I’ll let someone much smarter than me speak to this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM&t=4420

Exclusive, luxury

Just waiting for another xz utils situation

Hey there, cutter.

If you’re really after the deconstruction aspect, then I’m not sure there’s a whole lot out there. But if you zoom out to the level of “methodically tinkering with a system that requires careful attention”, there’s a lot of those.

Hardship Breakspacer is part of a (pseudo-)genre known as “dad games”.

• Powerwash Sim
• Viscera Cleanup Detail
• Goblin Cleanup
• Pacific Drive
• Papers Please
• Quarantine Zone
• House Flipper 2
• Star Trucker
• Dredge

On the “hardcore nerd” end of the spectrum, there’s even:

• Satisfactory
• Factorio
• Scrap Mechanic
• Any Zachtronics game

A little more chill:

• Unpacking
• Potion Craft
• Please Fix The Road

Edit: Or for the “scraping my way through out in space” vibe, but less tinkering:

• Endless Sky (free and open source!)
• FTL

Edit 2: Also, repair is probably an applicable theme:

• ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs
• Car Mechanic Simulator
• Space Mechanic Simulator

Pleads for asylum for a persecuted refugee

DHS: “And I took that personally”

The horrible names of these things…

o4-mini, not to be confused with 4o-mini

And 4o, not to be confused with 4 (aka 4.0 or v4, but 4V is different)

The loot boxes require skill? How?

Found this study, but no mention of skill influencing the outcome of opening a loot box.

Ehh, x86 SoC consoles will always have an advantage vs x86 SoC PCs, because PCs need to treat iGPUs as PCIe peripherals rather than co-processors, which has significant performance penalties and a low ceiling due to bottlenecked heat dissipation.

The Steam Frame should get you worried about x86 consoles, because if devs start publishing native ARM builds for desktop then this whole accidental iGPU performance moat goes away.

Buuut it should also get you excited about ARM consoles.

Star Ocean

Kinda more like:

I dig it. Wishlisted.

I have a rare disease where I can only buy Steam games that are on sale, but the next time that happens I’m all over it.

X axis: % of public support a measure

Y axis: % of legislators who support a measure

AI has ruined the rhetorical technique of “this isn’t just <basic neutral descriptor> — it’s <related descriptor with specific connotation>”

Also, like… the fact that it has a compiler. It’s like saying C is incompatible with assembly because you can’t yeet a .c file at an assembler.

Yeah, that’s uhh… that’s technically true for very strange and specific definitions of “compatibility”… but it wildly misses the point of TypeScript. Not sure what he was thinking there.

Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk

All IP laws are fundamentally “honor system”. The idea of digital locks is a pipe dream, only possible as long as legal threats scare people away from looking too closely at how the lock works.

But every digital lock can be broken, because we only know how to make one type of computer: the turing-complete universal von neumann machine. It can run any program, as long as it’s presented the right way.

So yes, it’s piracy. Just like how the crime of “breaking and entering” means “breaking the seal” and entering without permission (not necessarily breaking a physical lock), piracy just means unauthorized use of IP-law-protected content (not necessarily breaking a digital lock).

Breaking a digital lock is an additional crime on top of piracy, under the DMCA. 5 years and 50k fine for a first offense, I believe.

Now as to whether we should even have a concept of “piracy” to begin with… that’s a reasonable question.

I was gonna say… “no internet connection required” is not the key attribute of AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even require a network connection. It’s a weird comparison.

Beautifully put.

I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.

Big agree.

But also: people seem to only focus on the output side of the task of writing code, and forget that the developer also receives input from the codebase in return.

Even if you end up with exactly the same code artifact after completing a work item, you’ll have a better understanding of the codebase without delegating swaths of it to AI. But bosses tend not to consider this.

Tech bros have successfully convinced people that mental states do not exist, or at least do not matter — for laborers, anyway, cuz they’ll happily claim that their superior thoughts are exactly why they deserve to be billionaires.