I do not understand why Google has become so ossified. They must know they’re strangling their own business, surely? Do they somehow think they’re irreplaceable? That no one will ever build a better search engine? And the best they can come up with is AI-generated search nonsense? As if that’s going to help.

Stop trying to make maximum profits for minimum effort, fire whatever useless exec is in charge over there, and get someone who actually wants to fix things before someone eats your lunch, Google!

Yeah, I got that, but this was the particular part I was reacting to:

“He continued, “And applied to AI? That’s a terrifying possibility. Terrifying. Not least because as AI systems go into the defense infrastructure, ultimately they’ll be charged with nuclear weapons and if we allow people to say that that’s a separate entity from the person’s whose wielding, programming, putting AI into use, then we’re doomed.”

Possibly I misread it.

Excuse me, what? I fervently hope nobody is considering letting an “AI” get anywhere near anything nuclear! Despite whoever happens to be in the White House at any particular time, the upper echelons of the US military seem to be generally sane and smart enough to know that allowing glorified predictive text to control city-destroying superweapons is a bad idea.

AIs aren’t anything of the sort. They’re not intelligent at all, and we should stop calling them that. It just gives people weird, unrealistic ideas about their capabilities.

Exactly. To look at the mind-numbing vastness of just our galaxy let alone the hundreds of billions of others and think we’re the only ones is the height of hubris. Are they here zipping around in little silver balls that defy all known laws of physics kidnapping hillbillies and mutilating cattle? No, that’s conspiracy theory nonsense. Maybe the US government is being overzealous in classifying things, but that doesn’t mean it’s aliens, even if some guy with security clearance said, “Yeah, they’re totally real. Trust me, guys.”

Yeah, but we used to call it the information superhighway and the worldwide web. Internet IS the good term. It may well be that fediverse sticks around so long that we all get used to it, but at the moment, eh. I think if someone somewhere suggests a good alternative, we’ll all likely jump on it.

I’m still using Reddit for some stuff, but much less than I was. I have no doubt this will fully replace it at some point just as Mastodon has completely replaced Twitter for me.

Most flavours of metal, hard rock, punk, some blues stuff like SRV and Gary Moore. Basically, if it has loud guitars in it, I’m there.

Yes, I can’t stand complete silence. I have a fan going at pretty much all times, summer or winter, and I definitely can’t sleep without it. I have a white noise generator, but I prefer the fan because I’m so used to the airflow that the room feels dead and suffocating without it now.

While you’re correct, it’s just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about “surfing the information superhighway” or whatever.

There’s more than that too. Like Pixelfed for images and Funkwhale for music streaming.

Check out this Feditips thread for a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, except machine learning is also another bubble which I expect is going to burst pretty soon, so who knows where things will end up after that.

That’s true, but they’ll never be satisfied with just making some profit. There will always be a rapacious desire for infinite profits. If they could find a way to make you watch nothing but ads on there and charge you for it, they would do it. It’s only going to get worse.

If you liked Shadowrun Returns, I’d definitely recommend the sequels - Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. That first one was more of a proof of concept kind of thing. It was fun, but it was more about showing the gameplay could work. The other two are a massive improvement in the level of storytelling.

I say sequels, but they’re not actually related story or character wise. They can be played in any order. I’d say Dragonfall has the better story and Hong Kong has the better characters, but they’re both great and well worth your time.

As the meme goes, if you saw someone stealing food, no, you didn’t. Poor people gotta eat too.

Well, Microsoft can fuck the fuck off! First of all, you should own things you paid for. And second, they can’t even make Windows Update function reliably. I have no desire to have my OS stop working just because some server isn’t responding. No, thank you.

This is what I was coming here to recommend. April is a great character, and the series is really good. The first is very much old-school point & click, with the sometimes highly obscure puzzles that entails, but the story is excellent.

Definitely. Control is an absolutely fantastic game!

The navy uses wired controllers to operate periscopes, not wireless ones, and not for anything mission critical. Although I think I remember reading some military drones are or were at one point using controllers because they’re easy to train people on, but those are unmanned.

I visit here on my PC, but this is what I do for Mastodon on my phone, and it works great.

I’m sure the community is perfectly fine, but the name is gross and awful. It’s the reason I never went there on Reddit and probably won’t here either, and I don’t imagine I’m the only one. It’s not welcoming at all. It seems normal if you’re used to it, I guess, but having a Nazi reference in your name is not a good look. You’d be better off ditching it now you have the opportunity imo.