ThePowerOfGeek

Pretty well, all things considered. I played off and on for about 15 years (more on than off). Got into an awesome family-friendly guild and made some very good friends. I still regularly chat with and occasionally play other games with some of them.

I became the leader of that guild eventually, but by then it was well into a slow death spiral. It was sad to see everything slowly fall apart and there being nothing anyone could do to resurrect it. That was kind of a painful life lesson.

But I also have some very fond memories playing with both my wife and my son, and with those friends.

Maybe I was to much of a ‘filthy casual’ to get drawn too deeply into it (I only casually raided sporadically). But even still, it did hook me in for a while. And even now it’s left an itch I can’t scratch. I miss the Wrath era and how vibrant and dynamic and crazy the ‘world’ could be.

Overall I feel like it was worth the time and money. But I know that’s not the case for many others.

My son still plays it sometimes and is trying to get me to come back for the new xpac. But I have zero enthusiasm for it. The last several months I was playing I would log in out of obligation and then almost immediately log off again because nothing sounded fun to do. I didn’t (and still don’t) like what they’ve done with both retail and classic. I guess I’ve moved on in life.

Maybe it’s watched vs buffered?

We’re also doing a good job destroying the planet, at least from the stance of making it inhospitable for life. Will life survive? Yes. Because “life, err, finds a way”. But it sure as hell won’t be because of the efforts of the most powerful and influential humans.

A lot of the comments here seem to be missing some key points from this article:

• The writer made her own likeness available to everyone on purpose. She did this knowing what would happen, but it was part of the exercise of seeing how weird it would get. So the points that she was stupid for doing, or that she was outraged by this, this are missing the point. Was she stupid? Maybe, but she made a conscious sacrifice on her likeliness. Was she outraged? Clearly not.
• It’s short-sighted to say “yeah this will happen, so don’t put your is image out there”. There are lots of people (especially women and girls) who have gone out of the way to avoid having their image/likeness out there for these it similar reasons. But they have still ended up the victim of humiliation and trauma from photoshopped images or deep fakes made against them.
• This second point was a big part of what the author was trying to point out. It’s both a warning to others about being careful of protecting your identity, and an alarm sounding that there are some really weird and creepy fetishes out there that people can get their likelinesses pulled into, even when you actively try to avoid that.
• It also highlights the lack of safeguards on this kind of issue. Consent, age, level of fame… none of that matters in this issue. And in most cases the companies behind these tools don’t do shit to address these concerns.

A few counterpoints to the circumcision pros that you mentioned:

• Circumcision rates are dropping across America. In some areas they ared dropping faster than others, but from what I recall the get are basically dropping everywhere to some degree. So I expect bullying about it is on the decline as it becomes less common.

• Also, the simple fact is that bullies will find any reason to be shitheads. So if it’s not circumcision it’ll be something else.

• Any straight women who are grossed out by a natural penis are idiots, and your kid will be dodging an asshole bullet if they do reject him over that.

• Better to let him decide if he wants to get it cut later or leave it uncut than to take away his free agency.

Citizens United strikes again.

I don’t trust some of the numbers in this article.

Microsoft Teams: 100% CPU usage on 32GB machines

I’m literally sitting here right now on a Teams call (I’ve already contributed what I needed to), looking at my CPU usage, which is staying in the 4.6% to 7.3% CPU range.

Is that still too high? Probably. Have I seen it hit 100% CPU usage? Yes, rarely (but that’s usually a sign of a deeper issue).

Maybe the author is going with worst case scenario. But in that case he should probably qualify the examples more.

A lot of self-promotion quotes in there from companies involved in the H1B visa industry. But one broad trend among them: this will empower developing and non-Western developed nations at the expense of the American tech industry - especially the tech industry outside the big 5 or 6 giants.

It’s the same reason IBM still exists. Massive multinational / government contracts keep them alive and healthy.

Oracle will be handling TikTok’s algorithm? Okay, so TikTok’s back-end workflow/decisioning engine will rapidly bloat up and will need to be completely replaced every two years. Got it.

Amen. I’ve tried the vibe coding thing but it’s frustrating because a) too often the AI output has some profound problems and it gets annoying ‘babysitting’ it; and b) I usually prefer the challenge of figuring out syntax and implementation issues myself.

If something is taking too long I’ll ask the LLM. But I feel like if I do this too much my skill set will atrophy and I’ll lose my sharpness. So it’s a balancing act.

But this brings up another wider question: where is the line between “occasionally getting AI help” and “vibe coding”? Surely it’s subjective.

It’s almost like he’s full of shit and he’s nothing but a snake oil salesman, eh.

They’ve been talking about replacing software developers with automated/AI systems for a quarter of a century. Probably longer then that, in fact.

We’re definitely closer to that than ever. But there’s still a huge step between some rando vibe coding a one page web app and developers augmenting their work with AI, and someone building a complex, business rule heavy, heavy load, scalable real world system. The chronic under-appreciation of engineering and design experience continues unabated.

Anthropic, Open AI, etc? They will continue to hype their own products with outrageous claims. Because that’s what gets them more VC money. Grifters gonna grift.

The argument that you shouldn’t get divorced as after a certain age is as absurd as the argument that an acrimonious couple should stay together “for the children” (when too often staying together just causes more trauma to the children).

There’s no wrong age to divorce, because couples can drift apart at any time. And in fact, when they retire and end up spending more time together is often a point when the chances of divorce increase a lot.

The only caution I’ll say is about finances. Make sure getting a divorce doesn’t catastrophically screw up your finances. But if you can split from your wife and be able to live comfortably then it sounds like divorce is a good option for you.

Give it about a month and I’m sure there will be (…unfortunately).

For anyone who’s not aware, there are some pretty cool open source Minecraft options. Like Luanti (which is more like a playground for all sorts of FOSS Minecraft variants).

Yeah it’s crazy. They are trying to cater to older users, probably because they feel they can get more money from them.

It should at the very least get a new, better CEO. And also calm down with their focus on getting older users and encouraging user dating services. They have a solid user base with younger users, and should be focused on them and their protection.

But yeah, just shutting down might be the best option.

Sounds like it’s time to start some basic code camp / code academy / Udemy courses in your off time to catch up.

I second this. There’s a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it’s not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it’s been great.

BTW a lot of it seems to be just inefficient coding as Deepseek has shown.

Kind of? Inefficient coding is definitely a part of it. But a large part is also just the iterative nature of how these algorithms operate. We might be able to improve that via code optimization a little bit. But without radically changing how these engines operates it won’t make a big difference.

The scope of the data being used and trained on is probably a bigger issue. Which is why there’s been a push by some to move from LLMs to SLMs. We don’t need the model to be cluttered with information on geology, ancient history, cooking, software development, sports trivia, etc if it’s only going to be used for looking up stuff on music and musicians.

But either way, there’s a big ‘diminishing returns’ factor to this right now that isn’t being appreciated. Typical human nature: give me that tiny boost in performance regardless of the cost, because I don’t have to deal with. It’s the same short-sighted shit that got us into this looming environmental crisis.