All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

I haven’t read those yet, but I intend to. And I expect that, like every one I’ve read yet, they’ll be solid 7 or 8 out of 10 books.

That’s the thing that reminded me of Crichton. He has that same ability to start with some fascinating idea and run with it and deliver a solid, well-told and satisfying story, then move on to some completely different fascinating idea and run with it and deliver another solid, well-told and satisfying story. He’s not locked into any specific genre or any specific approach to telling a story - just whatever works for that idea, that’s what he does, and it just works.

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve been on a bit of a Tchaikovsky binge lately. I read Children of Time years ago and enjoyed it, but for whatever reason, didn’t read anything else by him then. I had a copy of Made Things knocking around though, and I finally read it a few weeks ago and was so impressed I started reading him in earnest. This is the… let’s see… seventh book of his I’ve read lately.

He sort of reminds me of Michael Crichton. He’s not a particularly notable prose stylist - his writing is entirely competent and sufficient, but not in any way really remarkable. But he tells very imaginative stories very well, so he’s a satisfying read.

This one is a sort of political thriller wrapped around a mystery that plays out a bit like a science fiction update of a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination story, leavened a bit with Emily St. John Mandel style misfit spaceship crew slice of life. I’m enjoying it.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.

And if the world were a just place instead of a twisted shithole designed to maximize the privilege of a relative few wealthy and empowered parasites, you could work fewer hours, make the same or even more money and afford a house.

But instead the system has been warped so that you have to work long hours for insufficient pay and still can’t afford a decent life, and all so that a relative few executives, board nembers, bankers, investors and politicians can siphon off the bulk of the wealth you generate so that they can buy more houses and bigger yachts.

No - actually I was talking worldwide. Russia’s just a notable example.

And I would say that all of the things you listed are, directly or indirectly, consequences of the fact that wealthy authoritarian parasites have warped societies to their benefit regardless of the harm done to others, so are actually examples of exactly what I’m talking about.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you’ve turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it’s long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.

Exactly as noted in the article, it’s not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it’s not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It’s not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that’s exactly how it should be treated.

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

Just be patient.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…