Wasn’t there a guy who trained his pug to respond to Nazi slogans?

Mandatory age verification may just be the smoking gun that pushes people towards Linux.

And it’s good this exemption got added. Enforcing this upon the FOSS community is inevitably going to be a shitshow.

I’m currently going through something similar with my 80 year old dad, and while I don’t think that taking the output of an AI chatbot as gospel is necessarily a sign of cognitive decline, I have witnessed worse signs in my case.

He is bad with technology and it’s only gotten worse over the years. Aside from times where I’ve had to clear malware from his computer, I quite often find myself assisting him with basic things like navigating his emails, online banking, resetting a password for one of his accounts, or ordering catheter supplies through a smartphone app which is otherwise incredibly easy and straightforward to use (the app isn’t very good on smartphones though, and everything about its UI is bigger than it needs to be.)

Another good example is with his television. Sometimes he’s struggled to even navigate through menus on the set-top box and isn’t properly reading through the menus. Next thing you know, he’s either set up a separate Netflix subscription, or signed up to an expensive cable package because suddenly we have access to Sky Cinema and TNT Sports.

Teaching and reminding him of how to use these things is sometimes like pulling teeth and it’s not like I’ve been half-arsing it either. I used to work in customer service for a major right-wing UK newspaper and when I wasn’t dealing with arsehole customers and the occasional bigot who think we can put them through to a journalist so they can spout their racist views, a lot of my job involved helping pensioners with website and smartphone/tablet app tech support queries.

This is challenging to deal with in-and-of-itself, but dealing with someone who can be obnoxious, rude, impatient and have the temperament of a male Karen makes it even worse.

Unfortunately this is something I have to live with. At 34 years old I still live with my parents and not necessarily out of choice. I lost my job last year due to mass layoffs and my work prospects have been dogshit ever since. But also, absolutely everything is switching to a digital-only model.

Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by letting him remilitarize the Rhineland, annex Austria and invade Czechoslovakia. Look at how well that worked out.

The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.

Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…

Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.

Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.

We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.

But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.

Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?

TERF UK is sadly quite accurate.

Bangor University recently deplatformed a Reform MP and banned them from speaking on campus over their party’s association with racism and transphobia.

Which would be all well and good if they applied their standards equally. Keir Starmer literally gave an Enoch Powell-like “island of strangers” speech when announcing tougher immigration policies, and openly supported a court ruling which basically denied that trans women were women. The Conservative Party have also been playing a similar game of Simon Says with Nigel Farage and lurching much further to the right. Why aren’t Labour and the Tories banned?

I also think that singling out and pissing off a party that is (unfortunately) very likely to win the next general election is a sure-fire way to have your university defunded.

Down in the workshop all the elves were making toys

For the good Gentile girls and the good Gentile boys

Sounds like the kind of power mod who spends his evenings sat in a hotel cuck chair because that’s the most intimacy they’ll ever have with a woman.

I only knew of him because South Park mocked him and his style of masterdebating by depicting Clyde and Cartman as parodies of him.

Don’t go to university, unless you really want to work in engineering or teaching.

You’ll be saddled with student debt and your job prospects will be worse than if you decided to start flipping burgers or stacking shelves at 18.

Middle out!

Nah, I can relate.

Worst experience I had was with a property management firm who made me go through three stages of interviews, kept me waiting for weeks for responses about next steps, sent me a bogus offer acceptance letter, then tried to lowball me by insisting the role I applied for was £5k lower than advertised.

And apparently this is a major property management firm that has BlackRock as one of their big clients.

Job market is shit right now for accountants.

Nah, this is yanderedev

This is YandereDev levels of bad.

Newsflash: Not every country practices free speech

I dunno, a lot of the rules they established sound reasonable, and they don’t really want to risk a raid from the German authorities.

It kinda came out of left field and pissed off all the people that actually liked the sitcom that CAD was becoming.

Also, Tim Buckley’s news post commenting on the comic made him sound like an asshole. Cyanide & Happiness actually spoofed the Loss comic but with the guy delivering a snippet of Buckley’s post

I think he only used C to build the installer. The rest was coded in x86 assembly.

Building anything in x86 assembly is a gargantuan effort, but then Chris Sawyer built a game on the same level of scale as RollerCoaster Tycoon…

Not good. Made redundant a few weeks ago, it feels like recruitment agencies are wasting my time.

Maybe a bit of a cold take, but my guess is he went back to Romania because Romanian or British prison would be preferable to a Salvadoran supermax.