Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

“vendored my library”

I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

One of my favourite Yorkshire dialect jokes is how “tin tin tin” can mean the complete sentence “It isn’t in the tin”

That’s a really cool idea actually. I knew a guy who used to install viruses for fun on a separate machine that wasn’t networked. I bet a more creative person than I could probably figure out a fun learning activity for kids using a “disposable” system

Comment that I’m adding on a couple of friends’. One lives in Norway, one lived in India. They told me that both of these places have an issue with accessing media and other digital goods legitimately, often finding themselves willing but unable to pay for something (I was surprised to hear this about Norway — my friend speculates that Norway is small enough that it might simply be forgotten about when big media companies negotiate rights). They both said that VPNs and piracy are way more normalised in their home countries, because it was either that, or miss out on loads of stuff.

Feel it’s useful and important to highlight that the degree to which piracy is normalised depends on where you are.

Ah, you must have access to the same internet library that my Dad used whenever I’d give him my iPod and a list of music, and he’d return it to me full of music. I don’t remember when I realised that he was pirating stuff, probably about the time that I started pirating stuff.

I’m not sure. I don’t plan on having kids, so this is a purely theoretical question that I won’t have to answer in practice, but I think I probably would, at least to some degree.

I had a pretty iconically millennial childhood when it comes to tech; I remember my mum being on the phone to the internet people and asked “he’s offering me an unlimited packaged for [money] extra. Is that good, do we need that?”, to which my brother and and I vigorously nodded. We were young enough we didn’t know shit, but unlimited sounded good and we weren’t paying the bills. My mum probably realised we didn’t know what unlimited Vs metered internet meant in practice, and opted for unlimited as the safe option, because if she felt the need to ask her children for advice, she wouldn’t be great at managing a metred connection. That’s the context in which I grew up and is why I’m as techy as I am today.

I learned the hard way, and whilst I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to learn, I don’t know how one might teach people how to recognise which “download” button to press, and when a dodgy looking site is actually dodgy. It’s like internet street smarts, but what that means has changed since I was a kid, and I don’t necessarily know how I’d teach that beyond the basics, like installing adblockers and other common sense things.

Haha yeah, I get what you mean. I think the author might mean “people who actively choose to do primarily web programming”, and isn’t being sarcastic. It’s baffling to me too, but I am glad that this subsection of odd challenge seekers exist, even if I can’t fathom people genuinely loving web programming.

That made me real sad in a way. It’s a beautiful story, but I wish Nichelle Nichols could’ve gone into theatre like she wanted. There was a quote from a black feminist group that I can’t find now that said something about how it isn’t really a choice to become a fighter to resist oppression, because if they could choose, they’d choose something else, that they want to do, rather than what they are compelled to do. The reason to be a fighter is to try to make it so that the black little girls of the future can be free to self-realise.

It was an impactful quote because I felt like it acknowledged the respect that is due to people who fight for a better world, while also not excluding the grief and sorrow that comes from recognising that to commit to a cause is a sacrifice that wouldn’t have needed to be made in a just world.

I know that Nichelle Nichols’ work and activism extends far beyond Star Trek, but underlying it all is a deep sense of duty that I find at once beautiful and sad.

That reminds me of a fairly recent article about research around visualisation systems to aid with interpretable or explainable AI systems (XAI). The idea was that if we can make AI systems that explain their reasonings, then they can be a useful tool, especially in the hands of domain experts.

Turns out that actually, the fancy visualisations that made it easier to understand how the model had come to a conclusion actually made subject matter experts less accurate in catching errors. This surprised researchers and when they later tried to make sense of it, they realised that they had inadvertently dialled up people’s likelihood to trust the model because it looked legit.

One of my favourite aphorisms is “all models are wrong, some are useful.” Seems that the tricky part is figuring out how wrong and how useful.

Oh man, as someone who’s been interfacing with a lot of university bureaucracy lately, this is so on point it hurts. I feel like you could get a press release from my university and swap in some Star Trek words and it’d be a similar vibe.

“The fact that Kratos isn’t the same person he was in the old series is basically the entire point.”

I always feel a little bit sorry for rage bigots like this, because of how dull their world and experiences must be. Like if he felt that the new Kratos felt narratively unsatisfying, or that his journey felt unsatisfying, that’d at least be an opinion with the potential to be interesting. But nah, it’s just “things are different”, with embedded implication that different = bad.

I hope your visit to the Dr goes okay, OP!

Ha, I didn’t get it, but now I do. That is quite a funny joke now you’ve explained it. Comedy is indeed hard

To be clear, I’m in agreement with you that CSS and HTML are not programming languages and also that saying that isn’t a value judgement.

I’m a scientist, and “Not a real programming language” gives me big vibes of arguing that a thing is a science (usually economics) because they’re using “is a science” as a proxy when they actually mean to say that their field is important and valuable.

I’ve dabbled enough with CSS that I know how much I don’t know, and I don’t think respect for a skillset is (or should be) measured by whether a thing is a “real programming language”

This, but not even in a joking way; In The Pale Moonlight was my late best friend’s favourite episode of Trek, and I watched DS9 with him. This line will always make me think of him