So… Cotton/Linen/Wool? The technology is fine, its only downside in most applications is simply cost. Cotton clothes are more comfortable, less stinky, less polluting, and won’t fuse with your skin and disfigure you for life if they accidentally catch on fire. On top of not making microplastics soup every wash cycle.

If we cared to actually solve the problem of plastics in fast fashion we could ban them, with some exceptions for sportswear and shoes where synthetics have some actually useful uses. Hell, we could even make it an easy transition by gradually pulling back the allowable synthetic content for x years.

But it would directly kneecap Shein and H&M’s business model so we have to weigh all the pros against that.

Tell me you live in NA without telling me you live in NA.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary, and not only does daylight last less than 8 hours but thanks to the coastal climate it’s not abnormal to only get single digit hours of sunlight per month (5/7th of which are when we’re stuck in an office). Rest of the time is either rainy or cloudy, neither of which is useful to find stray UVB. London has basically the same climate.

In the winter it’s not even useful to commute by bicycle, because it’s dark outside both ways. What the fuck do you want from me doctorman. I’ll be gobbling up those supplements because my Vitamin D deficiency is the least surprising outcome of working an office job in Belgium in winter.

Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.

Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.

Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.

Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.

All three of your examples were known to cause ill effects for centuries. The ancient Romans knew the asbestos mines were killing their slaves. Their overuse during the 20th century was not due to ignorance but corporate lobbying and political complacency.

The lobbyist play is to fund counter-studies to sow FUD even though the scientific consensus that [X Bad] is well established, because it gives an easy out for bought out politicians. However the tatoo lobby is certainly not one that I expect to be have the pull to fund FUD scientific studies to delay legislation, and if they are doing that it should be pretty easy to point to.

On top of the other point.

Capitalism is uninterested in your healthcare policy. That’s your country’s failure, not capitalism’s, for once. Market pressures did not invent a gaggle of middle men siphoning the money between patients and care providers. That’s a result of government failures that ossified into a corrupt system benefiting a select few, a scheme which is not unique to capitalism and is actually reminding me of soviet bureaucracy.

The distinction is not purely academic, because correctly pointing out that you’re not fighting capitalism but corrupt bureaucracy makes reform a much easier sell, which is why healthcare reform is a transpartisan issue until donors and lobbyists get involved.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

In my local experience, these are actually just profoundly incompetent. Hanlon’s razor.

They tailgate because they are actually incapable of maintaining a following distance (you know the kind, when the road is empty they alternate between mashing the gas and driving well under the speed limit, and somehow if you’re a passenger they’re totally unaware that they are doing it even if they are not distracted, how it is possible to be this bad at gauging speed and distance I do not understand but these people do exist).

Then as their malfunctioning brain randomly processes that they want to go faster, they overtake, and since the lane is clear they mash the gas.

Then when they are done and they merge back, their brain performs a hard reset and they somehow drive slower than before they passed you. They do not notice. You pass them, and they are not looking distracted; the only explanation is that their brain is doing the simpsons-monkey-cymbals.gif.

1. Buy more dishes so you can go longer between washes
2. Buy a half-height dishwasher. They exist, I owned one that lived on the floor of my bathroom.

I live alone and I fill up my full size dishwashers every few days. If you don’t eat ordered/preprocessed food you can also just chuck pots and pans in the bottom rack.

Dishwashers use a lot less water than hand-washing. Even if there’s a little bit of room left, it’s still a net positive. There’s no reason for anyone to hand-wash unless they live in a tiny NYC broom closet or exclusively eat take-out in disposable containers.

I read people complained that ME1’s character creator was ass. I guess it must have gotten that reputation by being kind of ass for making a dude, because my Shep was a badass bitch. Voice actress was on top of things too. She’s by far the most memorable custom character I played.

Until ME3 where they yassified her from a 40-something war veteran to a glossy-skinned 25 year old lifestyle vlogger. Interestingly that made me - a cis man - feel viscerally connected to the injunction to look a certain way for the male gaze, and I got so fucking mad at bioware during that intro cinematic.

The punishment must fit the crime. Minimum sentence in Canada for a DUI is apparently 1000 rupees and 12 months driving prohibition. That punishment makes sense for the crime of negligently operating heavy machinery that can and does kill thousands every year. Not for operating light low-power electric vehicles where killing a third-party is only a remote (though real) possibility. That minimum sentence being applied equally is not just when the danger posed to society is so unequal. I would also expect a truck driver to have a higher minimum sentence for the same reasons.

On top of the justice concerns, if the punishment is the same for everyone, a drunk college dickhead who would have ridden a bicycle home (still a reprehensible crime mind you) might decide to drive their car instead if they feel like they’re less likely to get caught and it would be punished the same anyway. Especially as cases like this get media attention.

That’s the pitfall with blind and strict rules, if I know I’ll be getting expelled from school for getting punched by a bully, then I’m incentivized to cave their face in before the grown-ups get here.

I agree with all you said but it’s still a (bad) abstraction.

By and large, the original market for VBScript or Cobol were people who did not have the means to understand - nevermind debug - their own output. Then actual professionals were hired to fix their broken pile of shit.

Vibe coding is arguably worse in many areas (such as determinism), but I’d argue it’s a difference of degree not nature. The idea and target audience are largely the same, and the results will be as well, which is why I am not worried for my job security, quite the contrary.

you’re at risk of becoming dependent, and not building the understanding you’ll need to make something that matters

Could be – and has been – said about literally any abstraction. Some people still haven’t gotten over the fact that assembly is not the default system programming language anymore.

