Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.

Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.

Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.

Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.

Oh, right, he's out of a job for having too many principles in Apple's vicinity.

Man, this century turned out so weird.

I've been saying this from the go: users don't need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn't add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn't a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes "do you want to see Threads or nah?", which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

Man, I'm not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn't kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.

This is gonna keep coming up, it's gonna keep being wrong and I'm really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.

Incidentally, I dropped Youtube's web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they're cutting down features in my account because "I don't have enough of a history".

I swear, these decaying tech firms just don't get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.

If you're coming to any international conflict, but specially to this one, from a "good guys/bad guys" framework you're absolutely not helping.

Sometimes (a lot of times, sadly) all you get in a particular issue is just assholes all the way down. Unsurprisingly, deadly military conflicts where both sides have proven at best a callous disregard for civilian casualties practically requires the asshole pile to be expansive and thorough.

The question is how you get the endless, writhing mass of assholes to stop. Which isn't looking great right now.

So in this scenario you're back in 1923?

I'm pretty sure it'd be anything including the words "World War II".

Bonus points if it also includes a date.

So this is weirder than it looks at a glance.

That is not an LLM-generated search result. That is a funny ha-ha mistake a LLM made that then some guy compiled in his blog about AI.

Google then did their usual content-stealing thing, which probably does involve some ML, but not in the viral ChatGPT way and made that card by quoting the blog quoting the LLM making the mistake. And then everybody quoted that because it's weird and funny and it replicates all the viral paranoia about this stuff.

I mean, Superman's nemesis is literally a billionaire who at one point was the president of the US. Captain America straight up quit in protest against Richard Nixon once. And of course there's the whole X-Men thing.

Comic books are books. The characters are as progressive or regressive as the writers make them, but there are many examples of superhero books leaning center-left in their context from fairly early on.

What do you mean, "imagine"? Have you met the British?

I don't think people realize how horrifying these addendums are.

Not only do they not really fix the issue, but they prove that no, yeah, they hadn't thought about the possibility of "install bombing" at all until just now and it would totally have triggered massive fees.

I mean, the announcement was terribly worded, and some of the stuff (like wha't a "monthly fee" or a "retroactive fee") were very unclear, so you could hold out hope that they knew what they wanted to do and were just bad at explaining it.

But nope, that ship has sailed. They clearly didn't give this any amount of thought.

So yeah, I'm more worried about it now than I was yesterday, believe it or not. Like, a LOT more.

Hah. Like Netflix is ever going to approve a third season of anything ever again.

They have twenty to go, tops.