I even don’t care about trust or whatever drama of the day is going on with LTT. I’m just sick beyond any measure of all that clickbait shit.

What about an emulator like 86box or so? And which game is it?

“Evidence”? What a quaint concept.

As a Bavarian (South of Germany) I agree with the Ch at the start of the word being pronounced like a K (Chiemsee starts with the sound K), but with it depends on the region. I start “China” and “Chemie” with K, but a lot of people start it with “sch” (which sounds like sh in English). But that’s really weird for my ears.

And the father of my ex wife is from Cologne, his “ch” sound quite like “sh” as well. Kirche (church) sounds like Kirsche (cherry) when he says it. Funnily his last name has two “ch”.

When coding (my main job since lot of years) I like to use LLMs for brainstorming, reviewing my code for the “quickly visible” errors etc. Oh, and I found out LLMS are not bad explaining query plans and suggesting optimizations for SQL queries in PostgreSQL. I feel the older a technology is (when there’s a lot of reference materials available) the better LLMs are with those topics.

But don’t put them to the task of suggesting something on new tech or creative. They lie without blushing. And in the end you just get a “Good Catch, that can’t really work” for wasting your time.

I think you need to get a feel for what they can and can’t do. In any event all the shit they are being pushed for - that will “go well”. Ah recently, I saw claude or so being able to edit exel sheets. Yep. Combine the most untestable tool guilty of producing tons of false data with LLMs. WHAT COULD GO WRONG!!! Users blindly asking the llm to do stuff in excel and then just betting their companies on the results…

LLMs are fucking useful, but there’s not yet a good business model. You can switch to any system at any time, so everyone is trying to forcefeed you their own version of it ro get you hooked. But in the end they’re just annoying the hell out of users.

German is my native language , so yes. It sounds a lot different from what you might think if you can’t speak “ch”. But if you’re American…

Please read this German sentence aloud:

Ich suche den Koch.

(I’m looking for the chef.)

Which is an important thing to check for, if you ever buy a used car. Some not-so-honest used car dealerships sell cars which have persistent ECU faults - which would result in a check engine light. To prevent the buyers from seeing these they just snip off the check engines LED from the instrument cluster board.

Here in Germany, there have been several fraud cases where car dealers don’t actually own the cars they’re selling. Instead, they’re selling them on consignment for someone else. That means when you buy the car, you don’t really know who the actual seller is, as the dealer just can say “ah, sorrybI didn’t know about that” . It’s a strange setup — and quite risky for the buyer, because it makes it hard to any legal rights if something goes wrong.

Btw these cars frequently are from salvage auctions in the us, then sent to eastern Europe to be fixed up so they look good from the outside and last being sold on small “used car” dealer lots as “pigs with lipstick”.

Anything else, sir?

Fortunately in English classes (I learned English at school) we read Macbeth. There’s a lot of layers to Shakespeare - for example a lot of allusions which you’ll only understand when you know about the time it was written in. And our English teacher dragged in a native speaker to help out with conversation, who was a student living in my town.

In German (my native language) however, we were presented a poem without not enough context about the author and had to answer “what’s the meaning of this”. Most of the German teachers I had were boring, lazy or both.

Your literature problem - I had that in German, Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig”. Yeah, I as a teenager was so eager to read about the homoerotic thoughts of an older man traveling to Venice and lusting about a young boy. Yes, of course it’s symbolic but - fuuuuck me, really? Do I need to read that.

Mark Twain has written an essay about the “awful German Language” (I don’t agree). Amongst other things he complained about long sentences.

Ha! He know NOTHING! He had not seen the works of Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann must have been hugely intelligent. He managed to write a single sentence that is too long for a single fucking book page. With a random number of subclauses in between. Exploiting all the cleartext encryption mechanisms the German language allows! With the most boring content a teenager in the height of puberty can not relate to.

I still have a visceral hate for Thomas Mann. In my 40s I thought I’d give that book another chance. Nope. Still hate it.

Ah, soon I’m 40 years past school and I still get PTSD about it.

No no no.

In school in higher education we had to interpret poems.

I am definitely sure, that neither the author’s opinion or my opinion are relevant. It is only the teacher’s opinion that is relevant.

(Do I need the /s?)

Eating it cold is even faster and still better than microwaving it into a mush.

MICROWAVE?!?!!! Who puts Pizza in a microwave? That’s probably the worst way possible to heat it up. It’d rather eat it cold.

Put it in an oven (or yes, a pan).

Ah fuck I hate that, when people go to work sick and infect everyone else. (Yes I understand you need to, and it’s not your fault. So I hate your boss.)

The history is interesting, we got health insurance and paid leave in the 1880s from Bismarck. He was trying to appease workers so they won’t flock to the socialist or social democrat parties which were booming at that time. At the same time Bismarck outlawed left wing parties. (It was a stick and carrot approach).

In 1969 we had a bipartisan left - right government (“great coalition”) and they put up to 6 weeks of paid sick leave into. law.

My ex-wife and me divorced amicably, so we still talk.

One day, about two years after separtion she called me whether I still had my credit card.

(Typically we pay by payment cards called ec or giro card - but they don’t habe a credit card number, so not usable for ordering something from overseas)

So I said, yes, why. “Uhm, I want to buy something from the US” she answerf with skirting around the topic.

A certain assumption forms in my mind, as she speaks on I’m getting more sure every moment.

I answer: Look, <ex-wife>, don’t try to order the Hitachi Magic Wand from the US. It can’t be imported due to the no-lead-in-electric-devices law. And even if it arrived you 'd need a transformer for plugging it into our 230V system. Just buy one of the knockoffs available on Amazon in Europe

She : “Um (pause), OK”

Some years later my teenage kids found it when they were at her place. They asked her what it was and she said “a microphone”. I swear by my kids, the “it is a microphone” meme happened once in my family in real life. (And of course these teenagers knew what it was).

Over here in Germany there’s no sick pay when you’re self employed, but there is (by law) when you are an employee.

I had been self employed from my 20s to 50s and am an employee for 6 years now.

I was in hospital last week to get my back fixed and am on sick leave for 4-6 weeks now. It’s still fucking amazing to me, that I can heal up now and will still get my payment into my account end of the month.

Having things like that written into law is amazing.

You will get a lot of lasagna and only read unfunny boomer memes for a month.

Exactly, Just regular misinformation - not AI. As long as it is created by a human people will upvote any slop.

I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.

And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.

All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.

When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.