I think so much about it is awesome (visuals, design of ships and sets, music, etc.) but maybe due to lack of repeated exposure to the movies as a child I don’t feel much about them. The modern movies were especially meh, since they all feel like they are trying to recapture the feeling of people who saw the originals in the cinema in the late 70s and 80s, but without doing anything new. I did quite enjoy the Fallen Order game and will probably play the follow up at some point too though.

Fuck Putin, the warmongering cunt. I hope Ukraine continues to get Western support and can kick Russia out of their country, however slim the chances might be looking right now. Russia extending its influence and things gradually going back to business as usual, only for them to do it again in another 10 years won’t be good for any Western democracies.

Haven’t really been following the Israel/Palestine thing much to be honest, but it would be nice if people would stop killing one another. Also really sucks that it benefits Putin.

Yeah, it’s probably best for most users, but I just personally prefer to treat them separately so I know what I’m dealing with.

Or mine on Vivaldi. It was showing me the notice the other week, but seems to have stopped now. Either they are now time limiting youtube before the ad blocking thing comes back, or uBlock upped the ante.

This is great, but I honestly hate the way that windows treats zips like they are just folders on your computer when they are fundamentally different, and I want to do different things with them. Sure, it’s nice to be able to browse the files inside, but I can do that with 7zip.

Well can’t they just call it Meta Threads or Threads by Meta if it isn’t already, and nothing has to change.

I’m sure there have been mistakes, but calling them incompetent is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it’s an absolutely eye watering amount of time and money, but they are trying to make an online universe with a high level of detail in which you can move between planets and all kinds of environments completely seamlessly. If they weren’t trying to make something with such a high level of difficulty, then I suspect they would have released a finished product by now, but they are making stuff nobody has made before, at least not at this scale.

Perhaps inability to scale things back is a bit of a problem, but I think Chris Roberts realises he’s not likely to get a chance to get a basically unlimited amount of money (in game dev terms) to make the ultimate dream game he and many other people always wanted, so I’d imagine that’s the reason they are just going all out.

so you get hired at level 70 and get 310k of stock? Is this normal for large tech companies? Do you have to sign some kind of blood oath to Bill Gates current CEO Satya Nadella to say you will remain there for n years? Presumably you can’t just get the stock and fuck off? Also, why is stock based compensation (potentially) so huge compared to base pay? Is this to make sure employees work extra super duper hard, or some way to reduce taxes?

I am very excited for Pop OS to get the new Cosmic desktop. Not really a specific feature but an entirely new DE that is quite different from the others and built from the ground up in Rust. Hopefully the first version won’t be totally broken and full of bugs!

Things are slowing down a bit. Isn’t this a good thing for the planet?

Even my phone from 8 years ago was fine. My current phone has a nicer camera and is faster, but all the other stuff is not that important.

Is this before or after it destroys the economy for everyone but the super rich by replacing them and making them compete for fewer and fewer scraps? Sorry, there will be lots more new jobs created by AI probably, like AI wrangler, AI safety consultant and the like. Probably.

As far as I can tell, they aren’t doing a very good job. I’ve seen the notice that an ad blocker is not allowed, and even without upgrading the ad blocker I use I can still just click the close button on the notice and it goes away and I can continue to watch uninterrupted.

If Google does figure out how to prevent people from using ad blockers on YouTube, I think it will help me break my honestly unhealthy habit and reduce the amount I watch, or perhaps even quit entirely, since there are far more ads on YouTube than there were in the past - especially if you also include sponsor ads that are embedded in videos.

Konami’s Motocross Maniacs

He’s basically the new Trump, in that for five years you could not escape Trump’s fucking face on every website you visited. Perhaps Musk isn’t quite that level, but he’s not far off. He’s in the news an insane amount, and it’s basically as annoying as Trump, only he’s not as ugly or stupid.

I don’t even understand why Windows 11 exists. I thought Windows 10 was meant to be the last version and then it was continually upgraded. They never add any particularly good new features, so I’m happy with security updates and staying behind a few months on feature updates to avoid being a beta tester.

Oh, and Windows 11 removed the ability to put the taskbar on the left or right, and I would have thought that perhaps teams of engineers and designers paid 100k+ in a trillion dollar company would be able to make that a reality, regardless of whether or not it’s only 1% of users (millions of people) that use that feature. I heard the right click menus have been fucked up by some idiot as well, and the sad thing is they probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make them that way, after many many depressing meetings and someone had to task it all out in Azure, whilst gradually losing the will to live, just to eventually make an already existent feature worse. Nice job Microsoft.

I’m happy to wait until Windows 11 is at least at feature parity with Windows 10 and thoroughly tested before I “upgrade”. I suspect some things got better, but it isn’t worth it.

I think I heard that usage on desktop is something like 1 in 4, which is pretty good. Mobile is another world altogether, since it requires different browsers that support adblocking and then accessing websites through the browser instead of the app for the website, which many users would definitely prefer to use.

Closing the tab and moving on with life is what I do when a Twitter login prompt or paywall appears. I’ve often thought it would be better for me to unblock ads, at least on timewasting sites like Youtube, just so that I get pissed off by the ads and close the tab, making it easier to stop wasting time.

The system goes on-online August 4th 2023. Using a virtual city model Tesla Autopilot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th. In a panic, Elon tries to revert to manual driving mode.

Assassinating Abe wasn’t right, but when I heard the killer’s side of the story I honestly felt a bit sorry for him. Glad to hear something is being done about the Moonies.

I was watching a video by right to repair advocate Louis Rossman yesterday and he was basically saying that he’s fine to go after big companies and the government to try and get right to repair passed, but he doesn’t want to fuck with Scientology because they appear to be psychos that will harass the shit out of him and probably wreck his life if he gets in their way. Apparently they are anti-right to repair because they have some fake ass thetan reading machines they sell for $5000.

Anyway, he mentions some of the shit they did in his video, and while I’m not sure if it’s a fact or not, he does mention that they were going after the IRS for years to try and get out of paying taxes after laws changed and they lost their tax-exempt status. After a huge amount of harassment and other crime against the IRS over 37 years, they eventually got their taxes reduced from something like a billion+ dollars to $12.5 million… How did they not just end up in jail?