Neither the Beast nor the Smiler are ignorant, conspiracy theorists, or foreign assets though (grifters and sex criminals, most definitely, I’ll give you that, especially the Smiler, but most of the City’s population seems to fit in those categories too, so in that sense they do represent their electorate).

They’re both quite competent and intelligent psychopaths.

Now, if we’re talking about the Republican Party Reservation and its associated TV show, or the vat-grown VP…

Or use NewPipe if you don’t need to sync with your Google account.

When you send someone a message in some messaging system which has read confirmations (like whatsapp, for instance, or outlook), and the message is marked as read (or you receive a message read confirmation, or whatever equivalent your messaging system has), but they never actually reply, which often implies that they don’t want to (or can’t be bothered to, same difference). Whatever the case they probably don’t have as much respect for you as you have for them.

As a metaphor I suppose it can also mean doing something for someone without getting anything in return, even though reciprocation would normally be expected.

English is my third language and I had no problem understanding it (and neither did whoever or whatever is behind the account you replied to, and I’ve got them tagged as a russian — or chinese — troll bot account)…

I do wish, however, that anyone who writes “U” instead of “you” would slowly die of exploding anal cists and haemorrhoids, though, I’ll give you that.

There’s plenty of science fiction without technology playing a significant role.

Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside was the first that came to mind; Asimov’s The Gods Themselves or Nightfall might be other examples; Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius; Clarke’s Childhood’s End has (alien) tech, but it mostly focuses on the psychological and societal effects of the contact with aliens, as does Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and some of the other stories collected in the same volume, Stories of Your Life and Others); Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five… lots of great science fiction works focus on aspects other than technology.

That’s their end goal: no choice whatsoever, you watch 30 minutes of ads, followed by the 30 second video the algorithm wants you to watch (which is also an ad), 30 more minutes of ads, and so on.

And, since they also own chrome, you can’t go to any other page without first spending at least six hours watching youtube.

people need to use these tools responsibly

Have you met people…?

I for one do appreciate Denuvo. They help me blacklist anti-consumer publishers and developers.

That’s tragic, LG monitors used to be great.

But it’s trivial to torrent their content at whatever resolution I want…

“Does it have denuvo (or any other form of malware, including microtransactions)” should be the first question.

If the answer is yes, never look at it again, and permanently blacklist both developer and publisher.

If the answer is no, then go on with the rest of the diagram.

In my case they’re facing a 100% revenue reduction regardless of when (or whether) it’s cracked.

I’m never going to buy denuvo infested malware, and developers and publishers who try to pull this shit go straight into the blacklist.

In my case they’re facing a 100% revenue reduction regardless of when (or whether) it’s cracked.

I’m never going to buy denuvo infested malware, and developers and publishers who try to pull this shit go straight into the blacklist.

I use a 13 year old PC because a newer one will be infected with Windows 11. (The company refuses to migrate to Linux because some of the software they use isn’t compatible.)

And I’m saying that I could have been that developer if I were twenty years younger.

They’re not bad developers, they just haven’t yet been hurt enough to develop protective mechanisms against scams like these.

They are not the problem. The scammers selling the LLM’s as something they’re not are.

I was lucky enough to not have access to LLMs when I was learning to code.

Plus, over the years I’ve developed a good thick protective shell (or callus) of cynicism, spite, distrust, and absolute seething hatred towards anything involving computers, which younger developers yet lack.

No. LLMs are very good at scamming people into believing they’re giving correct answers. It’s practically the only thing they’re any good at.

Don’t blame the victims, blame the scammers selling LLMs as anything other than fancy but useless toys.

Having to deal with pull requests defecated by “developers” who blindly copy code from chatgpt is a particularly annoying and depressing waste of time.

At least back when they blindly copied code from stack overflow they had to read through the answers and comments and try to figure out which one fit their use case better and why, and maybe learn something… now they just assume the LLM is right (despite the fact that they asked the wrong question and even if they had asked the right one it’d’ve given the wrong answer) and call it a day; no brain activity or learning whatsoever.