Rose

I’ve seen Americans start explaining how the geography in Spaghetti Westerns doesn’t make sense, so we in Europe have to go “oh, but you see, the film doesn’t take place in real America, it takes place in America of myth and legend.”

The technology side of generative AI is fine. It’s interesting and promising technology.

The business side sucks and the AI companies just the latest continuation of the tech grift. Trying to squeeze as much money from latest hyped tech, laws or social or environmental impact be damned.

We need legislation to catch up. We also need society to be able to catch up. We can’t let the AI bros continue to foist more “helpful tools” on us, grab the money, and then just watch as it turns out to be damaging in unpredictable ways.

I’m in Finland, in my 40s. I don’t remember much. I think in the early teens we did have lessons in school about sex and reproductive biology. What I do remember is the “real” sex education stuff around 15-16 years of age, that was part of the health education classes, because, well, I think it got inadvertently weird. The physical education / health education teacher we had was retiring that year. To no one’s surprise, the stuff in the textbook was left for us to read on our own. Because “ummm I don’t think I need to cover this, uhhh heh heh, ummm, you kids probably already know about this”. And everyone was, like, thank God we were spared of that.

Sir Cumference the sphere

Oh yes, and the monastery near Camelot also had a nearly spherical oblate

Oh crap, the last time I looked at Slashdot comments, systemd didn’t exist yet

I’m personally of the opinion that a separate app sign in is okay as an additional measure, if the app is actually useful. For example, GitHub does this well - they support TOTP, and the mobile app is okay. Steam mobile app is useful, but TOTP option as a fallback would be nice.

Maybe the most useless thing I have on this front is the Blizzard app, really. The app is not particularly useful for me, I’d rather just use TOTP, if they had the option.

I’m from Finland so technically not from Scandinavia. But yes, we do have multiple proofs of the strange and disturbing things happening in Sweden. Here, hardly a week goes by without someone asking “why is PostNord?”

Ah yes, Klarna. The proof that not everything is all right with Sweden. Proof that Nordic countries, too, are capable of incredibly dark things. …Do I need to continue?

Conservatives keep saying they’re for the common people.

Are they? Are they really? Seems to me they’re really busy doing stuff that regular folks hate.

Next biz bro bestseller: “Leverage the power of your bowels to produce fertiliser that promotes growth”

That’s it, I’m going to skip Switch 2 and get a Steam Deck next. And I’ll stick to stuff that can run Dolphin.

(Learns that Xbox Series can also run Dolphin without modding) Well shit, I’m set for life, now just need to sort out the portable console situation

And in the big touristy cities in Europe, there’s so many scam currency exchanges, while if you just take the time to go to official government exchanges, you get reasonable exchange rates. The problem isn’t the locals, the problem is that you didn’t do the research and you did a dum-dum. (Also fuck the people who are scamming tourists, that’s just low.)

In the late 1990s/early 2000s, there was some satire article about how to get most effective Linux support. Just write an angry news/blog article about how Linux sucks because it doesn’t (insert the thing you’re having problems with here). You bet someone will immediately respond how you’re an idiot and you should (insert detailed explanation of how to fix the thing here).

I didn’t even know Patreon had a mobile app. To me, Patreon is just one of those Big Adult Things you have to do on a computer. Seems to work just fine on mobile browser (Firefox for Android) though. Apple being mega greedy as usual.

Can’t really add much to all of the great games already mentioned. But I’ll add one, because it was one of the best games I played in recent memory. Chants of Sennaar. Where to even start? Point-and-click adventure/puzzle game that is all about language puzzles. With great visuals and music. Really dig the eurocomics inspired style. I don’t know why, but this game really touched me - maybe it’s because the game is about uniting people in an age of discord.

Heh. When I was a kid, I wanted proper development tools. Turbo Pascal. A relative said they knew where to get a “good deal.” …imagine my surprise when there were no manuals and suspiciously hand-marked floppies. Didn’t have the heart to tell them “you paid money for this?”

(I did later save up money to buy Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS. Still proudly displayed on my shelf.)

Game prices have nothing to do with inflation (or even production costs) and everything to do with arbitrary price points the industry just settles upon. Nothing forces them to charge that much, yet they do it because they think they can get away with it for now.

Rising prices have had an effect on me - I’m definitely not buying as many games as I used to, least of all impulsively on hearsay, and I’m not trusting any publisher enough to preorder stuff anymore. So they went past my pain point, sorry. If they keep doing this, they’ll run over everybody. I don’t think this is a sustainable direction.

Ooh! Remember what was the original premise of Google’s PageRank? A site was classified as more valuable if other sites linked to it. …I have no idea exactly what they do nowadays, because clearly search engines have every reason to be suspicious of people linking to other sites.

At least in Finland we had USB cellular data adapters (I belive that’s the full term) back in the 3G/maybe early 4G days. I haven’t checked if they’re still a thing.

(Never had one myself. Got a WiFi dongle instead because the city had a decent municipal WiFi coverage.)

Parody account

…Basically indistinguishable from any regular Twitter account. Why did Elon want these accounts labeled, again?