Sharks are so old that I’ve seen other comparisons, had never seen the milky way one before, that’s very interesting, the other ones I knew is that sharks are older than:

• The rings of Saturn
• Trees

So when sharks first evolved Saturn had no rings and trees didn’t exist yet.

I tried that, unfortunately my last name is also a brand of water. So I had to use @lastname.co which was available, but people kept adding the m and I missed on emails so I had to not do that hahahah

Nope, this one is in the bible (old testament), roughly in the same place where these are also listed as sins:

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Do not practice divination or seek omens.

Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.

And my favorite to point out to them:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Also the same book prohibits eating shrimps, and many other things that they will quickly jump to say it doesn’t apply anymore, because most christians do a pick and choose of things in the bible they follow and things they don’t. There’s a game where you and a group of friends follow everything on the bible, the last one jailed wins.

I don’t think there’s anything on a personal level that you can give them. I personally have accepted that I won’t convince people to switch so I use WhatsApp. That being said, up until very recently you could use the “hidden in the crowd” excuse, e.g. there’s no way for them to monitor every single thing that goes through them effectively, this has changed with the advance of LLMs.

This might not concern them, but the truth is that nothing you do in WhatsApp is private, the fact that you can read the same messages on two different devices at the same time without having had to input any sort of password is a dead giveaway that the information is stored unencrypted in the servers. This means that every message someone has ever sent on WhatsApp is likely stored on a huge database that can be scrapped by LLMs to find out information on an unprecedented level. Finding every user who has broken the law by for example mentioned using weed or illegally downloading content or finding all of the password for all of the accounts people have sent over Whatsapp is as easy as asking it in English. And the question you gotta ask yourself is “Do you trust Meta not to abuse that power? Do you trust every single employee at Meta with access to this database not to scrape it for personal gains?”.

But realistically that would fall on deaf ears. If you truly are serious about this you should flip the script, e.g. “Signal can do everything that WhatsApp can, AND it’s secure, which is important to me even if not to you. If you decide to use WhatsApp you’re saying that my opinion doesn’t matter, because you have no argument other than inertia. It’s like if a friend of yours developed an allergy to shrimps and you decide to still keep meeting in a Bubba Shrimp restaurant weekly because that’s what you’ve been doing.”

I get your point, but here’s the thing, GoG has never given a cent to Lutris, Wine or Heroic, I know about those and the many others that came before such as PlayOnLinux. But those are not useful thanks to GoG, they’re useful despite it. If I have to use an open source tool to “emulate” a game, and another one to organize and manage my library, I’ll give those guys money and pirate the games and get the same experience a lot cheaper. Because, like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

you can always play without updating if you want to

Can you? I never saw a straightforward way to do this.

I seem to remember a pop-up asking you whether you want to play without updating. Also I remember being able to stop a specific game from being updated by selecting the version to use in the settings, of course not all games use this, but the ones that accept mods usually do. I remember I had my CK2 pinned for a while because of mods.

I don’t think they do anything unethical but I don’t like having this private company’s always online closed source software running in the background on my computer.

I get that, but I only open Steam when I’m going to play something, so it’s not always online running in the background, and the vast majority of games I play are closed source so that’s a moot point

Second contact is the 2017 remake of the game I mentioned, GoG was not involved in that.

I know this might go against the flow here, but realistically if they’re using the tools in the way they say they are (which you should 100% check with your doctor to let him know about possible hallucinations) it’s not that bad. Speech-to-text is not prone to hallucinate, it can fail and detect wrong things but shouldn’t outright hallucinate. After that, LLMs are good at summarizing things, yes they are prone to hallucinations which is why having the doctor review the notes immediately after the session is important (and they said they do), so I don’t see this as such a big issue from the usability point of view.

You might still have issues from a privacy point of view and that’s a much more complex discussion with them about what kind of contract they have with the LLM company to ensure no HIPAA violations (as from the LLM point of view it’s just making a summary of a text it might store it, and then the whole stack is suable). They need to understand that just because they haven’t kept a copy around doesn’t mean the other party hasn’t, and because they shared it out without your agreement (you’re only agreeing to AI note taking which can be done locally so them sharing information with third parties is entirely up to them) they would be liable. I’m not a lawyer, so you might want to double check that, but I would be very surprised if that’s not the way it works, otherwise Drs could get away with a bunch of HIPAA violations by having you sign something that says they use a computer to store data and then storing things in shared Google drive.

