toebert

Thank you for the succinct answer!

Do these lawsuits backfire if the ones suing lose? Cuz this is very clearly not on valve to sort but the games. I’m guessing they are hoping to strike gold with 1 lawsuit as opposed to having to go after the game developers individually, who may just stop using their work in the future which valve can’t do… because they don’t use their work already.

But is it just a case you made lawsuit you lost, oh well some lawyer fees and it’s over? Or do they have to pay valve for wasting their time and their legal expenses too?

I don’t follow your reasoning, you support the current laws enacted by the government in this area (age verification, proposing ban from social media) but you end your comment saying you disagree with the government nannying kids as they do a poor job of it. Those seem contradictory?

Also, you don’t need a VPN to get around the current set of age verification crap. All you need to do is to look at smaller providers, which the government ignored because it’s unfeasible to regulate them. Or providers from different countries who just straight up don’t care. It’s not even hard to find these, pretty much just page 2 of Google.

The point being, any of these laws are unenforceable in reality. Preventing access to porn is not feasible in today’s world. It was not feasible 30 years ago when the internet barely existed, except then yes it was magazines (and porn was still popular then because sex has always been popular in the history of humanity). In today’s world if it came down to it I imagine it’d be SD cards or usb sticks. You seem to imagine it like walking into a store, in reality it’d be the 1 kid who got his older brother to download him porn and then sells it in school to his classmates for a few quid.

These existed for pirated movies and games ages ago when access to them was harder. There is no need for this today because it’s easier to get it from the internet. If the government magically managed to change that (which is doubtful), these would just re-appear because there’d be money to make. Same story as drugs.

Regarding your last point, you phrased it like you were disagreeing with what I said, but basically just suggested the same but with concrete examples (re: better support for parents and the education system). I’m not sure what to make of that.

There is no way the kids who grew up with technology in their lives from the start won’t find ways to work around it, especially when pitted against the people coming up with these legislations who struggle to understand the basics of technology.

Even if kids were to be completely banned from the internet and it somehow magically was enforceable, they’d just end up buying physical porn.

If they actually wanted improvement, they’d fund support for parents and the educational system so kids grow up in environments that teach them good values and feel safe in. But instead, we get this meaningless duct tape that’ll still probably cost a fortune for us, and will be unenforceable for anything but the biggest porn providers/distributors.

I guess when they can just get infinite money out of thin air it doesn’t matter if they waste it.

It is good news to see them work on something that’s almost certain to fail to speed up their fall tho.

Yes. I have tried various agents over the last ~1.5 years on multiple occasions on a bunch of different kinds of engineering type tasks. So far there has been a total of 1 time where the output was reasonable enough that I could build on it and not feel ashamed of the result (and that time probably saved me like half an hour). All other times, I wasted a bunch of time debugging crap and then just wrote the thing from scratch myself.

The closest I’ve come to somewhat consistent success with them is when I struggled to come up with a good search query for an issue I was having and after asking a longer prompt to an LLM it either gave me a close enough answer that I could figure it out from there, or the answer included some keywords that helped me come up with a query that got the results I needed.

By and large, I consider them crap for anything beyond the basics. On the other hand, I absolutely understand why they may look great in cases where the person using them doesn’t have an idea of what the output should look like. They’re a minimal productivity boost at best, at an insane cost.

There are also many apps which will give you a “personalized” one, i.e. asks you like 5 questions about how experienced and fit you are and what equipment you have access to/what do you want to work on.

So, even the exact use-case is better served already.

I agree with what you’re saying but to credit them, they’re offering to a bit beyond that.

Reduce strain on the grid. We’re investing in curtailment systems that cut our data centers’ power usage during periods of peak demand, as well as grid optimization tools, both of which help keep prices lower for ratepayers.

As much as I hate them, I think this decent from them - I only wish it was the government and the electricity providers which did this, but I bet if they were doing it, it’d be people’s power being turned off…

The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it’s pretty easy to tell someone you need to run “xyz -a -b -c” (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like “so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you’re looking for the 2nd tab and there’ll be a checkbox”.

The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.

The perceived speed by the judge would really depend on how rich you are. I’d bet that if you’re rich enough, you’d get away with a thank you note and the person you punched who violently headbutted your fist going to prison.

Honestly McDonald’s is one of the worst foods you can eat and there are few places in the UK you can’t order it, so as far as making the food options worse for kids… eh I don’t see it either.

Some of the arguments are good in the article, e.g. the places where there are multiple dark kitchens sharing the same place and equipment, ensuring allergy requirements are followed for each seems hard.

