I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos.
Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.
If you want to experience the thrill of being in the antimemetics division I highly recommend* unmedicated ADHD.
I pre-ordered the hardcover when it came out. I've read it online dozens of times but I like books and supporting authors, and this specific one really ticks a lot of boxes for me, so I got a physical copy. The book came, I put it on the shelf, admired it, went about my life.
Then, months later, I saw a mention of the physical book online somewhere, and I thought to myself "oh that reminds me, I wanted to buy the hardcover when it came out!" so I did! The book came, I went to put it on the shelf, saw the identical copy already sitting on the shelf, and I just stood there for a minute with the book in my hand like "..." "..." "..." while I worked through what happened.
None of the people making these decisions care about the long-term best interest of the company. Sundar doesn't give a shit about Google's future, he is laser focused on what really matters to him and the people he reports to: the stock price. A big round of layoffs can juice the stock, and it's a nice way to keep the numbers going up in between industry events where they can show off deceptively edited product demos and knowingly lie about the capabilities of their current and future AI offerings.
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
We already have a term for prompting a computer in a way that causes it to predictably output useful software; we called that programming, and people on this website used to think that knowing how to do that was a worthwhile field of study.
Google simply does not have a culture of giving a shit about people's experiences with their product. If you are having a problem you better either have that problem so frequently and severely that it shows up on whatever monitoring system they're using to evaluate release health, or you better get comfortable with it for the long haul.
Google also routinely removes AI suggestions for searches that produce embarrassing results (you don't get them for searches about keeping cheese on your pizza anymore, for example), so it's even harder to validate once a result goes viral.
My friend described the original symptom cluster as "Havana few too many syndrome" (as in a few too many drinks), which I think is probably about right. From there it's just people working themselves into a panic over nothing, like american cops with fentanyl "exposure": https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-ov...
#2 was definitely a problem for them; Teslas are out of action longer because of the wait times, AND they are more expensive to repair (which means they're more expensive to insure, and some carriers won't cover them at all). Being out longer costs Hertz a lot of money, and having to eat higher maintenance costs on top of that is a brutal double-dip.
edit just to add: This is much less of a problem for individual owners; I know people who are still happy with their Teslas, and a single person needing a single replacement car while theirs is awaiting repair is not a big deal. But a car company needing a thousand replacements while a thousand cars are sitting in storage is pretty bad for them.
I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy).
This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".
Fixing the company sounds good, but you have to remember that the people who would be fixing it are the people who got it to this point in the first place.
I think it's very likely that nobody currently at Boeing has the ability and willingness to make the kinds of changes they would need to make in order to become a functional company again, because Boeing has spent over two decades systematically purging senior engineers from management and leadership in order to become another crappy company full of empty suits with MBAs, who don't understand the product they're making, and don't care if they're literally killing people and the company is rotting out from under them as long as they can monetize the rot to make their quarterly numbers.
That's correct. LLMs are plausible sentence generators, they don't "understand"* their runtime environment (or any of their other input) and they're not qualified to answer your questions. The companies providing these LLMs to users will typically provide a qualification along these lines, because LLMs tend to make up ("hallucinate", in the industry vernacular) outputs that are plausibly similar to the input text, even if they are wildly and obviously wrong and complete nonsense to boot.
Obviously, people find some value in some output of some LLMs. I've enjoyed the coding autocomplete stuff we have at work, it's helpful and fun. But "it's not qualified to answer my questions" is still true, even if it occasionally does something interesting or useful anyway.
*- this is a complicated term with a lot of baggage, but fortunately for the length of this comment, I don't think that any sense of it applies here. An LLM doesn't understand its training set any more than the mnemonic "ETA ONIS"** understands the English language.
**- a vaguely name-shaped presentation of the most common letters in the English language, in descending order. Useful if you need to remember those for some reason like guessing a substitution cypher.
Just wanted to say that I think your rendition of Zellige is really nice, thank you for sharing! This is a very cool drawing language, and I think your art here is a really solid example of how creative you can be even with very limited tools.
I made a pinwheel, which is maybe not that exciting, but was a lot of fun for me. I like the bracket syntax a lot, and figuring out how to make this work actually recaptures some of the old sense of exploration and fun that I felt before programming was my day job.
The other answer to this is correct, but a little more detail in case you're interested:
^W is a control code. This specific one represents the keys ctrl+w, a keyboard command in Vi and Bash among other things. It deletes the previous word. You often see something similar with ^H as well, which is a single-character backspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U has some more information about these.
Some people use them more to make visual jokes in written text, more or less the same way you'd use strikethrough formatting in text.
