They could actually make this work.

• Have a recruitable Volus biotic warrior who you pick up in a nightclub and has romance dialog options.

• They go hang out in some big room on the ship, like a cargo hold.

• If you choose the romance options, more Volus just start showing up on your ship with no explanation. Like the next time you go in the cargo hold there’s another one, then two more, then you start seeing them in the mess hall, engineering, medbay…

• There’s either dialogue options to ask what’s going on (and kick them off the ship) OR there’s more romance dialog options, but you can’t do both!

• If you keep choosing romance options, they eventually all show up in your room at the same time. It turns out that when Volus take a new partner, their whole extended polycule is allowed to vote on whether or not they approve of the new person being added to your dynamic. There’s a whole scene where you and your new partner have to lobby, bargain and plead for them to include a human. Maybe whether they accept you or not has to do with other choices that you’ve made.

Capitalism is the system wherein the least qualified, most self interested party holds all the decision making power.

My response to this is seriously “look at compensations models that don’t involve selling apps directly on the app store.” Give your app away for free then either open source it and ask for Patreon support (this works better in an imaginary world that is NOT our shitty capitalist hellscape), or lock a bunch of functionality behind “pro” features and have that functionality live in the cloud (that’s what all the cool kids are doing).

Will assholes in southeast Asia clone your app and give away a free version supported by scammy ads (that maybe contain malware)? If it’s successful, yes they will. They were gonna do this anyway.

My phone, wallet and keys.

And yes, I have some tech tricks to find my phone. Problem is, I always forget to plug it in, so it’s always running out of battery.

I feel like I’m having that conversation with my father all the time and he still doesn’t get it.

The icing on that cake is that he totally has undiagnosed ADHD and PTSD, and he’s a rich old white man so he gets to go through life ignoring the consequences (for other people) and saying things like “That’s not my problem,” when anyone calls him out.

Yep. As a Gen Xer with a teenage son, when I hear my peers freaking out about their kids and technology, I remind them what our parents said about MTV.

At least this tiny percent of Gen X agrees.

Are we living in a world in which the JS/TS ecosystem is the yardstick by which we measure well written code? I mean… Wait a minute! I figured it out! This is the Bad Place!

This was the most informative thing I read on the internet today. I can’t wait to go start a blog.

Even if this were true, did the pharmacists get a raise? Are they making more money? Or are they just seeing more patients (doing the extra emotional and mental labor that entails) and paying less attention to each one while Safeway and Walgreens pocket any increased revenue?

The previews made the movie look nonsensical and confusing.

My code projects lately?

“This project uses an API written in PHP, with HTML in Lua (OpenResty) and JavaScript. We’re starting with the PHP component, please write me a burger with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup and mustard.”

“Absolutely! I’d be happy to help with that! I understand that we’re creating a burger in PHP. Here is a burger, with cheese, bacon, lettuce tomato and mustard. Explanation of the burger: The bacon is on top of the cheese, so it doesn’t fall off. The lettuce is included, to create an underlying HTML structure.”

"Um, that’s not at all what I asked for. First of all, you completely forgot the ketchup, which I explicitly told you was a requirement. Secondly, you said there was mustard, but I don’t see any. Third, the cheese is cottage cheese? No one puts that on burgers! Why would you put cottage cheese? Third, the bacon is turkey bacon. That’s not what I wanted at all. On top of that, the lettuce is UNDER the burger, not ON it. We’re not writing HTML, this is meant to be a rest API. All the output should be JSON.

Please try again. Write me a burger in PHP with pig bacon, mustard and ketchup, which you forgot to include last time, cheddar cheese (NOT cottage cheese) and tomato, pickles and lettuce INSIDE the bun. This is an API, so don’t write any HTML!"

“I appologize for the misunderstanding. Here is your burger with bacon (made from pigs, not turkey), mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles and lettuce inside the bun. I understand this is an API, so I’ve taken out the HTML. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

“It looks like you’ve called a function to put the lettuce inside the bun, but you never created that function?”

