You did 200k years. You need to do 200k years as seconds (the 6.311e12 they mentioned). Their math is right.

Not sure why you’re acting like they claimed to invent the logarithm, either…

I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.

Woah, slut shaming is uncool. If trucks like having sex, that’s not a negative thing. Would you have said that if it was a Porsche?

The “somehow” is because IRC is extremely bare bones. It doesn’t stand up to modern expectations of what chat software does. Plus accounts aren’t all a bad thing. Anti-spam is vital for the internet today, as is rigid ways of preventing impersonation. IRC is a relic of a simpler era.

I think it’s a standard case of people suing the one who has money. Stalkers don’t have much (if any) money. Apple has much money. It’s a dumb lawsuit IMO, but there’s generally no penalty for frivolous or misplaced lawsuits (and this is probably on the border where it’s dumb but not frivolous).

I’m doing an evil playthrough now and finding various things I missed from the first playthrough. But oof, I feel really awful about the horrible things the game lets you do. 😅

Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you’re good at it (and when there isn’t major time pressures).

Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you’ll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.

There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.

In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).

It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).

Yeah, in colloquial usage, most people understand that China and Taiwan are two different countries and there’s no confusion over which one is which.

We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.

Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can’t even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they’re theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?

A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn’t cash means we can’t take it away.

If they try to leave to another country, arrest them for tax evasion and seize every asset they have. Don’t let them do any business in the country without paying their share. Get other countries to band together on this until there’s nowhere for them to run except shitholes. Even if we can’t stop them from being rich in Ireland (and on that note, we should punish tax havens with sanctions), we can stop them from using their wealth to affect other countries.

How does this happen? Really soggy, thawed pizza?

Yeah, the average consumer doesn’t buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren’t going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They’re budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?

Agree and I sympathize with all the points.

On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it’s too late. But I know that we’re unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.

And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn’t an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we’re quickly approaching a point where it’s going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there’s still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won’t go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a dead giveaway. Because there’s been controversy about AI art that added watermarks. The controversy being because it implied the AI was scraping images that it definitely wasn’t allowed to use.

Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There’s no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you’re more selective and selectively regenerate, you’ll be able to get much more believable results.

This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I’ve been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.

I only guessed a single one as generated by AI and I was wrong on that (the mouse in the boat drawing felt like unusual shaping and shading for a human). I really could not identify any telltale signs of AI in any of them, so answered entirely honestly that none of the others looked like AI generated.

To be honest, I expected that. The telltale signs people often talk about are only problems for bad AI art. Well done AI art really is indistinguishable. Stuff like weird fingers, faces, and teeth are only problems if the prompter is lazy and just picks the first thing generated (and doesn’t selectively regenerate). If you’re selective, you can get AI art without the things some people claim make AI art easy to recognize.

It’s like photoshop or movie CGI. Anyone can detect a bad photoshop and we’re used to seeing those. But well done photoshops by experts can be near impossible to detect (short of careful pixel level inspection, which doesn’t really apply to AI art). Yet, a lot of people are over confident in how well they can spot photoshops.

I wonder if this will change anyone’s mind? I’ve always wanted to do this for a few topics, including AI. I’ve also wanted to do this for trans vs cis people (so many transphobes claim they can “always tell”), movie CGI vs practical effects (see also: Captain Disillusion videos), and for various kinds of food and drink (so many people are elitist that something tastes better – simple example that I’ve actually seen disproven is the various kinds of eggs, including store bought vs locally sourced).

Some of these I get, but I don’t get the T9 thing. T9 was so bad! It took ages to type many words. Today’s predictive keyboards are miles better.

Also, no software updates? Sure, every now and then there’s a shitty update, but most updates are great. New features and especially bug fixes are amazing. Used to be that if something had a bug, you just had to deal with it. There’s no guarantees it’ll be fixed today, but many companies do fix their bugs at least eventually. The ability to iteratively develop is huge for software quality. These days, unless you’re developing something that absolutely cannot fail (like a mars prober or radiation therapy machine), it’s widely agreed upon that iterative design is superior to “waterfall” design of trying to plan it out all ahead of time. Part of why is so you can get feedback continuously instead of only after you’ve committed to months of tech debt.

Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I’m constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I’m googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like “split a string of comma separated ints and add them up” are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I’ll just use Python, but Python’s weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

Side note, isn’t it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there’s no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?

The most recent C++ thing I worked on (not that recent, like 5 years or so ago) was a fairly new project and the people working on it were really passionate about C++. But it was C++ code that ran as a Python library and was using the official Python C bindings. Not sure why we didn’t use one of the unofficial C++ libraries, but the usage of that C library (and such a fundamental one) held things back. We wrote was was modern C++ (at the time), but big chunks would be a completely different style.

I hate writing code in either language. But at least what C has going for it is that it’s waaaay simpler than C++. Simple can be a really good thing. Sure, all those cool features can save you time, but they can also be gotchas that will cause bugs.

Though it is a balancing act. Too simple and you’ll make mistakes due to how much you have to repeat yourself or using unsafe equivalents (like using preprocessor directives to mimic features that C++ natively supports).