He’s bona fide!

The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).

But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., joined the criticism Thursday, telling Fox News that Democrats are telling wives to lie to their husbands: “What kind of a totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the Democrats developed?”

Ah yes, the guy who has cheated on multiple wives is talking about amorality and corruption.

Regardless of the election result, there will be a shit-ton of divorces incoming over the next 12 months because of it.

And the pandemic. The effects of the pandemic did a massive number on so many younger kids behaviorally.

So yeah, there are numerous reasons for the upswing in social and behavioral issues in kids over the last several years.

Totally irrelevant side note, but I just realized that he looks like a cross between Benny Hill and a werewolf.

I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.

Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!

I see the Guardian is going as Captain Fucking Obvious for Halloween this year.

I expect Russian media is framing this as part of a grand alliance consisting of the ‘good’ half of the world. Lots of countries. The best countries. Sooo many! You know… Russia, North Korea, Belarus, China (they are soooo close to sending troops guys, we promise!), ‘Chechnyans’… Some Moldovan sycophantic trolls… Umm… Yeah.

• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Il
• One medal for bootlicking Kim Jong Un
• One medal for kicking 100 starving peasants
• One medal for siking Trump when Donald tried to shake his hand
• One medal for sending a trash balloon over the border to the South
• One medal for brushing his teeth
• One medal for eating caviar
• One medal for dissing Blackpink
• One medal for being in the choir for this rendition
• One medal for losing the dialup modem passwords
• One medal for finding them
• One medal to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them

And vodka. Soooooo much vodka!

I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that a) my candidates of choice likely won’t win, and b) the results will be contested with complaints, nit-picking, tantrums, and probably violence across at least several states, and a final decision won’t be known for a few weeks.

I’m trying to avoid political topics and articles a bit more than usual. I also have a lot of things going on in my personal life (not necessarily bad things, but lots of responsibilities) that are keeping me busy right now.

I had also saved up a couple of TV shows that I’ve been wanting to watch, to fill in some of the little free time I have right now.

Edit: fixed a word.

The man is a fucking ghoul.

If he’s going to spread baseless rumors about people, then he should be scrutinized too. Maybe attention should be drawn to the fact that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Or Ted Cruz was a notorious creep on campus. Or if we want a new one, how about… Ted Cruz likes jerking off to images of JD Vance fucking couches.

Very good point!

I was going to say, maybe they should focus their time and money on solutions that stop them sucking so badly as an airline. This is way down there as a real problem in that sense. But you’re right, this is a comically low-bar solution, and is kind of embarrassing for them to flex on.

ETA: Some other issues they should really be focusing on include:

• Significant increases in plane maintenance safety issues (as reported by their own pilots union).
• Major problems/concerns with how they treat disabled customers.
• Weak IT security that left that airline (along with others) crippled by cyber-attacks last summer.
• Grossly underestimating summer travel demands.
• Inconsistent service levels from flight attendants.

Yeah, speaking as someone who grew up in the UK and had South Asian friends, the 80s (and 90s) were bad for racial intolerance and discrimination against minorities. I saw it a lot, along with the same shit directed towards black people. It was definitely a tangible part of the post-colonial culture. It’s still a problem, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Interesting article. But as a veteran developer the whole AI trend reminds me of the outsourcing trend back in the mid 2000s.

Back then Western developers (especially junior and mid levels) were seen by many companies as a waste of money. “We can pay for three developing world developers for the price we pay for one American/European one! Why are we wasting our money?!”

And so the huge wave of layoffs (fuelled also by the dot com bubble bursting and some other things) kicked off. And many companies contracted out work to India, etc. It was not looking good for us Western developers.

But then the other shoe dropped. The code being sent back was largely absolute shite. Spaghetti code, disparate platforms bound together with proverbial duct tape, no architectural best practices, design anti-patterns, etc etc. And a lot of these systems started falling apart and required Western developers and support engineers to fix them up or outright replace them.

Now, this isn’t a sleight on Indian of other developing world developers. I’ve met lots of phenomenal programmers from that part of the world. And developers there have improved a lot and now there are lots of solid options for outsourcing to there. But there’s are still language and culture barriers that are a hurdle, even today.

But I digress. My underlying point is that there are similarities with today’s situation with what has happened before. Now, it’s very possible LLMs will go to the next level in several years (or more) time. But I still think we are a ways away from having an AI engine that can build a complex, sophisticated system in a holistic way and have it capable of implement the kinda of crazy, wacky, bizarre business rules that are often needed.

Additionally, we’ve heard this whole “developers are going to be obsolete soon” thing before. For 20 years I’ve been hearing that self-writing code was just around the corner. But it wasn’t even close in reality. And even now it’s not just around the corner.

No doubt, AI will hit a whole nother level at some point. The stuff you can do with Chat GPT and the like it’s insane, even right now (though as another article here on Lenny earlier today said, quite a lot of LLM code output is of suspect quality to say the least). And I know the market is rough right now for greener developers. But I think we’re about to see history repeat itself.

Some companies will lean heavily into AI to write code, with only a few seniors basically just curating it and slapping it together. And other companies will find a middle ground of having juniors and seniors using AI to a more limited and careful level. Those latter companies will fare a lot better with the end product, and they will also be better prepared with regard to tribal knowledge transfer (which is another topic in this altogether). And when that epiphany is realized it will become the default approach. At least for another 10-20 years until AI can change things up again.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

It’s more like this: