If vim had an AI feature, it would be a plugin and vimtricks would give you detailed instructions on how to install it and why you shouldn’t.
Emacs has probably had AI capabilities since the mid-eighties. Just type C-S-M-x X C-a
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ikr?
They’re also adding it to Terminal. No thank you.
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Brother! 
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noooo! not my Ninja!
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Testing out products across four categories, the outfit discovered that all three air fryers it looked at wanted permission to record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason.
Unsurprising I guess, but damn, that is creepily invasive.
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I have a Philips, bought just before the pandemic. Bimetal strip thermostat, mechanical clock-switch.
Zero electronics.
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But is your sousaphone spying on you?
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It’s not just The Other Place.
I have recently been forced to stop frequenting Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a site I had been enjoying since its inception.
To those not in the know, it started as a PC gaming oriented site, founded by disgruntled UK games journalists who were fed up with working for the traditional games media, while also wanting to write content championing a platform that at the time, had been declared dead by the rest of the industry.
The journos in question were Jim Rossignol, Kieron Gillen, John Walker and Alec Meer, and the writing was sharp, witty and frequently irreverent. It was also very progressive (and still is, to be fair.)
But over time, they found they couldn’t afford to run the site, so ended up bringing on staff to help them navigate SEO in an attempt to keep the lights on and pay wages.
As things shifted more towards SEO, the founders gradually ended up leaving to pursue careers elsewhere (with the first to leave, and probably most successful being Gillen, who has gone on to have an illustrious career writing comics.)
They retained controlling shares, but ended up selling the site to a larger company, Gamer Network, who the SEO guy had previously arranged an advertising agreement with.
The format of the site was then tinkered with to make it look and feel more like other sites from Gamer Network, and is the look and feel we have to this day (I’m not a fan, to say the least.)
Of course, as the site began to rely more and more on SEO for its running costs, quality further declined (even as a subscriber who wasn’t supposed to get adverts, I still had to run an adblocker to get rid of all of them), and staff turnover noticeably increased, with at one point, contributors from other parts of the network writing one-off articles, only to then disappear never to be heard from again. This was increasingly obvious after Gamer Network merged with Reedpop.
And then, earlier this year, Gamer Network / Reedpop gave up completely and sold the site to IGN / Ziff Davis (further consolidating the industry), immediately firing the Editor-in-Chief at the time, the much-loved Alice Bell.
This is when I stopped subscribing.
The SEO guy, who had previously done a stint as Editor, is once again in control, and the latest development is that they have, as with the other place, revamped their comments system.
But where I chose not to engage with The Other Place’s new comment system, I’ve found that I simply can’t with the new one at RPS. Firefox just won’t show the comments at all (even after disabling ALL plugins), implying there’s something really inherently dodgy about the system.
I have had a peek at the site on Chrome, and can see that the comments now feature adverts ever other post.
I was never likely to switch my primary browser to Chrome anyway, but this revelation has essentially ended up cementing my decision to simply leave RPS and never visit again.
As with The Other Place, the comments and community were a large part of the draw for me, especially the “What are we all playing this weekend?” threads.
And if I’m no longer able to contribute to those or even read them, there’s no point me visiting.
So in the course of a couple of weeks, I’ve seen the death of two online communities I really treasured, so needed a place to mourn.
Thankfully, in the case of The Other Place, this place has come to the rescue, and I am probably more active here now than I ever was over there (where I was driven to comments primarily through reading posts on the blog rather than going directly to the BBS.)
RIP RPS.
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I commented occasionally on RPS but I stopped doing that when they gutted the team. I keep reading it for the news but only in blog mode (as long as it holds). I would say I care about the disappearance of the comments system but at this point I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and see when they kick out the few good writers they still have.
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I suspect that part of what lies behind this is the fact that (and I’m really not intending to sound elitist here) people like us may be more aware of these issues but a vast mass of people out there (including, increasingly, those with limited or zero memories of actually buying lifetime licences) simply do not care, do not know there is an alternative, or just accept it as a ‘fact of life’.
Amazon can afford to actually piss off some people and have them leave, because the profit from whatever is pissing them off, derived from everyone else who is subjected to it and puts up with it, is greater than the loss of revenue from those who do piss off as a result.
In a really dystopian future, many software CEOs, especially the
would absolutely vote for making even the mentioning of lifetime licences a thoughtcrime - they would very much prefer the masses were not aware such a thing were possible.
Extracting value has overtaken providing value, when it comes to business school education, sadly.
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Looks like it can be reflashed from a computer and functionality restored via various custom installs.
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I’m still using Quicken 2015, but I had to mess around with a config. file to do so (i.e. when I got a newer laptop). A fresh install still tries to summon a server at Intuit, which no longer owns Quicken, which means the software won’t run without the config. file workaround.
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/insert Fry shocked gif here
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