Bitwarden. Second place isn’t even close.

The first line of James Ellroy’s LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

There’s something about Ellroy’s clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it “shotgun prose”) that grabbed me from the very first moment.

An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninetyfour thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border–right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.

Ich bin ein berliner

I’ll hear NO aspersions against my precious Cron!

Cron is magic. Cron is civilization!

InXile was most famously the Wasteland series, the spiritual successors to the original fallout designs (1 and 2). But they also did Tides of Numeria and Bards Tale (I think, but don’t quote me)

No. Next question.

cries in Paradox

Had an EA Play so I could play NHL and FIFA, and the occasional ME Trilogy replay. Canceled it the moment the news broke about Kushner and the Saudis. Had paid for the year and was willing to sacrifice the final five months in the name of morality. But luckily they refunded me the difference.

He apparently has several ships, which is several more than most people can afford.

That number for the rest of us being, of course, none.

When I graduated highschool, the idea that some dinosaurs had feathers and evolved into birds was still “fringe science”.

How many times do I have to tell you. be THOUROUGH when you wipe!

Partially yes. But I’m positive that they were looking for their own Reichstag fire and found it in the Kirk killing.

You get two hotdogs in the time it usually takes to eat one. It’s called efficiency, my friend. We’re visionairies.

Someone in the administration (not Trump obviously) is smart enough to know to strike while the iron is hot. Use the Charlie Kirk killing to justify all kinds of shit that they want to do anyway while they have an angry army of supporters to shout down anyone who dares to speak up against their actions.

They were always going to declare antifa a “terrorist organization.” They were always going to come after Kimmel. They were always going to put democrats on lists to be investigated. The MAGA anger over Kirk’s killing just gave them the opportunity to speed up the timeline and they couldn’t let it go to waste.

I will often take two hotdogs, cut them in half longitudinally, and lay those out on two pieces sandwich bread.

Ergo…hotdog sandwich.

So programmers are now basically the equivalent of in-shop publishing house editors, or a better analogy, a script-doctor in the hollywood production scene.

A company vibe-codes something that is cheap and shitty, then has to pay an editor to actually make it usable.

I hate this timeline…just pay the person to create the code in the first place…

AI should never be used to create anything in Wikipedia. But theoretically, an open source LLM trained solely on wikipedia would actually be kind useful to ask quick questions to.

The reason AI is wrong so often is because it’s not programmed to give you the right answer. It’s programmed to give you the most pervasive one.

LLMs are being fed by Reddit and other forums that are ostensibly about humans giving other humans answers to questions.

But have you been on those forums? It’s a dozen different answers for every question. The reality is that we average humans don’t know shit and we’re just basing our answers on our own experiences. We aren’t experts. We’re not necessarily dumb, but unless we’ve studied, our knowledge is entirely anecdotal, and we all go into forums to help others with a similar problem by sharing our answer to it.

So the LLM takes all of that data and in essence thinks that the most popular, most mentioned, most upvoted answer to any given question must be the de facto correct one. It literally has no other way to judge; it’s not smart enough to cross reference itself or look up sources.

I’ve had this discussion with friends because I’m the crazy “privacy” person in my peer group. I always have trouble putting it into words, so this might not make the most sense, but I’ll try.

The most fundamental right that we have as humans is the right to present to the world the person that we want to present to the world.

Everybody has something about themselves that, if it were known, would change the way other people look at them. Maybe it’s something silly and stupid like you’re afraid of spiders. Maybe you’re into some really freaky porn. But whatever it is, if you don’t want people to know about it, that’s your right and it’s sacrosanct.

People will say, “who cares if people know that you’re afraid of spiders, it’s a small price to pay if it means that we also catch the people with something illegal to hide, like CSAM or other stuff.”

But what about the battered wife who has been secretly searching for support and planning her escape from the situation on the internet. But she shares a computer with her abusive husband and google, knowing her search history, starts showing him ads about furniture and moving companies?

What about the scared teenager who has realized that he is gay and have parents who would disown him if they found out. When he’s searching for support and fellowship online, the only place where he can feel like he belongs, he can be as careful as he wants, but his search history will eventually betray him before he’s ready to come out himself.

Maybe what you don’t want people to know about is just that you’re afraid of spiders, sure. But what if it’s something far more important.

Yes, but how does Huey Lewis sound on it?