I’m starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today’s society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else’s. That kind of colours my judgement.

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

That and the woke mind virus.

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we’ll never know…

I had a similar need, and it prevented me from moving to FireFox for a long while. Luckily, I did manage to get fx_cast to work, and it’s been flawless ever since. In fact, I’d say it work more reliably than Chrome’s casting!

Phew… I was starting to think I was the only docked Steamdeck gamer in the whole universe!

Well, my problem is partly that I play docked, so every issue is magnified up to 50 inches… so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

I managed to get it to run at a fairly stable 30fps, but the settings were so low that everything looked pretty muddy and basic. You can turn off the FSR to get it to look less blurry at 800p, but it still looked pretty bad. Generally, everything just looked a bit unstable, you know? Hair was pixelated, lines were jaggy everything felt jumpy and gritty. I’m sure it would look better on the SD screen itself.

I also read that Act 3 onwards takes a further hit to performance… so at that point I decided to cut my losses. Shame… it’s the first game where I’ve genuinely felt the SD isn’t up to it.

I’m looking forward to it! I bought it on Steamdeck, but had to refund because I couldn’t get it to run decently… felt I would be doing it a disservice with all the compromises. So I’m not waiting for the PS5 release…

You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D

Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we’d be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age…

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

I mean, it’s worth a try… what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter’s fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?

There’s a sweet spot, right? Popular enough to be viable; not so popular that the quality decreases.

It’s probably improved a lot since the early days. I remember it being significantly worse than the Google Music it was replacing.

They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.

That’s cool. I’m not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don’t need.

I really wish they’d drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.

I’ve been coding for 40 years, it’s both my job and my hobby, and I still feel old and out of touch when reading or taking part in coding conversations outside of my sphere :)

This is not meant to be discouraging - even the smallest amount of coding you could learn will be immensely rewarding - more to say that coding is vast arena with a breadth of complexity that can often feel overwhelming. So don’t be put off when you teach yourself some JavaScript and then still feel adrift in a conversation about C#.

I don’t have any specifics to recommend, but I would say that you should start small. Don’t aim to write the next Flappy Bird as your first project, or the next Mastodon. Just concentrate on making a web page say “Hello world!” or changing the colour of some text. Back in the 80s, most kids got their first taste of programming by having a computer shop C64 print “Dave is rad!” on an infinite loop! :)

Good luck!

Haven’t used Bitwarden, but I’ve heard good things about it.

Until recently I was using Google Password manager and a half-hearted attempt a “system” for unique passwords. Luckily, I wised up and decided to raise my game… after a bit of research, I went with 1Password, and I’ve been very happy with it.

The integrations are okay, though not perfect. But the thing that has been most useful for me is the Watchtower stuff that basically gamified my security and forced me to change repeated or insecure passwords. I feel in much better shape now, and feel very confident in 1Password’s encryption model. So, for me at least, it has been worth the money.

I’'m one of the people who sheepishly really liked “new” reddit’s interface, so Alexandrite is like catnip to me!

Infinite scroll! No more losing place in feeds!