Brief off-topic aside: This recurring thread has been a bright spot, for me, in a sad Internet, this year. Thank you.

As for what I’m playing - mostly Palworld. The late game has allowed me to try to breed perfect pals while getting as deep as I like into farm management and interior decorating. It’s been very fun. Well worth the sticker price.

Anything you do on USPS also goes to Google.

Opening a PO Box in person should avoid this issue.

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Post Office Boxes are the solution.

Doesn’t outlook support imap?

Officially, it can. Many organizations turn IMAP off “for security reasons.”

Edit: Microsoft routinely turns off features for security reasons, so this comment may age poorly, if not already.

My experience with ethically run (if unethically created) local models has been similar. Lots odd hardware to get slow mediocre answers.

But the biggest reason AI competes with plain old web search is that they’ve enshittified the web search available to us.

Corporate assholes are breaking search to force people to use their centralized harmful AI answer guessers.

We can fight back with Searx. https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Searx

I’m so tired of “Ai big number” headlines. 100+ packages - but how many good ones? (Genuinely, I don’t know, as I don’t the recognize those listed.)

We need projects that diligently keep the slop out. We don’t need every protect to do so, but it is critical that some do.

We have Meta and Microsoft to provide quick-to-market low quality shit.

The version of Linux that matters is the slow thoughtful good software.

I’m not mad at slop slingers, aa long as they don’t secretly inject slop risk where not welcome.

Edit: Thanks for responses.

For anyone who has read this far, I encourage seeing responses below for informative and nuanced thoughts on this.

Everybody says the data isn’t retained. It’s very stylish, today, to claim to delete unused data, at least until it get breached

I think Warframe is the only (non-open source) free to play game I have nice things to say about.

I never felt any pressure to pay, but every few months of playing and I would think, “I feel like I should chip these folks some cash, again”.

And then they do make it fun to chuck them some money.

Most of the purchasables may as well just say “trust us, it’s fun”, for all I understood any of them before buying. (I think I bought maybe 4 frames while playing for about a year.)

After playing for awhile, I do trust them. I’ve not been disappointed with any purchased frame or item - with the understanding that both are pretty much just amusing “thank you” gimmicks for supporting.

Warframe has been a good time. I sort of expect it to enshitify at any moment, but for now they seem chill.

sxxt?

Free markets hurt capitalists.

Fucking communists and their free markets and open competition! None of that for us, please.

(Poe’s law: This is meant to be taken as absurdist humor.)

Yes, it’s the people who put in decades of hard work, not the cocaine snorting golden parachute executives, costing US auto makers their chance to compete. That might be it.

Edit: If only there were some way for citizens united to do something to help those poor executives.

Stupidest timeline.

I’m doing okay, too. Thanks for asking, everyone.

We’re still quoting this fucker after his Epstein emails?

Is it still to early to pass on this?

I’ll take a clone with decent gameplay over a microtrash laden official licensed product any day.

Yes. I was interested until I realized it’s Capcom.

Capcom needs to work much harder to rehab their reputation with me. I recall them adding DRM to games where, to me, it made no sense. Including weird, seemingly random timing for the change.

I get how there’s an argument to be had about fair online play, and stopping early pirates. But sometimes Capcom seems to me yo just be rolling dice, or trying yo meet an internal DRM use quota.

Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.

Bad LLM code is worse than bad human code. LLMs sanitize out markers that humans use to catch and correct mistakes.

Eye contact is benign for most of us. We still give it a context warning in civilized circles. It costs us almost nothing, and lets people make an informed decision what you engage with.