There’s only so much space the “names of all steam engine trains in Britain in the 19th century” can occupy in one’s brain, so there’s plenty of room for old memes.

And that’s even before they have to deal with parents who think their little precious child acting like an out of control chimp with rabbies in a classroom is absolutelly normal.

(Warning NSFW) “Backroom Casting Couch”

That said, their “porn job interview but there wasn’t really any job” schtick is theatrics, as far as I know.

Sadly she got fucked in that interview and it turned out there wasn’t really a job.

Tech Industry paliative care is more mainframe stuff and systems still running in DOS.

Looking for “Time Travelling Senior Software Developer” …

In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.

It’s a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you’re operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you’re using it near capacity, you’ll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).

However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don’t depend on reaction speed.

(IMHO, the world top people at for example sports, are the ones who already early in their careers combine top physicallity with experience, smarts and wisdom)

It’s just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it’s not that much, if you’re using them at a near peak-level it’s noticeable if you pay attention as you can’t just reach the peaks you could reach before.

Well, I’m in my 50s and the previous poster is totally right about reaction speed - there comes a point were your aim is as good as it gets, but so is the aim of the kids doing the same FPS 10h/day and they’re faster than you.

That said, with age comes experience (well, can come, if you’re trying - plenty of people age but don’t learn) so you can beat the kids with smarts and wisdom (things like leading them into situations which are traps, using the environment in your favor and, more generally, just playing in ways were your reaction speed doesn’t matter).

That said, I’ve been out of the FPS genre for a decade now. Like the previous poster I simply don’t get enough fun from a game if it’s low complexity, which tends to be the case for fast paced games that require fast and/or precise moves.

If I wanted to be the target of homophobic insults, I could just do it to myself in front of a mirror, though granted, I can’t really emulate the voice of a 12 year-old so it’s not quite the same experience bouquet.

Beyond that, multiplayer is almost like working - you’re supposed to relentless keep at it, on somebody else’s timings even if you’re in a guild: done it in EVE Online and WoW and, frankly, for the experience of work I have real-life were I actually get paid for it rather than the other way around.

Then there’s the whole creepy monetisation shit - I’m not really interested in the constant sales pressure, especially when it’s “buy this or else you’re handicaped vs those who did” (EA is still in my shit list since they did it with a DLC in one of the older Battlefield titles), especially nowadays when I’ve managed to mainly remove advertising from my life.

So I just stopped doing multiplayer a decade ago and pretty much avoid it like the plague.

Maybe I’ll try Guild Wars 3 if it’s in the same style as Guild Wars 2 (which came out before the monetisation era).

“Possession is 2/3 of the Law” and guess who has possession of that data?!

Sure, one could take them to court, at best spending a ton of money to get a few dollars worth of movies back if you actually win.

If you had possession instead and they wanted to take it away from you, then it’s they who would have to take you to court.

The point being that those who don’t have possession are the ones who get the hassle of trying to get their shit back when they’re in the right which is often not worth it.

It’s not by chance that the industries using digital media absolutely love phone-DRM - it means that even when the data is stored in your data store, access to it is still under their control hence they de facto have the same level of control as possession gives (in great part thanks to corrupt governments which passed anti-circumvention legislation, otherwise you could likely turn that possession of the DRM-locked file into possession of the contained data)

The possession logic applies to just about everything, not just digital media. For example, if your power bill is directly charged to your bank account and they make a mistake and overcharge, it’s YOUR problem, if they send you a bill that you then pay, if they make a mistake it’s THEIR problem.

Time to put the *boom* in the boom.

What “democracy”?!

The whole point of Neoliberalism is to have Money be a higher power than the State (which is the part controlled by voters via elected representatives) - their entire schtick being all about how the Market should not be “interfered” with by the State and the State shouldn’t actually own or do anything other than National Defense and a Judicial System - so the very opposite of Democracy (were the greatest power of all is that of voters and it is not restricted to just some areas).

