This makes me feel old lol. I used to pirate VHS tapes and games on floppy disk, where you’d also get a photocopy of the pages of the manual that had the random words that the copy protection asked for. Heck, when I was I kid I remember my dad having pirated Spectrum/Commodore games that were copied from an audio cassette.
You can apparently 3D print a record, although it’s almost certainly not worth the effort.
Yeah we had a sweet deal before and we pissed it away. I don’t see why we should get the same terms if we rejoin. That’s just the cost of being stupid IMO
I suspect the ideal outcome would have been to have Leave almost win, like if it went 52-48 the other way. That way they could still keep saying it’s “what the people want” and keep using it as a wedge issue, but without having to actually do anything.
Bulgaria’s tourism minister must be shitting it right now though lol. “We have to host WHAT next year?”
Also if you saw all the Moroccanoil sponsorship all over Eurovision this year - let’s just say that company is not Moroccan
I use a yubikey on my laptop, but I use it to make it even harder to log in. It’s set to challenge-response so you have to have the key in and enter a password to unlock LUKS. Bit overkill but it was more just to see if I could do it lol
We had a little pirate movie ring going in college - this was in the UK in the 90s and there were certain films that were banned that you couldn’t get, like Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Reservoir Dogs etc. Someone somehow had access to Swedish satellite TV and so had shitty VHS copies of them with Swedish subtitles, so we had a counterfeit ring going that passed around 3rd-generation VHS copies of all these banned films.
Then DVD arrived and all these movies were just released on regular DVD so it destroyed our whole operation lol. The Exorcist was the first movie I bought on DVD.
We didn’t really have internet access when we were at school but we’d coordinate days where someone would bring in the floppy disks for something you wanted and you’d bring in a stack of blank disks and copy them on the school computers lol.
I have a 2TB external drive that I got for under $200 a couple of years ago, and the other day I saw the exact same drive in Staples for $650. It’s fucking wild out there.
I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.
I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol
Architecture is the other one that vaguely worries me. I don’t like the idea of unknowingly walking around in a building that was designed by AI. I work with AI and it can’t even be trusted to write a blog post correctly, let alone design a building that’s safe. And I know if I’m thinking of that now, it means someone else has already thought of and attempted it at least 6 months ago.
As someone with a degree in the arts, I’m pretty sure that almost all art as a career is under threat from AI. Sure, AI can’t match the human experience and expressiveness needed for really great art, but that’s not what most artists do to earn a living. And the vast majority of the people who traditionally pay for artists to make stuff for them really don’t care at all. Now they can get Grok to fart out a logo or a poster in 15 seconds and not have to talk to an artist, they’re all set.
No so much quitting, but I got booted because my cat killed my whole team.
It was back when I was playing Call of Duty, and it was in hardcore mode where it allowed friendly fire, but within limits. If you accidentally shot a team-mate you’d usually be okay (although they’d have some choice words for you on the team chat), but if you went around massacring your team-mates you’d get auto-booted. Anyway, we were in a situation where the whole team was hiding behind a wall, getting ready to take on someone who was hiding and being particularly troublesome. I was about to throw a grenade at them so my finger was hovering over the button, and my cat happened to walk past and rub himself on my hand because he wanted pets. He head-butted my finger, which made me throw a grenade right at my own feet, followed by an explosion and the game ending, at least for me.
I didn’t get a chance to explain myself, so I wonder what everyone else thought I was up to lol.
If we’re lucky, maybe there’s a sweet spot where new production for RAM ramps up just as the AI companies run out of money and cancel their orders, and then there’s suddenly a huge surplus of RAM that they need to unload in a hurry lol.
The extinction of the Neanderthals, or any of the other extinct human-like species. It’d be so fascinating to live in a world where there was another species that was close to us in intelligence but also so different. We’d be awful to them though.
There’s a book called The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson that kind of explores this idea. It’s an alternate history book where the black death kills 99% of the European population instead of about a third, and the world progresses essentially without any European people. It’s really good!
I ended up settling on Betterbird. It’s… fine lol
I was looking at IVPN. I still have some research to do but I haven’t found anything sketchy on them so far.