The title music will always be in my head. I only recently found out that it's from Bach's "Prelude and Fugue in C major" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKsAypz6Ou8
What really influenced my imagination forever since childhood was the tiny things like spelling "Wolf" with a "u" and the font and the little rhymes when you picked up a piece of the medallion...
> 256 screens of jungle. One way out.
Ah AIisms. :)
But that's okay. Indeed when I first played with AI a couple years ago, one of the first things I did was recreate the loading screens of old Spectrum and C64 games. :)
I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.
The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from here known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of other people, often poor and uneducated.
When those "tourists" arrive at their destinations, they have their passports confiscated by the broker's foreign counterparts, and they start working odd jobs while on tourism visas in places like Dubai, Thailand etc.
The brokers tell them that they owe a large amount of money for the privilege, often amounting to many months of their salary, and those brokers are the only way for the workers to send money back home.
They overstay their visas and when they get caught they can't even speak in English to explain their situation, and even if they could they wouldn't expose their handlers.
All of this has made it pretty embarrassing for the rest of us from the same country who just go for actual travel and tourism, and we can't even really complain about the racism we face because we know it's our country's fault...
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where the output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
Why not use trains for heavy transport?
I lived in a country where the roads between major cities were constantly swarming with hundred trucks coming and going. Even as a kid I thought that can't be efficient! It's certainly not comfortable for everyone else. Sometimes they'd be tipped over on their side. Sometimes there would be a tiny car crushed under them.
The barons certainly don't care about pollution, but don't they see the increased cost of each individual vehicle, the additional delays, having to pay multiple drivers and risk of accidents per vehicle?
Even if they want to keep a fleet of vehicles, shuttle trains aka "rolling highways" where trucks could roll on to the train via ramps, shut off their engines, let the trains take them to wherever, then continue into the destination cities, would be better than running the fleets on the roads. That would be good even for private cars.
The government added more lanes and diverted routes just for trucks, anything but build rail...
We lived in the backwater town of a backwater country, going through a turbulent era. There was nothing to buy there, except local food and produce and clothes. The only foreign stuff available to buy were the absolute basics like soaps and shampoo, and pirated movies and music on cassette tapes (even there people knew and adored Michael Jackson!)
The nearest city with international imports was 10-12 hours away on bus. Sometimes my uncle would go there for work, and the thing I looked forward to the most were the MAGAZINES he would bring back.
I would pore over them again and again, and fantasize about the games in them… it would be months before my uncle went again. So I made wishlists, drew comics about the stuff in those magazines, and learned English and about the rest of the world from them.
At first it was Sinclair User, Your Sinclair, then ZZAP!64. I picked up British humor from them, that still colors mine to this day. :) I learned about the USSR through Raid Over Moscow, the Vietnam War through Rambo and Platoon, the Falklands through some wargames, and other things that I would not be able to make sense of until decades later.
Every magazine and every reviewer, even the imaginary ones like Chuck Vomit the troll who reviewed text adventure games, had an intensely unique personality that affected how people perceived the games they were reviewing.
The 1980s and early 1990s magazine subculture is the most sorely missed aspect of gaming and computing that was lost when the internet took over.
Even if you didn't grow up on them, do flip through some random pages of the aforementioned magazines, just to see how some things never changed: There were PC vs Mac wars and console wars even back in 1985! There were people worrying about how increasingly powerful computers would make everyone dumber even back then!
Most people were dicks even back then
including me :)
You gave up way before that
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...
"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."
You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.
I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.
sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.
And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.
I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
But I can't get it removed from my passport as there are laws against apostasy and "blasphemy" here :(
It'd be a nice change from the desert climates I've been stuck in all my life though haha
> You can get work as an English teacher in Korea or Japan since you're so good at it
Let's be real here, they won't feel much confidence in learning English from a brown person :') I grew up on English media and then raised on the internet so my accent actually used to be good, but living in places like Dubai has actually messed up my English a bit because of the creole/pidgin they use there.
