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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2026

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  • It definitely sounds like some anti-piracy stuff. Old game devs were trolls when it came to finding creative ways to deter piracy. They knew they couldn’t prevent bootlegging, but they could certainly annoy the bootleggers.

    It’s why lots of anti-piracy stuff in old games only really ramps up after a few hours of gameplay. When a pirate is trying to crack a game, they don’t want to spend hours testing to see if the crack was fully successful. The game booted, so they sent it out the door. If the devs put a big obvious “we detected that you’re playing a pirated copy” warning on the title page, the cracker would obviously know that they need to take another look at their work. By burying the anti-piracy stuff behind several hours of gameplay, it means the pirate won’t be able to reliably check each version of their crack.

    Especially if the game devs do something like check for a crack at multiple points throughout the game, and record it as an invisible part of your save file. It means you can’t just load a save from right before the noticeable stuff happens. Because you probably got flagged several hours ago, so loading that old save will still flag it as a pirated copy even if your crack is working now.




  • My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”

    I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?

    The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.









  • Also, it’s funny that he touts logged-out access while a large percentage of the site is walled off. They also block VPNs if you’re logged out, because they want to be able to tie your tracking data to a specific account. They can do that easily if you’re not on a VPN, so they let you browse without an account.

    But if you’re behind a VPN and blocking all of their background trackers, they can’t easily tie your browsing history back to a specific user. So they force you to log in, so they can track everything your account does.






  • “We have one full-time staff member (that’s me) and 14 mostly ​part-time contractors,” Executive Director Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation said via ⁠email in an interview on Friday. Board members are unpaid volunteers, and funding ​comes from donations and grants.

    Sounds more like she is stretched thin, and pointing out how unsustainable the current model is. Only one person dedicated to maintaining a programming language that ~70% of the internet uses is the perfect example of that xkcd “all modern infrastructure, vs one obscure person who has thanklessly been maintaining a project since 1997” meme.




  • It’s really not that hard to believe. Waymo will use any available roads to navigate between fares, and it can become especially bad when they’re waiting for fares. Because they don’t just return to a home parking spot and wait between fares. The point is that they want to spread their potential reach (and ensure there are cars nearby regardless of where they’re requested) so they spread out until they need to return to charge/refuel.

    They cruise around random backroads and residential areas until a fare requests them. They also avoid U-turns whenever possible, which means they’ll often path through some interesting places just to avoid turning around. They quickly clog residential roads when fares are slow, by all driving in a holding pattern around residential areas that aren’t designed for that kind of through traffic.