Wasn’t it also just reported a few weeks ago that Samsung installs Israeli spyware on android devices sold in MENA?

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-appcloud-spyware-controversy-3616325/

NYT sucks and I canceled my subscription, but the third archive link on removepaywall.com still works to get around their robot messages and puzzles.

Alton sure has the best recommendations for getting that beautiful mahogany skin. Perfectly executed! Nice cook.

I agree. Dying is way, way less scary to me than a slow decline with dementia or a long, painful battle with cancer. No issues with death, I just hope it’s quick.

I have my mom’s 1967 edition with recipes for muskrat and opossum! And as the spine has completely disintegrated on that one, I also have a newer copy without the instructions on how to prepare small game. Still a kitchen staple.

I recommend picking up an analog, wood pulp-based copy of The Joy of Cooking. Pretty much any classic western dish is in there and you don’t need to worry about AI slop.

I also love my copy of The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. That one is a little more global, and has I think 500+ pages of recipes with minimal irrelevant anecdotes.

Retirement planning

Every time anyone rejects Microsoft’s shitty bloatware/spyware it’s a win. I just converted a few months ago. Win11 is going to push more and more people away.

You should look it up. It’s a fantastic story with incredible art and design. Reasonably priced with a ton of content.

I feel like Nintendo gets a consolation slot with whatever the best game was in their closed ecosystem, but it’s not going to be competitive with the other candidates.

I also think they’ll give GOTY to an indie given what an unbelievable year it was for indie titles. Probably COE33, just based on the quality and production value they accomplished with a relatively small team and budget. But Silksong and Hades are also outstanding.

I read “when I try to buy some gems” as “stupid.”

I work in a high power field and we straight up cancel projects because we get quoted six year lead times more and more often. We can’t absorb the lost revenue.

There are some places that have grown so quickly, like downtown Denver, that capacity is just completely tapped out. And you either pay millions for feeder upgrades that won’t be ready until 2032 or you just move on.

Sometimes we ride in on the coattails of a data center that pays for the upgrades and leaves a few MW left over, but even electric service equipment never had its lead times fall since the pandemic. Projects that used to take eight months now take two years or longer. Not an easy time to be agile.

Heck, the present is ublock origin!

Amazon recommended me a book by Charlie Kirk. I guess the algorithm hasn’t got me yet.

I agree the most with that you called it a toy. It’s fun to play with.

In very limited cases, it can be a tool - but I’ve asked GPT5 to summarize complex policy documents that I know inside and out and it gets a huge amount wrong or just makes things up.

It’s getting shoehorned into business when it is nowhere even close to the functionality and accuracy it needs in that space.

And worst of all, it’s utterly destroying the web. Half of what I find in search results these days is AI slop with that baby’s-first-essay writing style and weasel words aplenty.

It has a few applications in small, targeted tasks, but on balance I think businesses are vastly overestimating its utility as a productivity tool.

Honestly, not a bad idea. Synthesizing and iterating, taking things out of context, combining elements you haven’t before - that’s how you get something interesting.

Ubi’s problem is that their gameplay loops are completely stale. There just isn’t enough new and different, the stories are trite, the dialogue is shit, and everything is boring and predictable.

I somewhat enjoyed the first Assassin’s Creed, but was a little bitter it wasn’t the Prince of Persia game they’d intended the engine for. I didn’t find “walking slowly to blend in with a crowd” to be as fun as the intense combat and tight platforming of Sands of Time. But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.

I’m actually playing The Lost Crown now and - not that I’m the first to observe this - but I feel like it’s the best thing Ubi has done since The Two Thrones twenty years ago. This is the kind of risk that Ubi should be taking. Modest games, smaller budgets, new genres. Diversify and let the creatives create. Let small projects succeed and give them a sequel. If small projects fail, it doesn’t break the bank. But for christ’s sake stop releasing the same three giant boring games over and over.

“No, no, hear me out. It’s exactly the same game. The same thing we make every single time. But this time, it’s in… Egypt.”

“Holy shit! What a maverick! Who is that guy? I like the way he thinks. Give him a corner office and the same budget we gave the Greece one!”

I’ve also used it successfully for those kinds of special cases - particularly translating complicated medical documents back and forth to Japanese due to my wife’s treatment.

But I think the caution here is overreliance. Using it in a university setting, where you feed it everything you were supposed to read and understand, and having it write down all the analysis that you were meant to analyze, and what have you personally gained as a result? The article cites students who couldn’t even recall what they’d “written” after submitting an assignment.

You can use it as a tool, or you can use it as a crutch. If you outsource your whole thought process to a computer, I can see the detriment.

You’re completely right. It sounds from the article like they flailed around a lot trying to figure out what that could be before settling for “do what you know.”

A huge amount of time and energy wasted without a clear vision, and then they fell into the trap of trying to chase the success of other games.

I actually went with Tuxedo OS, which is based on the Ubuntu kernel but has a very noob-friendly desktop environment.

My daily driver laptop is a 12-year-old Hackintosh MBP that I’ve been repairing for years, but I’ve priced out a Tuxedo laptop for when it finally kicks the bucket. So I started dual booting Tuxedo on that as well to get my bearings.

Once I’m a little more experienced, I’m definitely interested to check out other distros! Right now it’s a lot of looking up terminal commands and learning the architecture. The firmware fan control in the MacBook is shot - fans blasting at full speed due to a failed GPU temp sensor that makes the computer assume it’s overheating - so I’ve already learned how to write to /sys/ with a custom fan control based on the working sensor in the CPU die.

It’s been really fun so far. You get the sense of just having vastly greater control over the hardware at a low level and the ability to control how it functions in a way that Windows and MacOS completely obfuscate. I still have very little idea what I’m doing in the terminal, but I’m starting to pick it up.