There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.

Also it’s just not that hard to buy toilet paper. If you’re home and with an Internet connection on your phone or computer, that’s like five minutes max. 15 if you need to go on a deep dive of cost comparison.

This just isn’t a problem worth billions of dollars to solve.

Problems worth solving? Wage theft. Climate change. Famine. “Add some RNG and hallucinations to your grocery shopping” just doesn’t rank.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

I feel like most people don’t buy software anymore. Everything runs in the browser.

Like, nerds and enthusiasts and game playing people sure. But most people? Nah. It’s all Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, Reddit, YouTube. Maybe like roll20 if they’re a dnd nerd. Most people aren’t doing Photoshop or blender.

For many people, it’s important that there is suffering by people who “deserve” it. Giving people money feels wrong and unjust. People who think like that are assholes

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.

Yeah, it mostly worked. Mostly.

It’s hard to say if my previous group worked better because they were used to my style, or just a better fit for me, or some other factor.

“I’m a Grok guy,” said Vance. “I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke!”

What a fucking idiot. Really wants everyone to go back to sleep

I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.

Wizard I ran DND for in didn’t love this, but understood it.

The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group

I worry about how I would raise a child in this landscape. Two of the people I know with kids, the kids don’t care about video games. One of the kids is super into iPad games, and that feels like a haazrd brewing.

Maybe I’d try to stick to real games for any child I was responsible for, but I don’t think that would survive impact with peers.

Physical cards last for years. Maybe the online game will be around in ten years, but maybe not.

I have most of my magic cards from my youth. They’re a thing I own. I can do what I want with them- play the game, use them for decorations, sell them. Digital shit is transient with few options for the buyer.

Good. The more people switch, the more support there will be.

Sometimes when people say they used ChatGPT to do some creative writing for them, I’m like “That’s like telling me you used a coal-powered machine to lift weights for you at the gym. You’re missing the point.”

But I guess some people go to the gym for reasons other than personal fitness, and some people don’t write to be creative.

Yeah, but I guess megacorps like Warner Brothers are even more obscene than elder gods.

https://shadowofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Shelob

Business Idiots. Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about how many business leaders are out of touch with users and their own products. They live in their own little pocket dimension with each other, and only really care about shareholders.

Yeah, display port worked fine. It was when I plugged the second monitor in to HDMI I realized the problem. And then couldn’t get online to search for issues.

I had to tether the desktop to my phone over USB to get a network connection.

I later installed pop!_os , tested all that stuff, and it worked out of the box.

After booting, test WiFi, BT and audio functionality.

This is an important step. One time I boldly just installed without testing anything in the live session, and discovered that HDMI and Ethernet didn’t work. Woops.