That being said there is actually an issue with them which is not really mentioned (and it’s as much an issue with the delivery apps). They can be listed as available without a food safety certification. It shows in most of the apps, but it’s only if you actually look for it really. It makes it so easy to just create a new digital storefront and sell crap. Maybe your reviews bomb in 3-4 weeks enough that people stop ordering, but hey just make a new one from the same place and you’re back in business.

I’ve found these places can be rather annoying in smaller towns (I live in one now), but not really a big deal in cities cuz there are so many options there. There are about 4 “different” burger places here on the apps that are the same place (same items on the menu but different names, same pictures even, same address listed, very similar prices) and it’s inedible - there’s a separate group of 3-4 for Mexican food, same situation. They did pretty much what I described above, one showed up, it was shit, lasted a few months and it’s now at 3 stars or similar then another “new” one showed up and followed the same path and so on. It’s too easy to sign up as a “restaurant”.

It also makes it kind of an exercise to order from a new place and have to investigate if it’s gonna be just the same garbage or if it’s a genuine new place.

I think the solution would be forcing the apps the confirm a food certification with a business name matching it before allowing them to sell food. It’d help with the renaming, and also with the food safety concerns.

I’m pretty sure the dlc thing is already possible. Guild wars 2 at least works this way, you can buy the game/dlcs either via steam or via their own store and then you can install and run the game either via steam or via their own launcher (although IIRC the steam way still has the launcher).

It’s probably more of a case of steam providing a convenient way for developers to not need their own account system, so rather than them creating their own solution that integrates with steam and other sources, they just straight up use Steam’s way.

To be honest I’d love it if they forced a way for steam and other shops to allow migrating your games between them, so I could take all the free games from epic but never use it. Currently my compromise is to just never use it and skip the free games.

The UK is not part of the EU. The lawsuit is not by the UK (or the EU), it’s just in the UK court.

Luckily, the focus is on the important things. The government doesn’t have the resources to help the people who can’t afford to eat, when there are such problems still around as kids using social media.

Somehow food and shelter doesn’t seem to make it into the “protect the kids” bills they push…

/s, just in case

I’m excited for the next once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis as it’ll hopefully mean the AI bubble will have burst.

Nothing, if that was your point then I misunderstood what you were suggesting - also perfectly valid.

I think 75% is apt here, tailwind is incredibly popular and most people wouldn’t know how many engineers they have. If it said “tailwind let 3 people go” I bet most (including me) would assume alright… tailwinds big they may have 30-50 people around… 3 is not too bad right?

I also disagree with this being entirely bullshit, I think he is right that the impact of AI has made the situation worse for him by impacting his most valuable sales funnel (their own documentation pages). But separately, it is a very populated space (UI libraries) with multiple options to compete with, some of which are rather well established and free - so it was an uphill battle to begin with.

“Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he added. He then goes on to explain that “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.”

People no longer need to look at their docs or their website because they ask AI how to do something with tailwind instead, so they no longer get to expose and advertise their product (tailwind plus).

Tailwind plus is a one time payment, not a subscription. If there are no new customers to buy it, their income is gone.

I worked for a reasonably successful startup in IT, and quit around the time when investors started calling for their returns. It went from the focus being providing good service to selling something, anything, whether we have it or not to boost the books before the end of next quarter. Every quarter. Our sales team who used to be part of the product design process and knew more about our product than some engineers were getting replaced with people who didn’t even know the name of features. They just made up things to potential customers and straight up lied, once the paper was signed they were done.

It was demoralising to see and go through this, I was a tech team lead for one of our core products and the requirements were mad. Every customer started becoming their own product because of all the overpromising, and it was all the absolute bare minimum. Anyhow, I was on good terms with the remaining few old sales people as we had worked together a lot prior to this mess.

I remember sitting in a meeting with some higher management and one of these older sales guys where he was saying he does not know what to do anymore and needs help or we need to change something as it’s impossible to do his job well anymore with these expectations that we just abandon customers as soon as they’re signed and chase new business. He broke down crying during the call while he was explaining how soul crushing it was to have to do this to people - build up a relationship, convince them to pay us and then ignore them immediately. There was an awkward quiet in the room when he finished and the “top dog” in the room just said “try to detach yourself, it’s just business” and then we moved on.

I saw myself becoming that man in a year, maybe 2 tops. I started interviewing the next day and found a new job in about 2 weeks (luckily this was when IT was booming and recruiters were lining up for anyone with engineer in their title). The company has since been sold multiple times and completely exhausted to a husk. The last sale I’m pretty sure was just a large enterprise acquiring staff and some tech.

“A large open world to explore!” - by slowly walking or teleporting.