Extra fact - in the USA almost all games use long weighted reels.

I believe this is by law, but may be misinformed.

Also, if you know the rng gen you can game machines: a very very clever group in Russia bought up old machines from defunct casinos, reverse engineered the games, and then developed an app that let a user photograph x number of spins to find out what the seed was for the next spin, and from there told them to bet high or low based on the upcoming game. They made millions, and farmed it out to make more. (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/)

Never really worked with them (we never made them).

I think they’re lower prize threshold cat Bs.

In the UK, slot machines fall into 4 main categories. Of particular interest are category C machines, as these can remember a fixed number of previous games. I.e. the “myth” that a machine is “about to pay out” because “someone lost a lot to it” can hold for these games.

Cat A and B machines are completely random, previous games can have no impact on probabilities of winning (though pots can climb).

Online games have different rules, not always fair ones!

Oh, and ALL games (in a physical location) must (by law) show “RTP” (return to player) somewhere. It usually gets stuck it in a block of text in the manual since no-one reads them. (If it’s below 97.3% just go play roulette as it offers better returns).

You know, this thread really needs a list of of the publishers responsible for this travesty.

“Publishers Hachette Book Group Inc, HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc and Penguin Random House LLC” - According to Reuters

1. Make it too big to fail
2. Wait for the fall while enshittifying
3. Cash in on the bail out
4. Go to 2

Good to know.

Now here’s a thought - what if the real workaround Google are using here is targeting only non manifest V3 users?

That would reduce the cost of doing this, since chrome users are already forced to swallow ads and could just be served as normal.

The end of a beautiful era - hats off for all the folks who made the pi what it is, the folks who will now be forced to make us sorrowful for what it will become.

Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it’s just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It’s not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.

It’s, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.

Eventually, after a suitable lag, we’ll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.

The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they’re just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they’re the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we’ll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.

And here was me thinking windows 8 was just a beta release of vista that was leaked by Microsoft!

That needed a trigger warning

Ah Windows 11, Vista 2.0.

At this point, I can use Linux for most things except older fangames, reliable printing (seriously, cups is pain), and some mmorpgs.

Once I get a month without the university shitting its pants and changing policy overnight, I’ll eat the learning curve and switch (actually learn to troubleshoot wine rather than relying on searches).

When I move, thinking mint with cinnamon because I love that desktop.

What is life but a lottery?

A lot of the drive towards AI is people thinking to save a quick buck, but longer term that places them in a very unsteady position themselves.

All products end up being for “shareholder value”, and AI will be no different. Someone will find an enshittification vector and run with it.

Suddenly, that “quick buck” becomes a monthly subscription that costs more than the people fired. Company data is harvested and sold, customers are advertised out, the shittiness of the system becomes a company problem.

So we’re either going to see a stark change away from the current shareholder value model (about as likely as world peace), or we’re going to see a lot of CEO seppuku. Win win really.

Hah, jokes on them, my university is too poor to afford copilot.

I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it’s derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.

The +5 charisma buff was too hard to pass up.

My options are likely to be:

A) Live 5 years unable to remember my work, with added incontinence.

B) Go out trying an experimental age reversal treatment - because why not roll the dice one last time?

C) Not survive to old age due to overwork, burning out my body one semester at a time.

C is most likely, B is the plan, and A is to be avoided at all costs!

Operation archive the archive?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.