Well if it’s voluntary and the staff gets paid their usual wage - one would assume a higher one than the warehouse folks get - I don’t really see the problem. It doesn’t make sense to try and hire folks for just a few days of peak workload. Not if you can manage it by shifting some folks around. Heck, I’m sure some will appreciate the change of scenery.

I had so many experiences like that. I was a voracious reader as a kid. I was reading books in English (my second language) about topics such as aeronautics and space exploration. I was reading far, far above the level of any classmates. And that lead persisted all through college.

Every time a new teacher would give us an essay assignment, I’d get called out to stay after class once they graded it. And they’d casually accuse me of plagiarism.

My usual response? Quiz me, right the fuck now, on any paragraph you want from that 20 page paper. And ask me the definition of any word you’re unfamiliar with. That shut them up right quick.

A large vocabulary is its own reward, but not so much when those who’re supposed to teach you are lacking in that department.

Exactly. Back in 1995, my dad could never get online. Heck, he couldn’t even remotely figure out a PC. We tried to teach him some basics like ‘click with the left mouse button to open something’, but he was downright scared of the thing. He never, ever touched it.

But ‘thanks’ to the iPad, he’s e-mailing, on Facebook, on YouTube, TikTok etc. Which also has the unfortunate effect of subjecting him to boomer brainrot. He’s now more actively misinformed than he used to be because of that fucking iPad.

We’ve made the web accessible to people who shouldn’t be on it. Because it’s hurting them and hurting society as a whole.

I’ve been online since 1995. I weep for what we lost. The web should have stayed a nerd domain. We’d have been better off as a society.

Do watch Andor. It’s not just good Star Wars, it’s ‘good TV’ in general. And I say that as someone who hates modern Star Wars with a passion. Andor’s excellent.

God yes. I was one of the first people to buy it. Back when you had to send Notch himself five bucks to play it. I was interested in the concept, but frankly didn’t think it would have much appeal beyond people who enjoy completely self-guided experiences with no set goals.

How wrong I was.

It’s been wild seeing it rise to the top of the pop culture heap, become popular with 12 year olds and eventually result in me seeing a movie starring Jack Black based on it.

It’s wild that it started with me and a handful of guys sending Notch a fiver.

Goddamnit yes. It’s why I’m very pro-gatekeeping. Because people who are new to a hobby because it got popular tend to ruin every-fucking-thing.

For example: flight simulator. That used to be an exclusively nerd domain up until the FS2020 version, which was released on Xbox. The result: a massive influx of new garbage payware and a decline in quality of established brands. While also making the sim worse in order to chase broader appeal. It’s gotten a bit better after covid went away and the normies dropped the hobby, thankfully.

Also: film photography. The popularity of instagram and YouTube ‘influencers’ got a lot of people into our hobby the past decade. It’s lead to increased gear prices, film being more difficult to get and the forums flooding with the dumbest possible questions, since these newcomers are allergic as fuck to reading manuals or watching any tutorial longer than thirty seconds. It’s also lead camera manufacturers to chase this new demographic by making their cameras shittier and more ‘instagram-friendly’. Here’s looking at you, Fujifilm and your shitty X-half.

Take it from someone who’s been around a bit: if you like a thing, keep newcomers away from it. Gatekeep it like the Berlin Fucking Wall, lest they completely fuck up your hobby.

It’s pretty ball-sweatingly hot here in the Netherlands as well. Expecting 35c tomorrow and 36-38 on Wednesday.

Problem is, few houses and buildings are equipped to deal with heat like that. Everything’s well insulated, but built more for cold winters rather than hot summers. Every year, more people get air conditioning. Because you need to. It’s that or be miserable for two weeks straight. Anything above 20 makes me want to hit people.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the factors is ‘we stopped beating kids’. Back in ye olden days, they’d hit kids until they stopped being ‘weird’. You obviously can’t do that today.

It definitely wasn’t mainstream here in the Netherlands up until the mid 1990’s from my perspective. Any guy who did things with another guy was ‘gay’, irrespective of anything that they might engage in with women.

