1983. The video game industry effectively collapsed entirely.

There were something like 14 major console systems on the market, all incompatible with each other. None had decent quality control for the games. At the same time home computers were starting to be a thing so the hobby money started going in that direction.

In sum that caused an effectively total collapse of the industry in the USA. It took until the late 80s for the market to start to recover when Nintendo released a new console. Notably, this console was not marketed as a game console – it was the Family Computer in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System (with a shell deliberately styled like a VCR) in the West.

Several major companies left the market (like Magnavox or Coleco) or were unable to compete when the market recovered (Atari).

You can see the Rust they added to the kernel.

But hat would require them to put in actual effort instead of just pushing out a minimum viable product and calling it the next evolutionary stage of computing.

Schon mal gut so. Wenn jetzt mal das Gericht die Klage der AfD gegen das BfV abgewickelt kriegt, damit die auch auf Bundesebene wieder gesichert rechtsextrem sind…

Yeah, that’s what I meant with the bigger picture. They have a valid reason to deny this request but they haven’t denied other requests that they really should’ve.

I mean, I can see a case for not wanting to play dragnet at a mere request. You don’t want any random guy and/or agency to be able to have you to help them track down someone they only have a picture of, no matter how much they pinkie swear they’re doing it to protect that person.

That’s getting awfully close to sharing PII. You generally want to see a subpoena for this stuff and with good reason. Meta are, oddly enough, not being actively scummy here. (One can of course argue about all the other times when they don’t give a shit; the bigger picture is definitely super scummy. But for this in isolation they actually have a valid reason for their behavior.)

What might work would be a standardized, streamlined process where the police can ask the company and if the company says the request is reasonable they can apply for an expedited subpoena to allow legal access to the information. Agreement by both would be necessary to give more opportunities for due diligence. This process would also have to have a very limited scope in order to make abuse harder.

Things like this made the news several times when Interpol (or was it Europol?) showed pictures on social media and asked if anyone could turn them into information (things like “in which country is this backpack sold”).

When international law enforcement agencies are already openly crowdsourcing image details, an article about a group doing background detail analysis isn’t much of a revelation.

Of course it’s political. If Caligula hadn’t chickened out they wouldn’t be in this mess today where water can just airdrop in and demolish the landscape at will. Is that water the sea? No, but conquering the sea would’ve sent a clear message to water in general.

Usually people who have silver cutlery tend to only bring it out when they are entertaining guests. Since semi-formal dinner parties have fallen out of fashion and casual guests don’t care about how nice your cutlery is, fancy silverware has basically become irrelevant these days.

It definitely depends on the use case. I could accept this being abstracted out to facilitate mocking, for instance (although I’d recommend mocking at a higher level). But in general this wouldn’t pass review with me unless I get a good explanation for why it’s necessary.

Then they could add their own function in later stages. YAGNI exists for a reason.

My high school had a few unusual traditions around graduation time.

The first related to our director, a man who gave his 100% on official school business and then gave another 100% on all of his hobby projects around the school. It wasn’t that we had something like an apiary or a pond biotope. We had an apiary and a pond biotope and a herd of goats and a tiny vineyard (in an area mostly unsuitable for wine) and a shelter for emotionally disturbed aras. In a public school. And all that besides him being a highly respected director and teacher who epitomized the definition of “strict but fair”.

So at some point the students started to express their gratitude by giving the school presents upon graduation, usually themed around the director. The gym sported a Jurassic Park sign, except with the name of the school and with the profile of the T-Rex replaced with that of the director. In another year someone had contacts with the roads office and got something that looked like an official city limits sign made, except that it identified the school along with “administrative region <director’s name>”. Very cool; he took that one with him when he retired.

Another tradition is somewhat common in the region: The “chaos day”, effectively a formalized graduation prank. At my school, it worked like this: The evening before, the students were given a copy of the keys to the school and free access to the school grounds to prepare. The next day they had to prevent the teachers from entering the building; if a teacher got in, school would resume as per normal. The teachers had a fairly good track record. Many graduating classes failed to account for the fact that the teachers had bolt cutters. One time they didn’t account for an obscure window at the back of the school, which happened to be an emergency exit and had an external lock.

My year didn’t take any chances. I come from a fairly rural area so we had farmers in class and those farmers had forklifts and hay bales. By the time school was supposed to start, all entrances to the building had solid walls of hay in front of them. We also immediately cashiered any teacher who entered the school grounds and forced them into party activities. I have fond memories of hearing my class teacher horribly butcher Oh my darling, Clementine before wandering off to listen to the school band play Hurra, hurra, die Schule brennt.

If the show had been made in Germany it would’ve been called Just Send Saul A Fax.

Oh yeah, same here except with a self-hosted LLM. I had a log file with thousands of warnings and errors coming from several components. Major refactor of a codebase in the cleanup phase. I wanted to have those sorted by severity, component, and exception (if present). Nothing fancy.

So, hoping I could get a quick solution, I passed it to the LLM. It returned an error. Turns out that a 14 megabyte text file exceeds the context size. That server with several datacenter GPUs sure looks like a great investment now.

So I just threw together a script that applied a few regexes. That worked, no surprise.

I’ve been to the park with a dog with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
When I make passwords, I can remember his name
'Cause there ain’t no one for to give me no pain

That’s true; I didn’t touch on those points but I very much agree. (Yes, while I occasionally use it. It’s easy to ignore the implications of what you’re doing for a moment.)

There are things LLMs are genuinely useful for.

Transforming text is one. To give examples, a friend of mine works in advertising and they routinely ask a LLM to turn a spec sheet into a draft for ad copy; another person I know works as a translator and also uses DeepL as a first pass to take care of routine work. Yeah, you can get mentally lazy doing that but it can be useful for taking care of boilerplate stuff.

Another one is fuzzy data lookup. I occasionally use LLMs to search for things where I don’t know how to turn them into concise search terms. A vague description can be enough to get an LLM onto the right track and I can continue from there using traditional means.

Mind you, all of that should be done sparingly and with the awareness that the LLM can convincingly lie to you at any time. Nothing it returns is useful as anything but a draft that needs revision and any information must be verified. If you simply rely on its answer you will get something reasonably useful much of the time, you will get mentally lazy, and sometimes you will act on complete bullshit without knowing it.

Dude somehow owns a smartwatch where the step count and sleep tracker need to be operated manually. He might be too busy fiddling with that thing to get anything done.

I wonder if he has to manually blink the turn signal on his car.

Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it’s not as easily said as done.

Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.

It’s doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it’s probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.

Nee nee, er hat gemeint, dass bis zum ersten Angebot nicht gestreikt werden dürfen soll.

Bin ich dafür. Allerdings sollten dann die Forderungen der Arbeitnehmer nach X Werktagen verpflichtend automatisch angenommen werden müssen. Wer’s nicht mag soll halt ein Gegenangebot machen.