FUUUUUUUUCK CHATGPT.

I still haven’t finished 100 percenting Spiderman 2 (2004) and I’ve only got 10 years to go before I’m 50.

Took me a while to even figure out vaguely what you were talking about here. I use DuckDuckGo exclusively for search. (And I use DuckDuckGo for search mostly because they let me turn off LLM BS.) I wasn’t aware they offered a browser. (I assume what you’re talking about is the DuckDuckGo browser/app, right? Not, say, search or LLM services or whatever.)

When you say “browsing and tracking through my apps”, what do you mean exactly? Did you have the impression that having the DuckDuckGo browser installed on your phone will prevent other apps from tracking you somehow? Or are you saying that by using the webapp of whatever particular service through the DuckDuckGo browser rather than an official app, you avoid tracking built into the app? (If that’s what you’re saying it at least sounds plausible. But if you’re thinking having DuckDuckGo on your phone will prevent, say, Google Play from tracking you (assuming Google Play is installed on your phone), I can’t see how that could be the case. But I also wouldn’t think DuckDuckGo would make the claim that it would. Unless you and DuckDuckGo know something I don’t.) Or when you say “browsing and tracking through my apps” do you really mean web trackers? (Or maybe apps can interact with web stuff through the browser in ways that I’m not thinking of.)

I guess what I’m asking is what specifically is the privacy claim related to DuckDuckGo that you’re asking the veracity of?

Whatever the case, it’s entirely possible that the particular claim you’re asking about isn’t true, but that it’s also not a claim that DuckDuckGo makes nor that they’d expect people to think about their products and so isn’t any particular reason for your coworker to dunk on DuckDuckGo.

Back when Hasbro didn’t seem as evil. Simpler times.

One small step for a frog…

Can I ask to what you’re referring?

Mindfulness. Note your behaviors. Note what leads to your behaviors. It’ll give you insight into what in your life and in your mind leads to “kind” actions as well as what leads to “unkind” actions, which is a huge part of the effort to become more kind.

How long have you had your mouse?

Oh, long time. Like, probably close to a decade. And it’s about the cheapest mouse I could find. The mouse wheel first broke probably within 6 months after I got it.

So if anything, the problem is probably just that it’s a super-cheap mouse.

My mouse’s wheel stopped working, so I opened it up, cleaned it thoroughly, and it worked again!

…and then broke the same way like two weeks later.

I’ve been making do without a mouse wheel. :\ Because I’m too cheap to get a new one. And I can’t be arsed to clean it every two weeks.

Even if an LLM hallucinates a sentiment that we like, it’s still slop.

I’ve been playing a Gamecube game (Spiderman 2 (2004)) on original hardware lately (slight lie - playing on a backwards-compatible Wii, but with an official Nintendo Gamecube controller) and the analogue L/R are quite annoying. Given that the analogueness doesn’t do anything in the game I’m playing unless you fully press it, it’s more like a non-analogue trigger with a ridiculous depression distance.

Be safe. Use a good VPN for pirated content and don’t trust that what you download is what you expect it to be.

The longer the bubble continues to grow and the bigger it is when it pops, the worse the crash/deflation will be, which is why I say I hope it comes “soon”.

I guess that and so that I can stop having LLMs forced on me.

Oh, and “deflation means you have less money” is a bit overly simplistic. If you’re living hand-to-mouth and don’t have a lot of debt, deflation can actually be a net good thing because a paycheck in the future can buy more than a paycheck of the same size today.

I’m in the U.S. if you’re curious.

The Switch 2 isn’t region locked. 😮 That’s awesome!

I’m still waiting to get one, hoping for a jailbreak kind of vulnerability. (I doubt we’ll get anything as awesome as Fusée Gelée, but I think even if it needs a mod chip, I’ll probably go that direction.)

I have used vibe coding

You really need to take what I’m about to say seriously and not dismiss it offhand.

It’s possible this is AI psychosis. Don’t use AI any more. At all. It’s fucking with your mind. Also recommended: seek help. This is not meant as an insult. I’m really concerned for your mental health. You need to reach out to a professional.

I hope it comes soon.

Stricken in 2000, but her ultimate fate is not reported in secondary sources.

The robots just massively crashed the Korean economy. And in a sane world, that would be a good reason to think that couldn’t be the next bubble. “Surely they’ve learned their lesson that that particular industry is a nonstarter”, would say my sane-universe counterpart. But this is an extremely not-sane world, and you have a strong chance of being right.

A big part of why I’m salty about the last two bubbles is that I’ve had to fend off hoards of brainwashed weirdos who were my coworkers buttonholing me to preach at me about how “Etherium and the Lightning Network will change everything” and “if we don’t learn how to vibecode, we’ll be left behind”. If the next bubble is bipedal robots like in Korea, I don’t think it’ll hit quite as close to home for me specifically. I’ll feel sorry for the people whose jobs it will fuck up, and I’ll hate when it comes up in contexts outside of work, but I feel like it won’t make me hate my life, my job, and everything that provides me even an ounce of joy as much as the last two bubbles.

…I hope.

If I were a little more psychopathic, I’d just give in and find a way to “sell shovels” in the next bubble.

2010s: Blockchain.

2020s: GenAI.

I don’t want to think about what they’re going to pivot to in the 2030s.

Does appeasement count as a plan?