I imagine if that guy grew up in say, the 70’s UK, they genuinely might not have been aware that ‘bisexual’ was a thing you could be.

For this comment, I want to be absolutely clear that I do not give a shit about AI, and that it in no way factored into my decision to buy this iPhone 16 Pro Max.

With that disclaimer out of the way:

I very much look forward to a class action lawsuit. Apple advertised specific features as coming ‘very soon’ and gave short timeframes when asked directly. And they basically did not deliver on those advertising promises. Basically, I think there’s a good case to be made here that Apple knowingly engaged in false advertising in order to sell a phone that otherwise would not have sold as well. Those promised AI features WERE a deciding factor for a lot of people to upgrade to an iPhone 16.

So, I’ll be looking forward to some form of compensation. It’s the principle of it.

Even my local supermarket has like ‘258 vendors and affiliates’ as their cookie listing.

Can you imagine shopping in person there, and the entire supermarket packed to the gills with dudes in trenchcoats and magnifying glasses, taking a peak at the exact product that I might consider buying? That’s what they’re doing. Fuck all that bullshit.

We’ll also welcome our Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica brethren, obviously :D

Only a fool or a 12 year old would think otherwise. Back in the late ‘90’s, the web had a great sense of community. On forums, IRC, places like Cybertown, etc. You had smaller communities where you could reasonably know most users. They had a human scale; like a friendly neighbourhood.

Modern social media is definitely terrible. It happened because we were too welcoming. Back in those days, the web was a nerd domain. We all shared the same sort of interests and optimism for the future of the web. You had to BE a nerd to get online. To WANT to be online.

But now that it’s too easy for everyone to get on, the idiots have taken over. We really should kick everyone off the web who can’t name at least three characters from either Star Wars or Star Trek.

I’ve seen interviews with him where he mentioned: ‘I was reading a synopsis of a story that sounded really interesting’ only to discover that it was about a book that he had written. And apparently he has no memory of writing Cujo.

There’s ‘doing coke’ and ‘doing coke so much I forgot I wrote a fucking best selling novel’.

I’ll check out Brave, it’s been mentioned a few times.

I don’t mind companies making a dime, but now it’s really devolved in bad results that are profit-driven.

What’s the best alternative, in your opinion? I’ve tried Bing and DuckDuckGo, but both showed me worse results for my particular searches.

I just want classic Google Search back, before everything got turned to shit. But I fear that doesn’t really exist since there’s such an economic incentive behind how search engines rank and show results.

That fucking AI thing absolutely sucks for anything factual. I’m a journalist and noticed that it gleefully listed all sorts of factual errors in that AI summary. Stuff that you can see correctly on the original pages, but it somehow manages to misinterpret everything and shows incorrect information.

And knowing how lazy people are these days, most will happily accept Google’s incorrect information as fact. It’s making me very, very nervous for the future.

And one funny addendum to that story is that someone COULD reasonably think that Pepsi had an actual Harrier to give away. After all, Pepsi once owned an actual navy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PepsiCo

In 1989, amidst declining vodka sales, PepsiCo bartered for 2 new Soviet oil tankers, 17 decommissioned submarines (for $150,000 each), a frigate, a cruiser and a destroyer, which they could in turn sell for non-Soviet currency. The oil tankers were leased out through a Norwegian company, while the other ships were immediately sold for scrap.

The Harrier commercial aired in 1996. The Harrier jet was introduced in 1978. It wasn’t too unreasonable to think that an 18 year old jet aircraft would be decommissioned and sold, especially after Soviet tensions eased. And if ‘they’ let Pepsi own actual submarines and a destroyer, doesn’t that seem more far fetched than owning a single old jet aircraft?

Guy should’ve gotten his Harrier.

Ugh, I’m sure to hate that.

Google recently put Gemini in gmail, which lets you one-click summarise an e-mail.

Most e-mails I get and send aren’t nearly long enough for them to need a summary. And if I send a long e-mail, it’s for a good fucking reason: it contains essential information.

I should probably build in some check - like a really random sentence to confuse an LLM - to make sure the recipient actually reads it.