I’ve bought much on GOG. I mostly stopped buying individual games (and shifted to mostly buying game bundles) before GOG became a store with a good indie catalogue. I’ve been holding off on buying BG3 until I actually have time and motivation to play it “properly”, but I’ll definitely get it on GOG.

Fantastic article. Thanks for linking!

The CBC does a remarkably good job considering how their budgets have been repeatedly cut, relative to inflation, at the same time that their ad revenue has been in stay decline (same as everyone else).

And yet the CPC wants them axed, because the Republicans have shown them that conservative-owned media is one of the main ways to shift the Overton window further right, and public broadcasting/reporting is a major obstacle to them. Unbiased, accurate reporting doesn’t align with their goals.

You just described Sigmoid curves, roughly speaking. The only issue is your incorrect use of “exponential”.

The idea is that it’s not exponential for two main reasons:

1. It caps at 100%. You can’t grow infinitely.
2. You also need to consider the reverse: going the other way, going from 99% to 98% is a ~1.01% decline. Going down from 2% to 1% is losing half your remaining users. That’s huge.

Exponential growth is used colloquially for any situation where there’s an upward curve to the trend; in calculus terms, the second derivative is positive. But there are a lot of functions with that property, and exponential functions are only 1 type. Sure, it’s a common one, but so is parabolic, cubic, and other polynomial functions; a variety of trigonometric functions (over certain domains, like sine from -1 to 0); rational functions (again, over certain domains), etc.

Sigmoid curves (colloquially known as S-curves) are very common in any situation where there’s both a contagion factor (like popularity, word of mouth, network effects, etc.) and a limit on growth or maximum carrying capacity. The later is always the case when your function maps to percentages of a population since it caps at 100%.

I don’t think all Boomers are bad. Lots care about the climate, and (sadly) many younger people don’t care about the climate, too. Hence why I clarified:

a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

The reason it matters they’re a Boomer is because anyone younger is going to be facing the reality of climate change regardless of what they care about.

What the flying fuck. I’m only 6’, and in 30" seats, my knees were already touching the chair in front in an already uncomfortable seating position. I could squeeze in tighter a bit, but only with a painfully small hip angle. With losing 2", I’d only fit with my knees in front of the seat next to me. Three men of high-average height couldn’t reasonably fit into these seats next to each other, I reckon.

I’d probably need to stand in the aisle the whole flight, then sue in small claims court if I didn’t get at least full refund.

The only way losing 2" could work would be with hard-backed chairs, since they’d be thin enough that you could fit, but I don’t think it’s safe for many to sit, with limited possible movement, on hard chairs for any length of time.

What a disaster. And all to get, like, 2% more seats on a plane? Not to mention how much retrofitting 22 planes cost. Such a colossal fuck up.

I think you missed the bit that makes this sort of maybe make a tiny lick of sense: you use this to write code that you evaluate against tests, and put a maximum iterations counter in to make sure it doesn’t go infinite.

Yes, this is still going to melt the planet just a little bit faster every time it’s used. Yes, it’s most likely to completely fail and, even in cases where it eventually succeeds, it would likely have been orders of magnitude more compute efficient to vibe code it the usual way of actually, like, vibing the code. (Is that what re-prompting is called for vibe coding?)

But it could maybe, kinda, sometimes work. If you squint your eyes. And you’re a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

I came here to recommend Gamesir. I bought a pair of wired Gamesir T7 xbox-style USB A controllers, and they’re fantastic.

I also really like my 8bitdo SN30 snes-style wireless controller, but only for games that don’t really use 2 joysticks. The second joystick is on an uncomfortable spot for my XL hands—fantastic controller otherwise, though.

Exactly what I’ve heard; essentially, they work pretty well for recent games, but they suck for patient gamers.

Kinda makes the idea of using them in a handheld a non-starter for a lot of people, since older games are amazing on a lower-powered handheld PC.

Notably, in the “close” referendum, polls at the indicated many (the majority, I think?) of “leave” voters thought they would still be using Canadian money, still be part of the Canadian military, and thought there wouldn’t be a border crossing/customs to travel to other provinces.

Sounds very similar to what’s happening in Alberta, except that it’s not at all close.

There was also the Clarity Act that explicitly requires much more precise language in any future separation referendums. Alberta is explicitly not pursuing a referendum right now, and the cynic in me expects that’s because the Clarity Act would make a referendum result laughable at best. And risk causing a schism in the already-wobbly Wild Rose Alberta Cons Party.

The House of Commons must decide if the referendum question is clear and unambiguous, asking directly about secession. (emphasis mine)

It’s something like 5× stronger in the direction it prints than across layers, with great adhesion. It’s even worse if your adhesion is lower.