First, you’re assuming that most successful assassins are the unstable nutcases. It could just be that it’s more memorable when the motivation is “make jodi foster love me” than “stop an expansionist imperialist who’s destroying the lives of the common man”.

You’re also more likely to be a lone assassin if you don’t conform to social norms because social norms say not to kill people.

The most prolific assassins are just common soldiers whose names we don’t even record.

I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.

That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”

I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.

Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…

Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.

The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it

City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.

It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.

Okay, but trying to guide a braindead little sim automaton through basically playing factorio would be incredible. “Oh my God, why are you running the blue circuit belt through there? Stop it! No! STOP CRYING DIANE, YOU CHOSE TO SKIP EATING AND USE A SUSHI BELT. Stop eating off the floor, there’s coal everywhere”.

Please elaborate on how LLMs can functionally replace politicians, elected representatives, lawyers, or political activists.

I really want to hear how you think that works.

Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.

It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.

PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.

The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.

Yup, that’s a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.

But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.

Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.

The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
“Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.

On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.

Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.

We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.

99% agreed, but I’d increase the number a bit. With inflation and rising costs $10 million in net worth isn’t always an obscenity.
It’s unquestionably wealthy, but still in the realm of attainable by an individual without being a bastard. Owning a single family home and a gas station in the San Francisco region and planning for retirement could put you in that realm.

I don’t begrudge someone who worked hard having nice things. I don’t even begrudge luck, inheritance, or nepotism getting luxury. It’s when it’s beyond luxury and no one could get it with any amount of work.

Tie it to the consumer price index or some such.

Right? I work for an actual megacorp and our policy is almost the exact opposite on every point.
Sick workers make more sick: don’t work and feel better faster. Distracted workers makes mistakes and cause problems: don’t work and take care of your kid. Rested workers work better: take the time around the holidays off entirely. Productivity is crap then anyway and with so many vacations it’s easier to plan around a block where nothing happens than to deal with random teams having unpredictable delays. Car broken? Expense a Lyft. We have a corporate account and your ride to work is a rounding error compared to the sales visits.

If you’re going to invoke money you should actually understand how big companies function and view money.

My standard for an orm is that if it’s doing something wrong or I need to do something special that it’s trivial to move it aside and either use plain SQL or it’s SQL generator myself.

In production code, plain SQL strings are a concern for me since they’re subject to the whole array of human errors and vulnerabilities.

Something like stmt = select(users).where(users.c.name == 'somename') is basically as flexible as the string, but it’s not going to forget a quote or neglect to use SQL escaping or parametrize the query.

And sometimes you just need it to get out of the way because your query is reaaaaaal weird, although at that point a view you wrap with the orm might be better.

If you’ve done things right though, most of the time you’ll be doing simple primary key lookups and joins with a few filters at most.