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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Yeah, the goddamn wooden spoon. I remember being noisy in a crib and my mom storming into the room screaming and busting the spoon in half on the side of the crib. She’d already hit me with it so I knew exactly what it meant. I got spoons, open hand, and hairbrushes for most of my childhood. Hair pulling, pinching, and ear-twisting too if we were in a situation where she couldn’t just haul off and hit me.

    The funny thing is, she called me up about a decade ago and asked if I could remember anything about my childhood that was bad. And rather than list everything off, I told her about the time she broke the spoon on the crib. That’s when I found out that it hadn’t happened at all, and in fact if it had happened it was because the spoon was old and brittle and if she’d done anything at all it would have been a light tap on the side of the crib to get my attention, and now that she remembers it yeah that’s exactly what happened. It just fell apart in her hands. We didn’t talk for a few years because of that and other things.

    After my daughter was born, she sent us a package that included two beautiful olivewood spoons from Israel. I use the fuckers when I’m making pasta. She calls or texts every once in a while warning me about protecting my daughter dark, evil things in the world. This usually happens when she sees a picture of my kid playing with a toy spider or a halloween skull. And I just chuckle and agree that there are dark, evil things in the world and I’m doing my damndest to protect her from them.














  • Yeah that’s actually funny. Calling it FRAGS is just the icing.

    Now that it’s less broken, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk a lot and it feels like edgy shit done correctly. All the big tough guys are actually just weirdos enamored with the sound of their own voice, the ads are ludicrously over the top, it’s bloody, and everyone’s a human being. I haven’t felt gross with any of the content in it so far and it has at least as many strippers as Duke 3D had. I think the loud edgelords keep trying to paint it as free speech vs censorship but it’s really about not making players complicit in whatever infantile world view the director has.



  • Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It’s also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.

    <rant> A lot of the ads from that era are uncomfortable. Hell, a lot of the games were. It was rare to see a female character that wasn’t ditzy and helpless, a thinly-veiled copy of the writer’s mom, or exactly like a dude but hot. Those were the options. I’m not saying I needed every game to be a work of great literature with complex and tormented characters and copious backstory; I just wanted female characters in games that didn’t like someone doing a ventriloquism act with their fleshlight.

    I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don’t think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There’s still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I’d stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.

    Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to “fire a rocket directly up the bad guy’s poop chute.” I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let’s never go back there. </rant>


  • As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

    Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

    That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

    tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with