This story resonates with me a lot. I hope you don't mind if I share my own story (not as a counter-argument or anything, but out of solidarity from an addict in recovery). I don't really talk about this with most people, because I feel very weird about it. I used to be debilitatingly addicted to video games. I played World of Warcraft in particular compulsively, to a degree that I joke about but am also deeply ashamed of. There's an addon that you can install that will calculate the amount of real-world time you've played, across all of your characters.
I would really rather not know.
I'm not addicted anymore, and I couldn't tell you what changed. I have a guess though; I think it was mobile games? But maybe not the way you might think. I got really hard in to some of the early mobile gacha games for a little while. Summoner's War was one of them, it's about 10 years old now. I spent some money on them; I have a tech job, and splashing a little cash on pulling the slot machine lever for powerful new monsters felt good for a little while. But those things were barely games, they were basically the absolute shortest, least ornate form of the hedonistic treadmill that you could offer and still call it a game, they were essentially just designed to form habits and get you addicted to a routine with predictable rewards, and then slowly dial back the rewards as you progress but also slowly dial up the number of advertisements for the in-game cash shop.
Regular pc/console games would at least try to hide the ways in which many games are grinds, they'd try to make an actual experience and give you value for your money and make you feel satisfied about your purchase. There's a lot of psychological tricks involved there, please don't get me wrong, pc or console gaming isn't free of that kind of predation at all (especially these days). But with mobile gaming, that's almost all there is. It's like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and having a couple glasses of wine with dinner vs going to a 24 hour liquor store at 3am and buying a case. At the liquor store, there's no music playing, there's no ambiance, nobody cares if you're having a nice time, you're not there for the atmosphere, you're there because there's something in your brain that will hurt you if you're not.
I think that ultimately, spending money on four seconds of mild excitement over a few special monster summon scrolls that ended up being garbage, and then going straight back into the endless pointless grind, was what actually did it for me. I think there was a moment where I saw completely the whole machinery of the game, laid completely bare. I felt like I could finally see that it wasn't really a game it was like a garbage disposal that I could throw money into. It drove home what a sad little addiction I really had. The total merciless clarity that I was functionally just a type of depressed rat slamming a little lever hoping to get a good treat that would help me clear the next level of a dungeon so that I could grind a marginally better set of drop rates that would improve my clear speed on that dungeon slightly pretty much instantly burned out my dopamine receptors for that kind of gameplay.
The funny thing is, I actually can enjoy video games normally now? I buy games that look fun, I play them a normal amount, and then I put them down when I'm done, whether or not I've beaten them. I feel really weird about the way I experienced that specific type of clarity / addiction burnout, it's a very difficult feeling to describe, but I was just like "oh I hate doing this, I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore". I know for a fact that this is not something that everyone gets to do, and that in a way I'm really fortunate that I came out the other side of it a basically normal casual gamer instead of someone who would do the video game equivalent of sucking the tar out of a cigarette butt to get a nicotine fix, that's not usually how that story goes.
Mogstation is truly incredible, it's like the digial equivalent of those "this is not a place of honor" signs, it feels designed to actively repel use.
That said, FF14 is a ton of fun! And IIRC these days you can play the free trial up through the end of the first expansion, which is a LOT of gameplay.
> The player politicized their neutral platform. The NBA fined players that wouldn't stand for the anthem for the same reason.
Standing for the national anthem is not a politically neutral action. FORCING players to stand for the national anthem is not a politically neutral action.
The "1000 dollar apple phone" thing is such a weird myth.
My wife has been using the iphone 5s for years now, because the later models are too big for her to hold comfortably. It originally came out in 2013. It is still supported by Apple, and hers currently runs iOS 12.4, which came out last month. She is on her second 5s, because she dropped her first one in the lake trying to take a picture of our dog. I use it from time to time to help pull up music or navigation in the car and it runs just fine, it's a perfectly usable phone.
These days, you can get a "renewed" one for less than a hundred dollars, unlocked, straight from Amazon.
Android is the phone ecosystem where you actually need to spend a thousand dollars* on phone hardware, because all of the inexpensive android devices are cheaply made garbage that feel like they should come filled with candy. They are stuffed with manufacturer bloatware (if you're lucky, or malware if you're not), and are obsolete right out of the box. If you spend a hundred dollars on an android phone, I absolutely guarantee you that you will regret it.
I'm not exactly an apple partisan here, I work on android apps for a living, I've used android phones for years, I actually like the Android OS and I want it to thrive, but the current state of the overall android hardware and software ecosystem, outside of the very high end devices that most people frankly can't afford, is just dire.
*- I have a pixel 3 XL, I know a thing or two about spending a thousand dollars to get a usable android device.
This is, as I understand it, the goal. I mentioned this in a different comment, but getting companies to think of unsecured consumer data as a liability is absolutely key to getting them to take privacy seriously. Companies need to consciously decide if the risk of accruing this data is worth the downside. Pre-gdpr there was functionally no downside at all.
Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.