I’ve had two PCs over this time period. One came with a pirated copy of Windows (bought overseas) and I later installed a legit copy with my uni’s licence. The other I transferred that same licence across to after building the PC myself.
I wouldn’t have described it as a golden era. More like a constant, steady, quiet sense of improvement.
I’m talking about the whole period of like 2010 to about 2018.
A decade ago things were looking really positive for the future of Mac gaming. It felt like more and more games were coming out supporting it. I’m not sure if their transition away from Intel has hindered it, or if it’s something else, but it definitely seems to have stalled.
Plus, the move to Apple Silicon has killed the back-up option of Bootcamp. Or I assume it has, I’ve not been a Mac user since before the transition, when my ageing MBP died and I just found I didn’t need any laptop to replace it.
paying Microsoft for an operating system
To be fair, I haven’t paid Microsoft for my OS…ever. And it’s not even piracy.
I got a licence for free through my university when I was in uni. And Microsoft seemed happy to let me keep using it and even upgrading it. I started on Windows 8, upgraded for free to Windows 10. If my PC didn’t have a processor that seemingly arbitrarily they decided can’t run Windows 11, I could be on that today.
Funhole isn’t exactly hidden but you might not see it if your instance isn’t federated to it.
Not only have I not seen it, I can’t even find it when I go looking for it.
I thought I heard that California had a law requiring cancelling be just as easy as signing up? Is that not the case? (Assuming the name of the gym is an indicator of the city it’s based in, and not the state or country.)
At the risk of sounding like an overly obsequious AI… You know what, you’re completely right. I’m honestly not sure what use case I was imagining when I wrote that last comment.
That is a reasonable exception to no-AI policies in research papers and newspaper articles, but not for Wikipedia. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia has a strict “no original research” policy. Using AI to provide examples of AI output would be original research, and should not be done.
Quoting AI output shared in primary and secondary sources should be allowed for that reason, though.
The content is CC licensed, but they are trying to block AI scraping because it overloads their servers. They have a paid API that uses a lot less compute for both Wikipedia and the AI, as well as being a revenue source for Wikipedia.
the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they’re asking anyway
I’m gonna say that’s ideal but not quite necessary. What’s needed is that the user is capable of properly verifying the output. Which anyone who could do it themselves definitely can, but it can be done more broadly. It’s an easier skill to verify a result than it is to obtain that result. Think: how film critics don’t necessarily need to be filmmakers, or the P=NP question in computer science.
It’s not good for large architectural issues but it can point out nuanced issues in single files that often wouldn’t be caught otherwise
Yeah I agree. It’s sometimes good at code smells, though sometimes it can be straight-up wrong in ways that are actually surprising, so it always requires a human in the loop. It’s not good at larger-scale architectural decisions, and I’d also add that it’s usually not capable of understanding the intent behind business logic.
I think the best system is an operating system that stores the exact date, but exposes it via an API that only returns a boolean. You trust your own local machine, but don’t necessarily trust random apps or websites. And they don’t need to know anything more than whether you pass a particular age gate.
Historically, it has ties to the oil industry. It has pivoted more towards green energy recently, but their interests are still in the production of energy, rather than in achieving the best outcomes for our cities.
Yeah it’s insane. I wrote up a complaint in another thread but I think the OP realised how terrible it was because it was deleted by the time I hit submit. That particular post was utter trash, not even attempting to maintain a reasonable tone or look at the situation dispassionately. Its lede literally read:
Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it ‘hilariously pointless’ in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
And frankly, the author of that sort of hit piece should be ashamed of himself. Far, far more than Dylan should.
It’s such a dumb thing to whinge about. Age verification is not a bad thing! What’s bad is age verification that is implemented in a way that either requires, or significantly increases the chances of people’s privacy being violated. Requiring people to upload photo ID directly to sites, or to third-party “trusted age verification partners”. Or trusting bullshit AI face-detection age verification.
Age verification that’s implemented by asking parents to…y’know, actually parent, and helping them to do that by giving them tools like OS-level parental controls, enforced through operating system and browser APIs that we mandate apps and websites use, is the way to go. The OS should expose to apps, and browsers expose to websites, only the simple answer to the question: “is the current user of a legal age to access this content?” as a boolean value, based on information stored in the OS by parents setting it. No fancy technology. No privacy invasion. Just simply giving parents the tools to help them do their job.
There are more complicated technical solutions that could be used. Things involving repeated hashes or blind digital signatures. But these are only appropriate if we pre-suppose that the government needs to strictly enforce it by requiring IDs or other sensitive information be used to age verify. And these solutions help minimise the risk by eliminating the connection between the age verification and which sites are being accessed (so the verifier can’t see what sites the verifyee is viewing, and the sites can’t see who the person being verified was, only that they were verified). And you don’t need to go even that far. Because the best solution is right down on the user’s device, with a simple setting that parents can set.
Conservatives will do anything to avoid building trains.
Well you can’t just lead with that and not tell us the whole thing!