TehPers

One time, my mother-in-law answered a phone on speaker in a bar. It was from her boss.

“I just killed someone” came out of that speaker in a voice that sounded like he was going to cry.

I don’t think she has put it on speaker since then.

Adblocking is piracy, yet AMP, ChatGPT/AI overviews/etc, archival, and so on are perfectly okay, right? (Archival stands out here as being not a shitty thing to do but is still rehosting without serving paying ads)

It’s only stealing when it inconveniences these creators. They seem perfectly content with what Google’s doing, though.

Flipping it around, if the creators want more money, they need to solve that problem themselves. Charge money for some (or all) content if you need it. Sell merch. Find creative ways to showcase sponsored products that actually serve as valuable content. Being lazy and turning on ads or showing the same sponsor segment you’ve used dozens of times already isn’t going to do anything but annoy people.

I hate her. She has the worst initials.

Also, she’s generally a bad person, but that’s irrelevant.

I agree with the comments around this being toxic and dissuading men who might actually respect you. But that aside…

What’s with this overanalysis over read receipts that people have? I’ve never understood that. Okay, he read your message. So what? For all you know, his cat’s blowing chunks all over his carpet and he needs to address that before he can respond. Maybe he opened it on accident and it marked it as read? Are you really so important that your random funny video warrants stopping everything and answering immediately?

You seem to be in the perfect situation to justify screen limits then.

However, I can’t help with that sadly. I’m not on stock Android. It’s possible on my Samsung device through parental controls, so maybe look for something like that?

Setting limits would help, but you’ll be left with time to spend off of your phone. While I can’t help with setting limits, I can recommend picking up a hobby that pulls you away from it. That can be anything from a sport to crochet. If you have something else you want to do instead, you may find yourself naturally using your device less.

I’m left wondering what the profession is turning into for other people.

All the code I review looks good at first glance and makes shit up as it goes once you read into it more. We use two different HTTP libraries - one sync, one async - in our asynchronous codebase. There’s a directory full of unreadable, obsolete markdown files that are essentially used as state. Most of my coworkers don’t know what their own code does. The project barely works. There’s tons of dead code, including dead broken code. There are barely any tests. Some tests assert true with extra steps. Documentation is full of obsolete implementation details and pointers to files that no longer exist. The README has a list of all the files in the repo at the top of it for some reason.

I will admit that I’m more in the naysayers camp, but perhaps that’s from a fear of losing my livelihood?

People are being laid off because of poor management and a shitty economy. No software devs are losing their jobs because AI replaced them. CEOs are just lying about that because it’s convenient. If software devs truly were more effective with these tools, you’d hire more.

Am I predisposed to see how these tools are lacking? Have I not given them a fair chance?

That’s up to you to decide. Try using them if you want. But don’t force yourself to become obsessed with them. If you find yourself more productive, then that’s that. If not, then you don’t. It’s just a tool, albeit a fallible one.

people are often nasty when others ask questions they assume to be stupid.

It sounds to me like you might want to reevaluate the communities you’re in. This sounds incredibly toxic.

And I agree, for simple questions, it can be helpful. I would caution against overreliance on the answers though. Even the best models available today hallucinate regularly. Always verify answers when they are important.

Also, learning to read documentation directly is a valuable skill to develop. Even if you don’t rely on the documentation directly, reading a lot of it will make it easier to write documentation as well.

I think the post (well, this translation anyway) is best read as a fantasy rather than associated with reality. It’s predicated on a lot of assumptions, including the assumption that AI has the ability to develop large software almost entirely autonomously, that large brands have no means to lock users within an ecosystem, that people will be able to articulate exactly the software they need and how it should be designed, and so on.

The future being described by this post is the elimination of all roles of software and product development, spanning from developers to designers to even product managers.

As a thought experiment, it’s interesting. It shouldn’t be confused as reality, though.

I would narrow this down to including monetary cost and reward.

A game of primarily chance, such as slots, roulette, poker, blackjack, or even MTG’s Ante variation where something of value is offered (money, chips, resellable cards) and something of value is rewarded would be gambling. Note that chance would be a primary mechanic of the game, but skill may still be involved.

Seeing as I can’t see the thread anymore for previously mentioned reasons (yet oddly I can reply to you because you pinged me), I’m not sure which mod currently holds the reins over this community, but feel free to just delete the whole thread.