As for racism, I've been to East/SE Asian countries and frankly the racism that white/Western people tend to perceive is often pretty harmless and benign. Just cultural differences in "appropriateness". I've certainly seen worse in my own country. The worst I've personally experienced was in Dubai from Arabs/Emiratis against the many "brown" expats who live and work there, even those following the same religion. (P.S. I'm not religious at all)
I don't really need a job per se to support myself. I just want a way to 1: Be able to stay in a country long-term (longer than the usual tourist visas) while working from home, and 2: Eventually own property there and become a permanent resident if not a naturalized citizen.
There are some "gray" options like paying someone to "hire" you as their employee, basically getting an employment visa but doing your own thing. Or paying someone to marry you :') Both options are legal but rely on trust and make you dependent on a person you don't know: They can take your money then give you the boot any time if they want.
I learned of New Caledonia a while ago (France) and man, that place looks like paradise. Would be so perfect if I could settle there!
I'm more inclined towards East Asia, and read that Thailand may have options for "digital nomads". My passive income alone may be enough to live in relative comfort there.
If I ever go to the western hemisphere I'd rather consider places like Chile, or even visa-free places like Svalbard, Norway as a last resort.. :)
How about just disappearing in a Polynesian island like Samoa, is that a thing? lol
I was born in a shitty Middle Eastern’ish country and let's just say I’m sick of it. The general toxicity, the internal racism, the unreliability of basic utilities, the misogyny, the risk of mugging and murder…I tried living in some of the “better” Middle Eastern places like Dubai, Qatar, and frankly, behind the artificial veneer that they spend massive efforts to advertise, they are just as...
Even humans have created systems that sort of create other shit on their own.
Like the patterns that form when viewing prime numbers in certain ways, the fundamental laws of the universe could be some emergent properties arising from mathematical truths, and require no "god"
This is the reason :)
WARNING: DriveGenius/DrivePulse may be malware, it's a pain to remove it and prevent it from instantly relaunching itself, and I'm still not sure it's gone completely.——I just bought a new external disk and tried to transfer everything from an older disk to the new one:• I MOVE'd folders instead of COPYing them to easily keep track of what was already copied (and to avoid Finder annoyances when...
I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?
No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.
But even among them I'm sure there's plenty bread-and-butter 9-to-5ers, just in slightly posher professions.
Working in the evening instead of daytime.
Specially in hot ass countries/cities.
I mean really, do most modern jobs really depend on sunlight anymore?
Right now most people's daily cycle is "Rest -> Work -> Leisure -> Rest"
We should give "Rest -> Leisure -> Work -> Rest" a try.
Some other radical ideas: Let people alternate between 2 jobs every week. Like say being a waiter one week then a store clerk the other week. Most professions like cashiers etc could easily handle this. The benefit to workers would be the option to gain more experience/networking/mobility and a safety net of always having a backup job if you lose one.
> There has been no drop in productivity
Your employer seems to believes different.
In the UAE, for example, most people work 12+ hours every day, and barely get just Fridays off. Almost every one I know was working on Christmas, and they'll be working on New Year's. Vacations etc are unthinkable.
They don't feel it's odd or that it's "over"working or that having more free time would be rewarding; this is dominant mentality in the the Middle East and most of Asia and Africa (and I bet in other "poor" regions like parts of South America and Eastern Europe too).
Being idle in these societies is seen as a sin at best and the difference between survival and starvation in practice. Besides, even if people were forced to take 2 days off every week, they wouldn't know what to do with their time anyway (which manifests as the generally low output of creative arts from these parts), or have the disposable income to indulge in anything beyond a stroll at the mall or a meal at McDonald's (though KFC is more common round here I suppose).
Holidays are a first world luxury.
If everyone took them more often in every country, your Samsungs etc would be a lot more expensive.
In my corner of the 3rd world and the countries around it many people have computers but almost nobody pays for software.
There's no worse curse than being born and stuck in a place where you can't find any compatible people let alone kindred spirits.
All I can hope for is running into someone like myself someday, but if they're really like me we will just turn each other off.