







Because as Terry Pratchett astutely notes in the Hogfather belief is what makes the human society possible. We invented justice, mercy, duty, laws, money etc. They exist only because we believe in them. Some beliefs make the world better, other ones worse, and we should try to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.


It’s not just using an LLM to assist. It’s more generating the whole source with an LLM, running it once to check if it seems to work (if it “vibes” good) and then publishing it without even trying to read through and understand the code.
Edit: just to clarify, the odds are that the generated code performs awfully, doesn’t handle even the simplest edge cases and has security problems.


At least in some countries authors get a compensation every time their book is borrowed from a library. So you might still be indirectly supporting the author when borrowing from a library. Also if there’s enough demand, the library may acquire additional copies and the prices for libraries are higher than for consumers.
https://equityatlas.org/how-do-authors-make-money-from-libraries/
Conversely, when you are borrowing a book from an author you like, you probably are supporting them and do not need obliged to purchase it for yourself.
In one of the Tantacrul’s videos he says that UI/UX people do try to help and share their expertise, but the programmers running the projects ignore them or are actively dismissive, so they give up.
https://youtu.be/12TJ-zTgiH0 Around 16:20
While more donations and contributors are always welcome, the thing open source projects really need to break through are project leaders and UX designers to polish the software to make it more appealing.
Blender has come a long way in recent years by concentrating on these. There are also excellent videos by Tantacrul about his work on Musescore and Audacity after he made a video about Musescore and they got in touch with him to fix the problems he brought up.
Fun fact: US has so weak food counterfeit laws and enforcement it has become the dumping ground for low quality oil or even mixed, making it an allergy hazard. If you haven’t gone out of your way to ensure you are getting the real deal, and paid a premium for it, you probably have never tasted genuine extra virgin olive oil. https://www.mashed.com/281801/the-real-reason-your-olive-oil-is-probably-fake/


The clarification on Xitter states deleting and reinstalling is 2 charges, the same as installing to 2 different devices. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20


So… If the Unity’s secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.


The Settlers games have not been Settlers games after the fourth one. Except of course the remake, but that also was a very long time ago.


Half as Interesting explained how it ended up like this. https://piped.video/watch?v=_Bq-6GeRhys
TL;DW; Amazon tried to offload vetting of the third party vendors to the patent and trademark office by requiring their brands are registered, but the vendors ended up generating nonsense brand names that automatically pass because there are too many applications and the names aren’t obviously going to conflict with existing ones.


That is exactly what happened with third pound burgers.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/


That’s the difference, they hoard wealth and not currency. The value of assets do not go down when currency loses its value with inflation.
Wealthy have little to no cash that would lose value with inflation, they just buy everything on credit and have their wealth tied to assets and investments that probably gain value at least at the pace of inflation.
Yes, I do. A lot. Starting from elementary school when a class mate had a really weird pronunciation of Harry Potter.
Some of my embarrassing memories aren’t even something I did, but something I cringed hard at when I saw or heard it. Sometimes I am so afraid someone else is going to embarrass themself I have to block my ears so I don’t hear it.


“smart” devices aka Internet asbestos


I have become so clumsy with the wires, it was less wasteful for me to buy wireless earbuds with wire only between them. The modern codecs are high quality and I only use them outside, so the nuance would be anyway lost.
Smart speakers I do not have. I feel weird talking to devices and I would have to do it in English because they support my native language poorly if at all. I’m not sure if they even are officially available here.
Everything unnecessarily connected to the Internet should have this on them, because they have very little security auditing and all support is dropped very early on the lifetime of the appliance. https://kissa.depili.fi/internet_asbestos_52x32_cmyk.pdf