Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.

Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).

The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it

All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.

I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.

In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

I grew one during lockdown, decided I liked it and kept it. I suspect I am not an anomaly in this.

For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).

However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).

I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.

It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.

To clarify, I used to do more miles (which is why I bought the car in the first place) but in the last year I’ve moved to working from home full-time. Still need the car for occasional errands and long trips, but obviously tyre wear is now not much of a problem.

However, given the massive amount of torque you can apply from standstill, if you drive like a hoon at all times then yes you can absolutely tear through them.

I own a Model 3 which I took delivery of back in 2020. As a car it’s actually been fine - no major issues, aside from a fault with the AC which was sorted under warranty. It’s been cheap to run, cheap to service (basically just tyres and other consumables like wiper blades), build quality seems perfectly fine and overall it’s generally pleasant to drive.

The charging network is also fantastic and by far the most reliable one, at least here in the UK. It’s now opening up to other makes of vehicles and I regularly see non-Teslas charging there.

Would I buy another one? With their current lineup, probably not. Nothing to do with Elon, douche nozzle though he certainly is. I mean, people still buy VWs (also great cars, used to own one too) and look who founded that company.

No, my issue is with the stupid cost cutting measures with removing critical physical controls from their latest cars. Moving the gear selector to the screen is absurd but at least you are (or should be) stationary when you are swiping the screen to change direction. Removing the indicator stalk however and replacing with buttons on a movable surface seems downright dangerous, especially in EU & UK where there are roundabouts everywhere and you need to be able to indicate while at half lock.

My Tesla is old enough to still have physical controls for all of those things and unless that changes I will not be getting another. I also just don’t do enough miles these days to justify a new car, I’ll just run this one into the ground.

I went from a manual to an EV. For an everyday use point of view there is just no comparison. Acceleration is effortless, start/stop traffic is no longer a nightmare, it’s quiet and refined. It is the ideal daily driver. Even on longer trips I no longer feel fatigued after driving for 4-5 hours (the enforced charging stop helps with that).

I personally would not go back to an ICE car in general, manual or not, for everyday use.

From an enthusiasts perspective, however, this is a different question. I wouldn’t rule out getting an ICE manual for fun/weekend use in the future - the kind of driving where you can actually enjoy the level of fine control and feedback that a manual gives you, rather than just wasting it in traffic. But it would have to be something pretty special.

I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.

The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.

Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.

At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.

Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

This seems like a brilliant solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist.

Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.

I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.

The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.

The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?

The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.

The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.

Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.