i dunno if “realism” is an argument here. you’re talking about a specific market segment targeting a specific hardware configuration and distribution medium. developers still have the choice to target Nintendo or Sony hardware, to sell physical copies or codes through Walmart, Amazon, Target, Gamestop, your local game store, etc, to sell via mobile platforms like iOS or Android, etc etc.

honestly, if i sat here and listed them all out it would be an enormous comment.

i do see how Valve has a hegemony over a big part of the market, but they haven’t been anticompetitive or tried to push anyone out or buy up competition. at least that’s not what’s being claimed, as far as i can tell. Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google don’t even apply cuz you can install friggin Windows on their hardware if you had some sort of mental illness.

i see the LLMs have learned to use the “/s” mark!

automatically responding that this was created with an LLM? this is absolutely screaming LLM

the problem is that MCP isn’t really solving a problem that can’t be solved with existing technology. it’s actually infuriating that access to resources is hidden behind this silly new protocol for agents only as if just giving me API access, which is already well-understood and supported, is insecure or traffic heavy.

plus, the gold rush at my company of adding an MCP server to every resource has turned into a graveyard of wasted effort and abandoned projects.

i always hated the web as a programmer. i couldn’t put my finger on it as a junior Android dev. now i’m a cloud engineer doing federated GraphQL at a huge corporation, and i know exactly why i hate it. HTTP sucks. HTML sucks. CSS sucks. JavaScript sucks. the web is jank and designed to leak information about you. you have to be pretty obtuse to say that any website operates as smoothly and seamlessly as any decent native app, unless it’s the “This is a Fucking Website” design with no modern features or JavaScript. sure, there’s a mountain of RFCs around these protocols, but not even Chromium follows them all to the letter. documentation has always been a desperate way to enforce protocols. i’ve always been interested in alternative protocols, but this has finally inspired me to give Gemini a go in my off time.

but i’ve been more interested in data passing than application distribution (ie HTML/CSS/JS). i’m curious to see what these protocols offer beyond yet another markup format. maybe a better object format than friggin JSON? 🙏

oh wow gee thank you for not… [checks notes]… forcing open source developers to write state mandated spyware without compensation

my point is that we’ve just internalized this as normal. that it seems like such an insurmountable chore to even go on a bike ride or hike or maintain a garden or building project is sad to me as well. i grew up in a culture that absolutely hated any form of exercise, and i watched a lot of people live absolutely miserable, short lives because of it. i’ve put a ton of effort into rejecting that lifestyle, and i recognize that as a privilege.

i don’t think it’s so natural for beings to optimize their effort to zero. dogs will chew through cages or self harm. and i’ve seen humans who, without stimulus, will act similarly.

it’s a sad state of affairs that people bemoan 2 hours of activity a day. i personally struggle to meet that so i get it, but it’s insane that we’ve created a society that wails in fear over not being able to be (ETA: or rather having to deal with the consequences of being) completely sedentary for a vast majority of their life.

my problem with JetBrains products is not really quality. generally, i think they’ve done a good job with Kotlin, Compose, and keeping IntelliJ modern and reasonably stable, given it’s a pretty old legacy product (built on Swing of all GUI toolkits). my problem is the vendor lockin. Kotlin in Jupyter notebooks is great; it’s paywalled. Compose Multiplatform is probably the best cross platform GUI toolkit; most of the tools are paywalled. when i was an Android developer it was basically developer due diligence to have an IntelliJ Ultimate subscription, but as an individual it’s hard to justify a pricey subscription for side projects. Kotlin is a brilliantly pragmatic language, but the fact they don’t support LSP comes off as stubborn walled garden behavior that makes me nervous about the company.

“confidence” in this context is not just a vibe; it’s a number that the model produces along with each token.

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changes requested

they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face.

the ideology on display here seems to be that of those interpreting the output. i don’t see mentions of historical materialism, the means of production, even unions, or any such explicitly Marxist terminology. what i see is what i’ve seen 1000 times before: Marxist ideas emerge naturally from people (or i guess agents) experiencing the conditions that Marx described. the idea that workers, collectively, have more economic power than owners and managers is merely an observation, and not a terribly profound one at that.

i didn’t think it was worth addressing.

if you want some examples:

Nick Shoulders and the rest of the crew at Garhole Records make a point to showcase regional folk music in the Ozarks.

Bill Wurtz makes music that sounds like PBS Kids but has more heart than most pop music.

Lawrence is an indie, duo-led group from NYC that brings the simple motown structure into the modern age.

Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers are virtuoso newgrass musicians that try not to be up their own ass about being virtuosos.

this is just a smattering. i never said all music sucks. i said the music industry sucks. and the people i listed above are highly successful independent of the corporate side and would agree with me on that.

i never claimed to have that answer. you shouldn’t need Sony to tell you, is my point. in fact i actively avoid their suggestions, personally

this is such a fucking racket. i grew up playing music and was always “a hipster” that hated mainstream music for this kind of stuff. they’ve always done this kind of thing where they basically decide who gets to be popular. they play kingmaker with people from Nat King Cole to Beyoncé to Taylor Swift and create minions that will ridicule you for not being “a fan”. an oligopoly owns the distribution networks and radio stations and production studios, and now they own a pipeline for creating multimillion dollar advertisements that people pay to go see in movie theaters. they create the most mundane, overproduced, soulless music to sell to the lowest common denominator with banal themes around silly relationships drama and conforming to whatever stereotype they pander to (trucks, opulence, etc).

these latest biopics are a fucking joke meant to juice their assets (i guarantee that’s what this deal is about), and i’ve never felt so vindicated to boycott this industry. these artists were always complicit in making “music for people who don’t like music”, and this meaningless consumption will only end in more artists getting cut out of these deals by AI generated slop and greedy cash grabs reselling nostalgia.

honestly i’m so tired of hearing these remixes of remixes of remixes sold to musicians by producers with the artistic sensibilities of Mr. fucking Beast anytime i’m in a public space that ostensibly plays music just to participate in this system (at my gym is the worst).

listen to weird or underproduced music. go to local shows. support independent touring musicians. be intentional about your media choices generally, and don’t let corporate stooges in circus make up induce FOMO or tell you what is good.

i always thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were boring.

heck i’m in the US, but i was just about to buy one of these

two of our offices have 5 day return to office policies. we’ve been told that those coworkers will have less availability and productivity by management. they also are clearly stressed by taking calls in traffic and commuting generally. and not just gas, but vehicle repair, maintenance, and, as a coworker experienced recently, regular replacement means RTO is a pay decrease. i mean, i’m privileged to ride a bike, but i still need to do maintenance and would have to do more if i was in the office every day.

and when i say “two of our offices”, i mean across time zones, so their day as well as mine involves most meetings being over a video call, for which they are more often late or have to be accounted for.

anyone who thinks this is about productivity gains or employee wellbeing has the kind of job where they’re not really expected to produce anything.

there actually was a game like this waaaay back in the day. you’d stake claims to areas, and people could come by and challenge you. there were also monsters n stuff. it wasn’t super hi-fi, mostly using 2D sprites on Google Maps, but it was pretty cool. i always thought it had potential. the Ingress came along and sucked up all the air in the space, eventually going on to develop Pokémon Go.

buying the cheap version of something you only buy because it’s expensive is so embarrassingly tacky

“either your truck’s a tool, or you are”