For me vibe coding is more akin to vbscript or MS Access. It’s for people who neither know nor care about the “how” and don’t give a shit about quality, performance, security, or maintainability (i.e. people who have no interest in software development). It’s a market that’s looked down upon for many good reasons, but it does exist and it does serve a purpose for small-scale and low-stakes DIY automation. Unfortunately that purpose is a lot narrower than the marketing pitch, nevermind all the other deleterious problems with the AI industry as it exists today.

So happy to see the game is not dead.

Combat and movement look fun and satisfying, graphics look amazing. So many moody areas, from gritty snowscape to colorful caves. Mojang could learn a thing or five from this trailer.

I do hope there will be more breadth of gameplay especially on the creative side so those promising exploration mechanics do not feel stale after a few hours of running around and blasting skeletons. That’s one thing mojang does get right, if anything they have too much breadth and not enough depth.

Not sure about the ease of movement when scaling multiple blocks. Figuring it how to get from point A to point B with the limited movement options is a core part of most Minecraft gameplay loops, especially when caving and/or fighting. Seems they made up for it with good fighting mechanics, but they will have to make up for it in the other gameplay loops as well.

Either way I wish them the best and hope they light a fucking fire underneath mojang’s ass.

EDIT:

This is the original legacy engine from the 2018 trailer, running on a four-year-old build as we push Hytale forward again.

Now hold the fuck up. What do you mean this is the 2018 engine? What the fuck have they been doing the past 7 years? Did they rewrite a whole new engine for no good reason? It looks fucking beautiful and seems to run great! I’m sure they had their reasons, and I don’t think we can draw accurate conclusions by speculating, but the insider perspective on the development cycle must be absolutely wild.

EDIT2: Okay their blog post explains quite a bit more. Seems to paint a picture that Riot wanted the engine to be cross-platform (makes sense for consoles) and they could not make it work with a full rewrite away from their otherwise functional Java/C# engine. Kind of a crazy play on Riot’s part to make Java/C# devs and former minecraft modders write a modern game engine from scratch in C++ if that’s the case. Probably a tough lesson to learn for everyone involved. If only they could learn from an incredibly popular voxel-based building/aventure game that went through the exact same engine rewrite away from a GC VM language and faced similar struggles.

As a PC player, great news that they’re sticking to .NET and Java. It will make modding much easier.

The more accurate picture is “A/AA games are doing great in terms of creative&cultural output with many mainstream successes despite being completely choked out by out-of-touch AAA studios capturing most capital investment”. 2025 has objectively been a great year for (semi-)indie games and a humiliating slap in the face for AAA studios.

But yeah I would still strongly advise against switching to a gamedev career regardless of whether the industry eventually sees reason and shifts away from AAA to AA. As with the rest of the entertainment industry, it’s ontologically exploitative and is famously a dream-crushing machine. Too many starry-eyed kids to be a healthy job market.

I don’t think that’s really fair. There are cranky contradictarians everywhere, but in my experience that feature has been well received even in the AI-skeptic tech circles that are well educated on the matter.

Besides, the technical “concerns” are only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that people complaining about AI often fall back to those concerns because they can’t articulate how most AI fucking sucks to use. It’s an eldtritch version of clippy. It’s inhuman and creepy in an uncanny valley kind of way, half the time it doesn’t even fucking work right and even if it does it’s less efficient than having a competent person (usually me) do the work.

Auto translation or live transcription tools are narrowly-focused tools that just work, don’t get in the way, and don’t try to get me to talk to them like they are a person. Who cares whether it’s an LLM. What matters is that it’s a completely different vibe. It’s useful, out of my way when I don’t need it, and isn’t pretending to have a first name. That’s what I want from my computer. And I haven’t seen significant backlash to that sentiment even in very left-wing tech circles.

Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs

The auto-translation LLM runs locally and works fine. Not quite as good as deepl but perfectly competent. That’s the one “AI” feature which is largely uncontroversial because it’s actually useful, unobtrusive, and privacy-enhancing.

Local LLMs (and related transformer-based models) can work, they just need a narrow focus. Unfortunately they’re not getting much love because cloud chatbots can generate a lot of incoherent bullshit really quickly and that’s a party trick that’s got all the CEOs creaming their pants at the ungrounded fantasy of being just another trillion dollars away from AGI.

Game preservation. The fact that Sony is scrambling to DMCA videos of this preservation effort is proof that it is not just a forgettable turd, it’s a historical landmark.

Much like ET for the Atari 2600, Concord is and will remain a case study for the downfall of the big game studios in the 2020s.

The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.

If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.

if its controlling expression is not a constant expression

Pretty big caveat. If I’m reading this right true definitely qualifies as a constant expression and the loop in the meme would therefore not be optimized away.

[Pop/rock] music has been a formula virtually since its inception. Respectfully, AC/DC put out some bangers but also all their songs kinda sound the same. Thriller was successful because it was written specifically to be the most commercially viable album of all time. Hell even in the '60s the formula was very simply “find out what’s topping the African-American charts and get white artists to copy it”. That’s how we got disco, which became so formulaic by the end that its “downfall” was a Worldwide Cultural Moment. If you think today’s music is bad, go listen to the top 100 disco hits of any random week in 1978… Probably not going to be a particularly great musical experience.

Every successful counter-cultural movement only lasts a few years before only the esthetic remains. Angry young artists “flame out” or sell out, corpos take over, make a safer formula out of it, and only then does the genre go mainstream.

I’d argue things are actually a lot better now than they were in the Disco era. The fragmentation of culture and slow downfall of linear media means that the formulaic stuff can be much more easily avoided, and it doesn’t reach nearly the same level of cultural saturation like it did when the radio was the main way to listen to music. The top charts are still relevant, but nowhere near what they were 20 years ago. Today anyone can pick up a DAW and be their own producer then self-publish to youtube, so who cares if the labels are led by uninspired fuckheads? They’re not in a position to bottleneck music production or audience reach anymore.