What? How is a game from 2024 old? Also how is GoG involved in that at all?

Edit: I’ve been reading on the story of that game, and I think I know what you meant.

While Outcast: a new beginning is a new game, you probably meant the OG outcast game, which is from 1999. There was a 4 year window where the original game was only available on GoG because they patched a community mod into it. But in 2014 1.1 version was released for Steam with some more improvements, and in 2017 the game was remade. GoG doesn’t seem to have been involved in either of those, only on the original 2010 re-release including the community mod as a built-in.

Edit: It’s amazing, GoG PR is so good that they get credit for removing DRMs from games they didn’t (and are DRM free elsewhere), being anti-DRM (while allowing DRM content and even producing some by some standards), and now they take credit for remakes and rebuilds they were not even involved in. I like GoG, but people give them way too much credit and it gets annoying.

The interests of Linux users and Valve merely coincide.

I’m not naive, I don’t think that Valve is doing anything out of the goodness of their heart. But they’re investing on something I care about, so me giving them money is an indirect way to invest in that.

As for me, with a 99% single player games library, the most important thing is no mandatory launcher and no updates. Click, boom, I’m in the game.
So using GOG when possible.

Mostly agree (except I don’t mind updates, you can always play without updating if you want to), and the fact that that’s my experience with Steam is a big part of why I buy from them. I can go from not owning a game to play it with just a few controller buttons, whereas with GoG I would have to:

• Plug a mouse and keyboard to my gaming rig
• Install a browser on that machine
• Navigate to the website and download the installer
• Figure out a good wine version to use and create a new profile for the game
• Install any needed wine tricks to that profile
• Manually create a shortcut for that game using that wine profile
• Add the shortcut to some third party UI to be able to navigate to it with a controller

So yeah, the whole “click, I’m in the game” only works on Windows, which is why I said I can understand Windows users preferring GoG.

No it doesn’t. It’s just a digital use license like in any other store. Here’s the relevant part from their User agreemet

We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content

That is legally the same as any other store out there.

So why does GoG make a big fuss about that? Well, it’s mostly a PR stunt, but there is some truth to it. Games sold on GoG are, majorly, DRM-free (although not 100% of them, but close to it), this means that you can backup your game installer and install it and play it in the distant future even if GoG is no more. The reason why this is mostly a PR stunt is that you can do the same with most games from other stores as well, except you backup the game folder instead of the installer, because (and this is the part I think people always miss) if a game is on Gog and any other store it’s almost assuredly DRM free in ALL stores.

Don’t get me wrong, GoG is great and their policy on DRM is something that I think other companies should really imitate. But it’s not the be all and end all that some people make it out to be, and to me personally when I have to decide where to invest my money my choices are between a company that has a relatively decent DRM policy but doesn’t care for me as a customer, and a company that has literally spent millions making my gaming experience as a Linux user better, it’s a no contest. If I was on Windows I might consider buying more stuff from GoG because of their DRM policy, but being able to easily play games on Linux is more important for me than DRM.

That’s interesting, one of the reasons why I don’t like chess at all is that it’s usually a memory game so you either need to memorize lots of plays or you will always lose to someone who has.

Your answer should be “be the change you want to see in the world, go back to Romania then maybe you will inspire others to do the same”

Well, as a descendant from someone who ate of the tree and understands good and evil I would say that’s pretty evil and egotistical, he expulsed them so they don’t become like him in two fields since they were already like him on one.

Also, you didn’t explained how they knew to cover themselves.