“You are correct. Your PHP code would need to have the function defined to put the lettuce inside the bun. Here is your updated PHP code with the putLettuceInsideBun function included.”

“Thank you, there’s a tomato and the lettuce is inside the bun now. I’m not sure why you called the putLettuceInsideBun() function twice, but at least it’s in there now. I note there’s still no bacon, cheese, ketchup or mustard. You know what? I’m just going to write those parts myself!”

“Writing PHP code can be a fun and educational challenge! Please let me know if I can assist you any further with your PHP hot dog grilling project.”

If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…

The Fediverse is Already Dead

Eh… This take is one grumpy dude in a hacker space somewhere soap boxing.

“At 9:43 EDT, the devs decided collectively to do a “rollback” to the previous release. This was the worst possible mistake,”

No, the WORST POSSIBLE MISTAKE was doing a major roll out, then NO ONE STICKING AROUND TO WATCH WHAT HAPPENED! Seriously, who does this?? It’s like lighting the fuse on your firework show, then having an all hands staff meeting in a sound proofed trailer with blackout curtains.

And a bunch of sociopath capitalist short sellers got hard.

Sex: Dragon sexuality is a bit too much of rule34 for my games.

r/dragonsfuckingcars has entered the chat.

Didn’t he famously like hate actual role play too? Like for him it was all just a new and more personal format of tactical war gaming.

Are you trying to say “Well the US sucks, so… don’t… don’t criticize Russia… man…”

Or are you trying to say “States gonna be states and do shitty state things.”

I have a kid, I spent 10 years working with kids professionally, and I agree with this dude.

In fact, lots of people, myself included, are drawn to leftist anarchism BECAUSE of lessons we learned about the failures of authoritarianism in school from parents and teachers. It’s always super annoying to see parents and teachers settling comfortably into an authoritarian role with their own kids, after hearing them wax emphatically about the effects of authoritarianism in adult society. I’m surrounded by hypocrites, and it’s not harmless. It’s like everybody either forget what it’s like to be kids, or think that the lessons of adulthood give them license to stop caring about those “little” problems, (and be fricken condescending in the process) when actually they just find it “easier” or it “feels safer” to them.

I have friends who we’re excellent teachers, but left the school system in absolute despair because they went in intending to be collaborative, entertaining teachers and passionate advocates for the kids in their care… Only to run up against all the bureaucratic walls the education system throws up to prevent exactly that and create as much conformity as possible… And then the icing on the cake is the vast majority of parents who just don’t get it, Don’t even try to get it, Don’t listen, know what they know, their opinions are their opinions and talking to them is just effing hopeless.

Whenever I’ve dealt with really difficult children, 9 times out of 10 you meet the parents and you’re like “Oh, this all makes sense!” (I can actually only think of three exceptions and two of those were clinical sociopaths). Or you go to work with a school (I’ve worked with and at dozens of schools) and you’re like “Oh, I understand why the kids from this school that I see in my program are always behaving in X, Y and Z dysfunctional ways. How is everyone this clueless and incompetent??” I have watched teachers utterly fail to teach or connect with the kids in their charge, and then watched those same teachers play politics and keep their positions while teachers who are doing a great job get let go (or forced out through social bs) because they want to ignore all that crap. I have had teachers come up to me when I’m running a program or event at their school and had them say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I saw the kids in your program and those are all the most difficult children we have!” And I’m like “these kids are fine! You’re an authoritarian in an authoritarian environment, aren’t you??”

And I’m literally surrounded by adults who like think they know what they’re doing, and aren’t even trying to get it and MAN do they have opinions they want to share and it pisses me the fuck off.

My kid creates super good boundaries, he emphasizes kindness in communication in ways I was totally unable to do it his age, he advocates for himself (and other kids) like someone a decade older, and if he’s on his phone in class, it’s because the teacher is failing to engage the class. End of discussion. When I see that situation, I’m almost always like “I could teach this class and these kids would not be on their phones, and I have the experience under my belt to prove it.” (And I have seen shit like that).