The enshitification is progressing nicely!

Everyone I want to talk to knows not to call me; I feel exactly the same. Phones used to be useful, but the sheer volume of telemarketers and scams have reduced it to uselessness. If it wasn’t for 2FA occasionally requiring a phone number, I wouldn’t even have one at this point.

This whole thing seems so weird. Why is Meta using the courts to enforce their ToS, anyway? Theoretically, the penalty for a user violating Meta’s terms would be Meta closing that user’s account. Unless the lawsuits are just frivolous scare tactics intended to drain the defendant’s resources…

“Hey, can you recommend a good free photoshop alternative?”

“DIE!”

Just like the good old Jraphics Interchange Format!

Plus as an added bonus we can have the ‘gif’ pronunciation disagreement!

Just because it’s an edge case doesn’t mean 30% of your userbase won’t encounter it!

They copied and pasted text that had a link in it, and got the alt-text.

I work at a company whose entire business model is providing QA to other companies. I work directly with some very large, public companies, and some smaller ones. Almost all of them have some form of dedicated in-house QA, which we supplement.

Disney+ could introduce linear cable-style streaming channels featuring key franchises

Netflix is reportedly planning to introduce linear cable-style streaming channels to enhance user engagement and increase app usage time.

What? Is Disney’s content going to be shown on Netflix in this format? Is it just a typo? I’m so confused.

Yeah, it’d be more interesting to see this done with, for instance, an RTS. Something where smarter decisions can beat out faster gameplay some percentage of the time. Obviously high APM is important in an RTS, but in this Street Fighter example, I’m pretty sure a 5 year old who only knows how to Hadouken spam would beat any of these LLMs from what we’re seeing here; it’s not so much about how good their decision-making is, but just about which ones execute the most moves that have a chance to connect.

My understanding is that this is because of the way they operate internally. They reward new initiatives but not maintaining old initiatives, so employees are heavily incentivized to sunset old apps in favor of new apps that are functional replacements, and this cycle is the result.

You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.

I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.

catch (Exception e) {
    Exception.autofix(e);
}

Done!

True Neutral, I see.

You know, this is actually a hot take and I could get behind iT.

Elon should be first in line to demonstrate how safe and side effect free this technology is!

There is a fairly nice base location near the center of the map that has ~6 coal and ~6 ore nodes, and is on a plateau making it functionally immune to NPC raids. I found it completely accidentally; there’s the 3 wildlife sanctuaries around the outside of the map and they all face inward at different angles, so I was trying to triangulate where they were “pointing” to see if it was leading somewhere. Turns out it was leading to a sweet base location.

This is noteworthy because there’s 4 resources (ore, coal, sulfur and quartz), so you need a base with access to 2 of them if you want to have all 4 generating passively.

For what it’s worth, if you customize the difficulty of your game (which you can do at any point, including after reaching the 40s), you can change most things, including resource drop rates and how much effort it takes to mine them, xp rates, Pal encounter rates, capture rates, etc.

I had a similar experience as you; by the time I hit 42 or so, I had the capture power maxed out, and most eggs were not giving me anything interesting, and I had the whole map revealed, so exploring had lost its luster and I was not enjoying the thought of grinding out another 6-8 levels to start being able to tackle some of the harder challenges in the game; I set the XP rate to x4, and doubled the resource rates, and it pretty much solved the problem for me.

Obviously if you’re playing on a server this isn’t an option, but if it’s just your own single player game, consider trying it; you might find some settings that smooth it out for you.

I hate to say it because I hate YouTube, too, but they’re getting pretty close to being as good at hosting streaming as Twitch is. The fact that full-length streams can just be saved straight to the user’s YouTube channel, with chat and everything else intact, is a pretty rad feature.