Most of the time I don’t know the artist, and usually don’t care about knowing them. In the rare cases where I do know them is usually because they’re a PoS. And in those cases I make a point of not giving them money, but that doesn’t mean not enjoying their art. For example Harry Potter has a quote that is very pro-trans, during the scene where everyone drank Polyjuice potion to look like Harry there’s this bit of text:

Hermione looked reassured as she answered Kingsley’s smile

Note that Hermione was in Harry’s body at that moment, so she was a woman in the body of a man, and notice how JK Rowling uses a feminine pronoun there. This means that she fully understands that trans women are women, she’s just a PoS that even understanding that devotes time and money to take away their rights.

I’ve never heard that translation, how does that justify them noticing they’re naked as a bad thing? The idea there is simple with the fruit granting the knowledge, but doesn’t make sense with a fruit that allows you to define good and evil. But even then there’s another thing you got wrong, they’re not kicked out of paradise for eating from the tree, they get punished for that but the reason why they’re kicked out is so that they don’t eat from the immortality tree:

22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever”.

I agree with you, but concert tickets was a bad example, as that is easily centralizable. My go-to example to make people have a grasp of the type of problems this solves is games.

Imagine there was a store where you could buy games and activate them on any store you want to by only paying a small fee, for example you buy the game on that store and can activate the game on Steam, Playstation and Xbox only by paying the fees on each of them. This would allow people to essentially cross-buy games which is good for customers as it means they can move platforms or stores easier, it’s good for game devs because their games would get more views across the board and their percentage is clean, and it’s good for the stores because they get a clean cut of the cake when someone wants to activate a key.

Why can’t this be done with traditional methods? Because there’s no central authority on who owns a game, Valve has no reason to trust Sony and vice-versa. And even if you propose creating such centralized authority others might not trust it. A smart contract is transparent and auditable, requires no trust from any party and acts as a decentralized source of truth.

Not exactly bait and switch, but a long time ago I was looking for a job, had an interview that I aced, I can’t overestimate how much I aced it:

• There was a “coding challenge” that was supposed to take half an hour and I finished in 10 min
• They asked a question and my answer was so complete that I could see them turning pages and skipping the next follow up questions
• One of the few times they got to ask me a follow up question which was very related to the work I would be doing the answer was "I would just do the same I’m doing for my master thesis, and proceeded to explain how I have solved that problem on my thesis and later I found out it was roughly the same way they had solved it on their use case.

Then they told me “our initial salary is X, but that’s for Juniors, which you clearly aren’t, we’ll finish this round of interviews and contact you”. They contacted me a week later and offered me a Junior role paying X. I can’t really said they baited and switched since they didn’t change the offer, and what the other person told me was more informal. Since I needed a job and they have accepted me part time while I finished my masters I accepted thinking that once I went full time I would get a raise. Nope, they said they only did reviews and raises annually, and I had started right after that. I worked my ass off for that year, proving to them that I was worth the raise. Got to my annual review and was told everything is excellent, we’re bumping you to Junior 2 with a whooping 5% increase in salary…

That’s when I decided fuck them. They want a Junior, they’ll get a Junior. I started to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos during my work and dragging my feet, taking weeks to do what I would have done in less than a day before, and still outperforming all other juniors. I quit before the next year for unrelated reasons, and went through training a replacement who, let’s just say, was really a Junior.

One thing that helped me quit coffee was drinking tea. I know it’s still got caffeine, but if you’re drinking 4 or 5 cups a day that brings the amount of caffeine waaaay down.

• Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Meaning of life (in that order of rewaches). Although I haven’t seen them in years, now that I live somewhere where weed is legal I should do that (never seen them stoned)
• Primer, which if it’s not on your list here you either haven’t seen it or haven’t understood it
• The Mummy and Harry Potter (especially the first couple). They’re one of my wife’s comfort movies so we watch them every once in a while if she’s feeling down
• LotR, although it’s more of an event to rewatch them.
• Stargate, every few years we rewatch the TV show when we have nothing else to watch, we do that with some other TV shows as well as it’s good background noise to just relax. And since it starts and ends with movies we’ve watched those several times.
• Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 are awesome music albums so I have watched those several times
• Hair, similarly love the musics

And although I haven’t seen them too many times (but at least twice) Memento is a great movie if you haven’t seen it. Also I haven’t seen it multiple times but The Strangers is a great horror movie.

I’m out of the loop on that one, why is he a piece of shit?