This kind of “liberalism” is never and was never about Democracy (though it definitelly disguises itself as “democratic”), it has always been about replacing Democracy with Oligarchy.

I’ve lived in Britain, Germany and Portugal during the period since 2009 and saw no big improvements in pedestrian infrastructure beyond a few streets being closed to traffic and turned fully pedestrianised.

The biggest change I saw was improved infrastructure for cycling, rather than for pedestrians.

From what I’m seeing here in Europe, the fines for driving with a phone are seldom applied and outside a handful of countries aren’t even that large.

Also infrastructure for pedestrians hasn’t actually improved significativelly in Europe since 2009 - the big difference in the quality of pedestrian infrastructure between Europe and the US comes all the way back from the 60s or even earlier, so it doens’t explain a change of trend on the US but not Europe in 2009.

I’m leaning more towards the “oversized light trucks are dangerous as fuck” theory since, well, they are and the trend to see more of those on the road hasn’t happened in Europe but it has in the US.

I remember back in the day when they had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement to update mainframe software because of Year 2000 and they got paid a bundle for it.

Similar thing for customization of older SAP systems after SAP changed the language used to Java but those systems were still done in the old language.

So I expect that freelance senior designer-developers are going to get paid A LOT of money to come fix things in a few years’ time, especially since in places with high AI adoption this is going to be way bigger in terms of size, complexity and seniority of expertise needed that either mainframe code updating for Y2K and updating customizations in old SAP systems.

Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they’re mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.

That’s the vicious cycle of “not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales” for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.

And then somebody changes the auto-formatter settings and all of a sudden every single file changed and committe appears as having most lines changes and you loose the ability find the real code changes between a version before that and the current version.

Guess how I found this out …

Standardizing code format via that path only works well if you start it really early in the project and never change it after that.

(Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of different software design styles)

Anybody who has worked through the life-cycle of large projects knows that as time passes and the software gets adjusted and expanded, code just accumulates problem and brittleness - especially because multiple different people change it and they tend to each do it their way, often without full understanding of the code base - not just at the code level but also at the software design level - and eventually that code gets so hard to change or fix that a whole new system has to be built from the ground up.

In my experience this happens maybe at around 5 - 8 years of age of a codebase.

So I expect we’re headed for a spectacular industry-wide explosion because using AI code vastly accelerates this because for just about anything but small projects that can entirelly be generated in one go, AI isn’t consistent in coding style, much less software design.

Throwing software engineers at it right now only works if they end up spending even more time reviewing and ajusting the AI code than they would if they did the work themselves, since having AI coding is pretty much the equivalent of outsourcing to a pool of random junior developers.

All the right wingers are hard at doing so, as are the “center”-“left” mainstream parties though in a more dilluted way - essentially the conquests of the post-War period are being destroyed, same as in the US but starting from a higher basedline in Europe so there’s more to destroy before reaching the bottom.

Shit, even the “fringe” “left” has a large subset of parties led by people whole detached from any single global and consist ideology (such as the older ones like Socialism, Social Democracy or Anarchy) who grew up only ever knowing Neoliberalism and thus whose idea of being “left” is the Neoliberal “moral liberalism” (mostly commonly known as Identity Politics) that very explicitly excludes the greatest, most widespread and most suffering causing inequality of all - Wealth Inequality - which is probably why the Far-Right is gaining massivelly from the fall of the mainstream parties than those “left” parties, since even the Far-Right lies are more appealing to the Working Class than the upper middle class well-off scion of well-off parent’s idea of “equality” that these parties defend.

(I was actually a member of such a “fringe” “left” party for a few years and was thoroughly dissapointed)

And yeah, I’m terrified.

Most Android phones nowadays fail at

Switch to a degoogled OS like GrapheneOS or LineageOS

either because they’re not unlockable or because neither OS supports that specific brand and model.

Not saying the rest isn’t correct, it’s just that “most” in there that in my experience is wildly optimistic.