There’s a discussion in another post that is almost certainly related to this one. I alluded to it when I came to that conclusion, which might have confused you.

Is this even a surprise? Giving away free access to Copilot hemorrhages money and only exists to convert those users into paying customers. It costs them nothing to take away some features from these users.

The only real ways to prevent this are local hosting (which is much more realistic these days) or an explicit contract stating that the features you want will remain for the duration of the contract. The latter is not an option with GH Copilot, as far as I’m aware, and is basically nonexistent with any modern services.

Edit: Hey everyone, you can disregard the above comment by TehPers, because they clarified that they actually aren’t claiming booster packs are illegal:

If you are only arguing about what is or isn’t legal, then you’re wasting your time. I’m not a lawyer, nor in a position to rule on laws. I don’t know if something gave you the impression otherwise.

;P

Thank you for clarifying to all of us that you do not comment in good faith. It makes it much easier for me to know which people to block.

And yet are not “gambling” as the colloquial understanding of the regulated activity stand, nor certainly things that people want to be covered under gambling regulations.

I didn’t say they were gambling, though trading shares is often associated with gambling. But in all of those examples, you receive something with value that changes in a way that is impossible to accurately predict.

And since this is about what should fall under the regulated activity, doubly-irrelevant.

And here you’re changing the topic to suit your needs. I replied to a comment discussing the definition of the word “wager”. As I’ve told you not long ago today, I don’t care much about the semantics of specific words. I’ll engage in the discussion though.

And since this definition is irrelevant to the regulated activity, it’s irrelevant to TCGs or loot boxes if you are pushing for those to be considered regulated gambling.

What? I’d like to remind you that you responded to me and solo’d out TCG boosters. In my response, I said very clearly that I am not a lawyer, nor do I make any claims as to what they should say in their case.

If you are only arguing about what is or isn’t legal, then you’re wasting your time. I’m not a lawyer, nor in a position to rule on laws. I don’t know if something gave you the impression otherwise.

If you’re arguing about what should or shouldn’t be legal, then it’s not an unpopular opinion that TCG booster packs should be regulated to some extent.

Anyway, I’m disengaging. As you mentioned before, we assume good faith here. That is my initial assumption, so I engaged with the discussion. At this point, I believe you are arguing for the sake of arguing.

By this definition, buying anything is a wager.

Mostly correct. Buying anything which retains value after the purchase is a wager. This includes shares in a company, collectible items, even a shipping crate of RAM.

You’re not betting on a specific outcome in that definition, which is the “gamble” part of “gambling”.

In the case of TCGs, the bet is that the value of the cards contained in the pack exceed the money spent on the pack. This is very common. And within TCG communities, there is a common understanding that this is gambling.

That’s of course not to say that all purchases of a booster pack are with the intent to gamble. I’ve also played poker and blackjack for fun, and those games are full of wagers, bets, and outcomes. But the bar has never been that all possible reasons to do something are to gamble, just that gambling is a common motivation to do it.

The final question presents a false dichotomy that it is the end of the internet or that the authors are pushing an agenda. This is a belief “that most people think [is] unreasonable and unacceptable” (as you put it) in the context of this specific article, which is what their comment was in response to.

I have no issue with anything that precedes that, obviously.

US law does not view TCGs as gambling, but by the colloquial definition, it is gambling. You say there’s no wager on an outcome. The wager is the price you spend on a pack, and the outcome is the resale value of the contents of the pack.

As for the case against Valve in particular, I make no claims as to what they should or shouldn’t argue in the case. I am not a lawyer. I can’t imagine most people in this instance are either.

Colin Hathaway, a millionaire businessman in Washington, said he’s concerned the proposed tax would treat the money earned by his roofing company as income, even though he’s putting most of it back into the business.

Bullshit. The tax cares about adjusted gross income for individuals. Business expenses are a deduction. Making $1m and putting $900k back in as business expenses deducts that from your income. This is all assuming you even have $1m as personal income, which is not necessarily true depending on how your business manages its finances.

I don’t think they understand what “dissent” is. Dissent is very often opposed and persecuted. It’s not often legal.

Making it illegal doesn’t make it go away. It makes it louder.

I added a second edit it appears after your comment, but repeating it here: what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about. Are you defending that the commenter’s comment reads like a sane interpretation of the article?

Nobody here is saying that it’s ridiculous to question your sources or try to identify potential bias in articles. Those are things you should always do. That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.