Honestly, a Japanese-style capsule hotel and net cafe would probably do very well in a university environment.

Granted, that’s still charging people for homelessness, which doesn’t help any of the underlying problems. It’s just slightly less dystopian since it’s cheap.

I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.

<rant>

You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.

If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.

To quote your quote:

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

I think the author just independently rediscovered “middle management”. Indeed, when you delegate the gruntwork under your responsibility, those same people are who you go to when addressing bugs and new requirements. It’s not on you to effect repairs: it’s on your team. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. The idea that relying on AI to do nuanced work like this and arrive at the exact correct answer to the problem, is naive at best. I’d be sweating too.

In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.

I’ll take it one step further and say that if you absolutely must use Office, O365 works in a browser on any operating system. You literally don’t need Windows anymore for that.

My prediction is that they’ll go full SaaS and make the non-pro version “free”, with a whole raft of features “cloud only” behind a Azure/O365 subscription.

Solid list!

but i always felt those two game designs were kissing cousin

I see them as the same genre. You have this “pushing the map’s frontier” mechanic, along with some power or item progression to enable that. The rest is find-and-seek to connect all those dots. IMO, the only major difference is a side vs top-down perspective.

Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.

Push back on your investors now before it’s too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.

A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.

If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you’re risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don’t already know this. It’s not smart, it’s not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It’s reckless.

How stupid do they think we are?

That’s not the question to ask. Anon should be asking: How stupid is everyone, as a group?

I agree. FWIW, unofficially, fans are already calling it the “GabeCube” which is no less punny.

TL;DR: viable last-ditch option would resemble Highlander 2 in terms of putting one corporation in charge of “protecting” the planet.

Okay, so I was keeping the idea of using deliberate “global dimming” in my back-pocket just so it wouldn’t worm it’s way through the zeitgeist. It’s a viable last-ditch option, but it comes with steep drawbacks. But since we’re here now, fuck it.

We already know that, thanks to requiring shipping vessels to use low-sulfur fuel, cloud seeding can actually reduce solar gain. The problem is that it also blocks out a lot of the light needed for photosynthesis. So this approach punches down on the environment in a completely different way. As for people, while global warming will absolutely impact agriculture, so would less sunlight.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/

So we could just use airplanes and cloud-seeding. Or we could increase particulates in the atmosphere. Or, as Elon suggests, fly satellites to do the job. The tradeoffs here are awful: disrupt where rain happens, raise lung cancer risks globally, or catapult one man into multi-trilliionaire status while they charge every government on earth for the privilege. Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.

We should seriously considering doing anything else first.

Edit: I know I didn’t invent this idea. Rather, I just didn’t want to add to any consensus around it.

It’s exactly the same game.

This is what kills me. There’s so much squandered potential in AC with this kind of thinking. Instead, Ubisoft just wants to be EA by re-selling the same game every year, but doesn’t have the sports licenses to pull it off.

After the initial couple of hours I started to feel like everything is a chore.

Exactly. I don’t know what I expected, but that was my experience as well. The game more or less told me this:

“Hey, did you enjoy the first chapter? Well guess what? We’re going to throw that at you x20 with the occasional plot beat thrown in for variety. Have fun!”

For the obvious boatload of cash poured into Odyssey’s development, I feel like half as much game done twice as well would have been a better experience. Instead, we get something that is seemingly padded for play-time, in the same way a 4th grader adds extra blank lines to hit the required page count on a book report.

Seriously. Why stand, miss, clean up your own piss (now or later), then repeat all that every time? Also: standing causes splashing - it NEVER all goes into the bowl.

Blood Dragon?

The sheer genius of both Hades games is that dying is absolutely one of the best parts, since the hub-world is full of fun things like this.

Hypnos: My list says you got killed by a REDACTED. What’s that even mean?

A few deaths later…

Hypnos: REDACTED got you again, huh.

There’s a section where, if you continue to avoid the narrator’s prompts to take a specific door, it just brings you to an unfinished room - dev textures and all - while the narrator gives you grief for screwing up the game.

Classic Doom even razzes you a little bit on the difficulty selection screen, with “I’m too young to die” as the easiest one.

I don’t recall Heretic or Hexen giving you guff for quitting, but I could be wrong.

Portal and Portal 2.

GLaDOS’ constant mockery of your person, your ability to navigate tests, and general spite pretty much make both games. It all even manages to provide a lot of world-building without lore-dumping. 10/10, would get roasted again.

Well, they can take my plugins and Tampermonkey when they pry it from my cold, dead, hands.