I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.

Now it’s the other way round.

If I could bring back anything from back then, it’s boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.

The USB transfer speed claim is misleading to say the least. The iPhone 15 was already capable of up to 10Gbps transfer speed (USB 3.0 support). You could quibble over the fact that the included cable didn’t support that (if only the USB-IF could get its shit together), but to claim the hardware doesn’t support it is a lie.

Also, non-US iPhones support both physical SIM and eSIM.

Sure, training data selection impacts the output. If you feed an AI nothing but anime, the images it produces will look like anime. If all it knows is K-pop, then the music it puts out will sound like K-pop. Tweaking a computational process through selective input is not the same as a human being actively absorbing stimuli and forming their own, unique response.

AI doesn’t have an innate taste or feeling for what it likes. It won’t walk into a second hand CD store, browse the boxes, find something that’s intriguing and check it out. It won’t go for a walk and think “I want to take a photo of that tree there in the open field”. It won’t see or hear a piece of art and think “I’d like to be learn how to paint/write/play an instrument like that”. And it will never make art for the sake of making art, for the pure enjoyment that is the process of creating something, irrespective of who wants to see or hear the result. All it is designed to do is regurgitate an intersection of what it knows that best suits the parameters of a given request (aka prompt). Actively learning, experimenting, practicing techniques, trying to emulate specific techniques of someone else - making art for the sake of making art - is a key component to humans learning from others and being influenced by others.

So the process of human learning and influencing, and the selective feeding of data to an AI to ‘tune’ its output are entirely different things that cannot and should not be compared.

Generative AI is not ‘influenced’ by other people’s work the way humans are. A human musician might spend years covering songs they like and copying or emulating the style, until they find their own style, which may or may not be a blend of their influences, but crucially, they will usually add something. AI does not do that. The idea that AI functions the same as human artists, by absorbing influences and producing their own result, is not only fundamentally false, it is dangerously misleading. To portray it as ‘not unethical’ is even more misleading.

Re 1, 3 and 5, maybe it is upon the AI projects to stop providing shiny solutions looking for a problem they could solve, and properly engaging with potential customers and stakeholders to get a clear understanding of the problems that need solving.

This was precisely the context of a conversation I had at work yesterday. Some of our product managers attended a conference that was rife with AI stuff, and a customer rep actually took to the stage and said ‘I have no need for any of that because none of it helps me solve the problems I need to solve.’

Railway and train modellers, of all scales. To their credit, a fair fee people are becoming more open, but especially modelling clubs are often run by old white men with questionable politics and problematic behaviours. They will sneer at anything that’s not steam, or at people who run modern instead of vintage trains, or who don’t get a train model exactly right the way the original ran that one time in the mid 50s from Bumfuck, Idaho to the middle of nowhere. They have little patience for newbies who might not have internalised all the lingo, or who might need something explained in simple English. If you build something that is not an exact replica of a real world location, they’ll say you’re not doing model railway, but merely toy trains. And then these same people go and wonder why they can’t attract new people to the hobby.

I don’t have a lot of comparisons to dubs in other languages, but most german dubs I know are average at best. The biggest problem is that they often pick voice actors who just don’t suit the character or the original actor. The stilted reading/talking is another issue, which is also often present in original German productions.

As an older metalhead, this makes me a bit sad, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. The metal scene I joined in the early 90s did have its tolerance problems specifically against other music genres, but I never knew it as particularly gatekeepy, at least the circles I socialised with and the concerts and festivals I went to. There were some people who though you weren’t a real metal fan if you didn’t exclusively listen to metal, but they were a minority. Nobody had a problem with me not particularly liking Slayer or Motörhead, and there was no requirement to have long hair and be covered in leather and/or band patches.

I once slept in a hotel room where the TV had a blue LED standby light. I had to go and cover it up, it was way too bright.

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I’d like to know your sources, because to my knowledge there is no such ban in Germany.

Spoken like someone who has never tried to get a group of people larger than two to collectively change their behaviour in a specific way.

If you’re ever a parent, and you have one or more kids in school, and they engage in extracurricular activities - you’ll be surprised how many amateur sports clubs and similar places communicate predominantly or even exclusively through Facebook.

Oh don’t fucking get me started on the referendum. It was defeated by weaponised ignorance. An absolute disgrace.

A fair few Australians fly the flag in front of their house all year round.

The funny thing is that most languages in the world call Finland Finland or something adjacent (usually containing the syllable ‘Fin-’), while it’s ‘Suomi’ in Finnish. Only the Baltic states call it something similar to that.

Many people suffer from impostor syndrome to a degree. Many people make mistakes even when it comes to subject matters they are very familiar with. Everyone has technical problems every now and then - that’s outside of your control. Technology is finicky and increasingly shit.

You’ll always get people who think they know better than you, or could do something better than you. But they aren’t. You are. You got where you are through your work and experience. As long you feel that you’re prepared to the best of your ability and knowledge, I think your conscience can be clear.

You will never have everyone you meet like you. Some people are just basic shitheads, and some of them will write reviews like that precisely to gaslight you into doubting yourself and your abilities. They do it for kicks. If 95% of your reviews are positive, you’re in a good place.

These people never walk back their bullshit. When called out on it, they will double down. When proven wrong, they will change the topic. But they need to be seen as strong, and right. Admitting that you’re wrong or even apologising is neither - it’s weak, and it can create doubt. If they were wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?

They radicalise their followers with lies and falsehoods, and they can only keep that up if they are not seen as being wrong about what they say. They spread their lies with confidence and zeal, and if reality disagrees, then reality is wrong.

Last time I checked, on iOS it didn’t have either.

Edit: just checked, the iOS version still doesn’t have downloads and does not support casting to Chromecast.

Support for downloading and Chromecast? Sign me up.