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sharkjacobs

I mean this is partly deranged megalomania but it's also partly a shibboleth right? You can signal that you're a true believer loyalist by not using the verboten term
Re:Starcraft: Ashfall on Monday October 19, 2026 @05:51PM (#50158580)
It's not a fun game, but it's cool anyway
Re:Starcraft: Ashfall on Monday October 19, 2026 @05:50PM (#50158570)
> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used

I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.

Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.

Re:Triple-A Minesweeper on Saturday October 10, 2026 @01:52AM (#50030009)
"Oof! A mine!"
Re:If AI is conscient, then we are making slaves on Saturday October 10, 2026 @01:42AM (#50029949)
What you are describing is certainly "bad" and "worrying" but it's not slavery.
Re:Making the case for Ed Zitron as the last of the great bloggers on Thursday September 24, 2026 @01:10PM (#49833700)
For a long time, even when I disagreed with Ed I appreciated his earnestness and clarity of intent, but after reading that Wired profile that came out and learning that his day job involves doing PR for AI companies, I can't even take what he's saying at face value
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.

> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

This is villain shit.

Re:Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @12:39PM (#49804075)
> “Verbose, hard-to-follow output has been my biggest frustration with frontier models, and Claude Opus 5.5 fixes it

God I hope so

Re:Brood War Bench on Sunday September 20, 2026 @12:57AM (#49772607)
Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Thursday September 17, 2026 @02:54PM (#49744984)
> Countless other mathematical curiosities were developed in the 1700s -- and forgotten.

Really? Like what?

edit: this is either an unfalsifiable claim, because by "forgotten" you meant here is no extant knowledge or remaining record of it, or it's almost certainly nonsense and anything you could cite would be foundational to some area of modern mathematics, even if as a disproven counter theory.

Re:Terpstra Keyboard on Saturday September 05, 2026 @04:58PM (#49580601)
I really expected this to be something from Brett Terpstra

https://brettterpstra.com/topic/keyboard/

And how do either of them relate to statistical literacy in the United States?
Re:Starbase, LA on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @05:42PM (#49441085)
> Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian

Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...

It's funny to me, a Canadian, that this even warrants a did-you-know article because everything about the beaver fur/hat making industry is something I learned extensively about in elementary and high school because it was like, a major driver of the European exploration and colonization and therefore significant to the history of my country.

But outside of here it's just a footnote to a fashion trend.

Re:Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9 on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @06:56PM (#49091113)
I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
Re:Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @02:03PM (#49010883)
I often cut + undo because seeing the cut is feedback which tells me the operation successfully put the content into clipboard. This is not always a guarantee especially in web apps, and sometimes I just have focus on the wrong window.
Re:The World's 2,400 Castles on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @01:00PM (#48995038)
> # Etymology

> Neither part of the monument's name is correct. ... was not a "castle" in the traditional sense, but instead may have functioned more like a "prehistoric high rise apartment complex".[8]

My understanding was always that aside from vanity castles like Craigdarroch (https://thecastle.ca) there aren't castles in North America because they're only practical in a pre-cannon world

Re:Blogging Can Just Be Stating the Obvious on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:07AM (#48669590)
There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.

And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.

I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.

Re:OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @02:02PM (#48663501)
> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models

> the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.

I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors.

Like, if this was as big a deal as it kind of vaguely implies, they would be making a bigger deal of it, right?

Re:Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with Agents on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @06:53PM (#48468947)
> Currently both Gitoxide and libgit2's networking functionality is either partial, slow or non-existant. Both GitButler and Jujutsu rely on forking out to Git in order to push or pull data. A big reason for this is the incredibly complicated credential logic involved, but all of this is (theoretically) currently covered in Grit.
Re:Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with Agents on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @06:52PM (#48468941)
> One of the main things I would like to be able to use it for is to be able to bundle complex push/fetch functionality into GitButler and other standalone Git tools needing network functionality (such as Jujutsu).

> Having parts of Git as discrete, embeddable slices of library also enables things like building custom Git servers or client functionality in Rust.

> The full build of all Git functionality in Rust is currently around 27M, but since a large part of it is a library, it could clearly be easily split up into domains of functionality - subcrates that do specific things. Perhaps you could simply use the subset you need.

Re:Samurai City on Thursday June 04, 2026 @07:10PM (#48405920)
> In a way, the Tokugawa system was a success. Japan experienced near-total peace between 1600 and the late nineteenth century, a remarkable achievement for a premodern society and a dramatic contrast to Europe or China, where tens of millions of people died in wars.

> Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace.

The two dominant political axes. Which of is more repellent to you: a rigid stable social system based around millions of rent seeking parasitic landlords, or frequent social upheaval and conflict and open warfare

Re:Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang on Thursday June 04, 2026 @02:33PM (#48402768)
How does any article or discussion about this get past 150 words.

"There is no agreed upon functional definition of consciousness, and no way to measure or observe it outside of oneself. It is as impossible to detect consciousness in waves or energy or inert matter or stochastic systems as it is in other living human beings."

Anything beyond that is akin to a theological treatise about the possibility of ensouled animals.

Re:A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days) on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @05:11PM (#48390136)
> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "unit of work" but I really like writing in Bike[1] for this reason, it's a hybrid text editor/outliner. It is simply my favorite rich text editor and the outliner functions provide really good affordances for organizing and reorganizing paragraphs.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/

Re:BBEdit 16 on Thursday May 21, 2026 @03:11PM (#48227577)
It's supported for Tahoe. It's still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They're selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.
Re:RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google on Thursday May 07, 2026 @02:00AM (#48045945)
> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read

They try to address that

> I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.

Are you saying this because it's an evergreen joke or because you really think there hasn't been meaningful progress in the field since 1996?

Duke Nukem Forever was release fifteen years ago. Some things never happen until they suddenly do.

The wolf really does eat the boy at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Re:Why I Write (1946) on Friday April 24, 2026 @02:48AM (#47886519)
> For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc., etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.

This is fascinating and totally alien to my experience. I don't often think in words at all unless I am preparing to either write or speak them.

Re:Ars Technica: Our newsroom AI policy on Thursday April 23, 2026 @03:44AM (#47873156)
There's a good post from Aurich in the comments of the article detailing the practical reality of how they (don't) use AI tools in their image work, but as a policy statement this sentence is 100% vibes, 0% actual guidance or restriction

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