Thanks! I was afraid you were going to say that…but it makes sense. Think I’ll go for it. Also means I can wait a while to buy Veilguard while I play Inquisition.

I’ve been needing a new big game to sink my teeth into, but I haven’t played any of the other Dragon Age games. I watched the glowing euro gamer review for Veilguard and it looks amazing to me (the slightly stylized look doesn’t bother me at all). Do you think I’ll enjoy it without much context? I don’t usually buy full-priced, but I make the occasional exception for games I know I’ll play for a while…Baldurs Gate, for example.

Sweet! I only learned about real-world Sabacc after how much enjoyment I got out of the Kessel Sabacc minigame in Outlaws. Looks like there are a few cantina tables in my area, might check them out.

This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.

I loved this game! I got like 6 solid months of fun out of it. It took a really long time for the card combat loop to get old for me. I had never played an x-com style game before this (though I loved their meta callouts to x-com), so the mechanics were brand new to me, but it all just made intuitive sense. The card design and animations are top notch, and some of the fights can be super-challenging, but there’s always a way, and there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finally finishing a fight after 5 different tries.

Agree on the story and voice acting, it’s all excellent. There are a couple very recognizable voices in there too.

Edit: Magik, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel are pretty much an unstoppable combo…

Your anger is entirely justified, and I share it. This whole licensing issue is a massive problem and shows how little publishers care about their customers. That said, this has always been the case, they’ve just covered their legal bases by updating their TOS.

But to answer your question, there’s no reason to keep using steam, other than it’s one of the easiest ways to legally game. It’s totally your preference if you want to keep supporting their business. There are lots of ways to illegally game, or pay way more for some DRM-free games that you can actually own, but then you’ll be extremely limited in your selection. I’ve invested so much time and money in my steam library, that I’m basically locked in (they count on this, of course). Sure I own a bunch of games on GOG, but they represent a tiny fraction of my overall library.

This is a totally unsatisfying answer, but your only actual recourse, if you want to keep using steam, is to reach out to them and express your displeasure at their updated TOS and its implications. But it’s an industry-wide problem, so I think we’re out of luck until Congress gets involved and changes how digital ownership works.

Exactly. I wish more people had this view of interns. Unpaid ones, at the very least. I worked with a few, and my colleagues would often throw spreadsheets at them and have them do meaningless cleanup work that no one would ever look at. Whenever it was my turn to ‘find work’ for the interns, I would just have them fully shadow me, and do the work I was doing, as I was doing it. Essentially duplicating the work, but with my products being the ones held to final submissions standards. They had some great ideas, which I incorporated into the final versions, and they could see what the role was actually like by doing the work without worrying about messing anything up or bearing any actual responsibility. Interns are supposed to benefit from having the internship. The employer, by accepting the responsibility of having interns, shouldn’t expect to get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping someone gain experience. Maybe a future employee, if you treat them well.

Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.

The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.

This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.

I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.

The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.

There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.

Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.

Think about it this way: remember those upside-down answer keys in the back of your grade school math textbook? Now imagine if those answer keys included just as many incorrect answers as correct ones. How would you know if you were right or wrong without asking your teacher? Until a LLM can guarantee a right answer, and back it up with real citations, it will continue to do more harm than good.

In general I think you’re right about the tech just being shitty, but a slight correction: LiDAR was not developed for self-driving, it’s just a relevant application of the technology. LiDAR has been around for quite a while, and was initially best known as a remote sensing technology. It is effective at remote sensing because it can penetrate certain solid materials, most importantly foliage. So when an aerial LiDAR dataset is collected for a forested area, since the light can penetrate through most of the foliage, one can essentially ‘delete’ the vegetation from the resulting point cloud, leaving a bare earth model, which is a very close approximation of the landscape’s actual topography if there had been no trees. This can be especially valuable for archaeological research, as foliage is often a significant obstacle for accurately mapping large sites, or even finding them in the first place.

All of that to say, yeah, self-driving buzz made LiDAR well known as tech, but it wasn’t developed for that purpose.

Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.

That’s a very cool concept. I’d definitely be willing to participate in a platform that has that kind of trust system baked in, as long as it respected my privacy and couldn’t broadcast how much time I spend on specific things etc. Instance owners would also potentially get access to some incredibly personal and lucrative user data, so protections would have to be strict. But I guess there are a lot of ways to get at positive user engagement in a non-invasive way. I think it could solve a lot of current and potential problems. I wish I was confident the majority of users would be into it, but I’m not so sure.

Holy shit that’s fascinating. This never would have crossed my mind unless I somehow found myself standing at the intersection of four square properties. Such a quintessentially American legal dispute.

That’s mostly right, but as with a lot of these kinds of things, it’s more complicated than that. Some of these checkerboard patterns were caused by systematic deforestation to help build the early railroads, but the checkerboard pattern itself comes from the way the federal government subdivided and sold Native American land to private individuals. It all goes back to the Dawes Act and our exploitation of indigenous tribes.

From a 2012 Democracy Now interview:

Eastern Navajo has a lot of—what we call the checkerboard area, and there’s these individual Indian allotments, which were created through the Dawes Act. And because of this individual ownership, Navajo allottees, they have the right to lease their land. And so, what the company does is they target individuals in our community, and they really, you know, use this divide-and-conquer tactic. And what they’re doing is basically promising all these riches and basically monetary gain for an already poor community that doesn’t even—a lot of our people don’t even have running water or electricity. And so, some of the individuals are dependent on this—on these promises of a false economy and jobs and all these good things that they—that they say they’re going to do.

It has caused a lot of problems for the tribes and their sovereignty.

Beginning with the Dawes Act of 1887, Native Americans, including the Navajo, were assigned plots of reservation land on which to practice subsistence farming. This was an attempt to assimilate Native Americans into Western European land use and domestication practices.

The checkerboard mix of lands owned by tribes, trust lands, fee lands, and privately-owned tracts severely impedes on the Navajo nation’s ability to farm, ranch, or utilize the land for other economic purposes. Problems of mixed jurisdiction (tribal, federal, state, or county) have also contributed to economic instability, as well as to racial tensions and community conflicts. Source

For sure, it’s not an easy problem to address. But I’m not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.

I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that’s a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I’m specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It’s basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can’t figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.

This is awesome, we need more rules like this, and Khan is absolutely nailing it. But I’m worried it won’t stick. I think companies have taken our absentmindedness and laziness for granted, and have made tons of money because of it. I don’t think they’ll give that up without a fight, but hopefully they lose. Unless the Supreme Court gets involved, and then we can all but guarantee they’d rule against these consumer protections.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

It’s such a basic and obvious consumer protection.

I guess I’ve been under a rock, but I hadn’t heard of this company until now. Did they really name themselves Nikola Motor? Were they expecting to be bought out by Tesla or something? This would be like me opening a store called George next to an existing store called Washington. Weird.