The poor whale shot itself in the back of the head twice before jumping off the roof of a 20 storey building. As it’s tradition with those who have offended Putin.

Haha, I was going to post this very meme.

I finally moved completely over from Chrome to Firefox this weekend. Fuck Edge, and fuck Chrome.

I can see how the Saudis would be pretty happy about Trump coming in again. He and his family got pretty cozy with them the first time. And Trump is very hostile to Iran, who are Saudi Arabia’s main rival in that part of the Muslim world.

So they are keeping the Mail app, but changing it so you can’t send or receive email. That seems pretty pointless. Just remove it from Windows altogether and be done with it.

Then they escaped to the Delta Quadrant.

All this was foretold in that documentary sent back from the future: Star Trek Voyager.

Not sure why you are being downvoted just for not realizing about Brave using Chromium. That seems a bit harsh.

Here’s a list of non-Chromium web browsers from August for you or anyone else who might find it helpful.

According to the wording it’s only supposed to be for children who murder someone under the auspices of terrorism. But I get the feeling the terrorism term will become the driving force for the imprisonments. Also, the condition where they can imprison children for 10 days if they are deemed to pose a threat is a really broad that is very prone to abuse.

Yeah that’s not going to happen. If we haven’t been able to make any significant inroads on mitigating climate change in the last 20 years, we sure as hell aren’t going to with the rise of strident climate change denier politicians to power all over the world. We are fucked.

I wonder how long it will be before the Supreme Court awards these sock puppet accounts with personhood, just like they did corporations.

“Oh shit, someone revealed the plan that everyone already knew about! Quick, distance ourselves from it!”

“Does that mean we’re no longer doing the plan?”

“Don’t be stupid! Of course we are still doing it! We just don’t admit it!”

Whatever she does do is just going to be reversed. Good or bad, it will be fine purely out of spite. It’s a futile exercise.

The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).

But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.

We have tried several reward systems, including rejigging the rewards and earning rules numerous times. But both us and the kids would frequently forget to award them. Then the kids would remember after 2 or 3 months and it would become a headache to try to assess.

So we’ve switched to debit cards with automatic allowance transfers. There’s also an option with the system we use to reward extra money for weekly chores, all done via the mobile app. It’s very convenient. Not least because the kids usually forget to do their chores, so they rarely earn the extra $s.

Additionally, the kids usually forget about their accounts/cards (despite frequently complaining when we say no to requests for treats or extra things). So their modest weekly allowances are gradually building up to a decent little nestegg.

But yeah, I hear ya about the concern about kids having debit cards too young. There has to be a certain level of financial awareness to really cope with them. Though the counterpoint to that is: such a mechanism helps get them to that better awareness.

Edit: fixed some autocorrect errors.

I expect Russian media is framing this as part of a grand alliance consisting of the ‘good’ half of the world. Lots of countries. The best countries. Sooo many! You know… Russia, North Korea, Belarus, China (they are soooo close to sending troops guys, we promise!), ‘Chechnyans’… Some Moldovan sycophantic trolls… Umm… Yeah.

• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Il
• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Un
• One medal for kicking 100 starving peasants
• One medal for siking Trump when Donald tried to shake his hand
• One medal for sending a trash balloon over the border to the South
• One medal for brushing his teeth
• One medal for eating caviar
• One medal for dissing Blackpink
• One medal for being in the choir for this rendition
• One medal for losing the dialup modem passwords
• One medal for finding them
• One medal to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them

And vodka. Soooooo much vodka!

Yeah, speaking as someone who grew up in the UK and had South Asian friends, the 80s (and 90s) were bad for racial intolerance and discrimination against minorities. I saw it a lot, along with the same shit directed towards black people. It was definitely a tangible part of the post-colonial culture. It’s still a problem, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Interesting article. But as a veteran developer the whole AI trend reminds me of the outsourcing trend back in the mid 2000s.

Back then Western developers (especially junior and mid levels) were seen by many companies as a waste of money. “We can pay for three developing world developers for the price we pay for one American/European one! Why are we wasting our money?!”

And so the huge wave of layoffs (fuelled also by the dot com bubble bursting and some other things) kicked off. And many companies contracted out work to India, etc. It was not looking good for us Western developers.

But then the other shoe dropped. The code being sent back was largely absolute shite. Spaghetti code, disparate platforms bound together with proverbial duct tape, no architectural best practices, design anti-patterns, etc etc. And a lot of these systems started falling apart and required Western developers and support engineers to fix them up or outright replace them.

Now, this isn’t a sleight on Indian of other developing world developers. I’ve met lots of phenomenal programmers from that part of the world. And developers there have improved a lot and now there are lots of solid options for outsourcing to there. But there’s are still language and culture barriers that are a hurdle, even today.

But I digress. My underlying point is that there are similarities with today’s situation with what has happened before. Now, it’s very possible LLMs will go to the next level in several years (or more) time. But I still think we are a ways away from having an AI engine that can build a complex, sophisticated system in a holistic way and have it capable of implement the kinda of crazy, wacky, bizarre business rules that are often needed.

Additionally, we’ve heard this whole “developers are going to be obsolete soon” thing before. For 20 years I’ve been hearing that self-writing code was just around the corner. But it wasn’t even close in reality. And even now it’s not just around the corner.

No doubt, AI will hit a whole nother level at some point. The stuff you can do with Chat GPT and the like it’s insane, even right now (though as another article here on Lenny earlier today said, quite a lot of LLM code output is of suspect quality to say the least). And I know the market is rough right now for greener developers. But I think we’re about to see history repeat itself.

Some companies will lean heavily into AI to write code, with only a few seniors basically just curating it and slapping it together. And other companies will find a middle ground of having juniors and seniors using AI to a more limited and careful level. Those latter companies will fare a lot better with the end product, and they will also be better prepared with regard to tribal knowledge transfer (which is another topic in this altogether). And when that epiphany is realized it will become the default approach. At least for another 10-20 years until AI can change things up again.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.