They used to have ads for Zelda ocarinas in Nintendo Power all the time. Eventually I got one. Kinda low quality, but I enjoyed it.

Got a nicer one as an adult. But in trying to learn to play it, eventually found out that the pitch depends on the pressure in your breath. So it’s sad that it’s kinda impossible to use with other instruments, for me, since I’ll always be off key. Still a nice thing to play with!

I’m sure they try to dress it up in some palatable way on either side. But if they’ve ever said AI would save them money, that would mean because they aren’t paying as many humans.

To save a click:

Claude Duet, a standalone AI agent app designed to act as ​a proactive assistant for professionals and small-business owners, ‌as rivals such as OpenAI and Meta race to develop AI agents that can complete work autonomously on users’ ​behalf.

Billion with a B. You love to see it!

The Diderot effect is a phenomenon that occurs when acquiring a new possession leads to a spiral of consumption that results in the acquisition of even more possessions.

Definitely relatable. I fall into phases sometimes, where I get this or that and it shifts my interest to collecting it for a bit. Nice to know this has a name!

Sure, tl;dr as I understood it:

• Person lists keyboard on Facebook Marketplace
• Gives Meta AI assistant full, ‘always-allow’ permission to handle the listing, respond to messages about it
• It accepts a lowball offer from someone, tells them to come pick it up at the seller’s house without informing seller
• Buyer shows up at the address, waits a while, gets annoyed, leaves and gives negative feedback
• Seller responds in an amusingly earnest way to the bot like ‘bro you gotta never do that’
• Meta says it’s probably seller’s fault for giving instructions somewhere
• Buyer and seller eventually make up and keep doing business

“You gotta never do that ever again” is a great line, gonna have to enter that into my vocabulary lol.

existing users who haven’t used it for six months will also be barred.

Wow, that really is awful. If I don’t use Reddit every six months I’m permanently kicked out of it? (Am I reading that right?)

I rarely go there, but when I do want to look up something I like to have the option.

(pls don’t pretend like new reddit exists, thx)

One of the worst stretches so far!

I think their point is that by and large consumers are stupid and willing to put up with almost any garbage like that. What makes you think otherwise?

Security issues for sure, that’s what I mean to acknowledge by saying it takes some level of maintenance.

But like, the feature set and UX don’t have to keep improving forever, IMO. The draw of something like this should be the community, the humans you interact with.

It’s always strange to me that software can never be complete or mature, it’s straight from ‘getting new features’ to ‘dead’. Not picking on the comment in OP, the announcement post reads like that too mostly. I get software requires some level of maintenance, but I wish we treated feature-complete as a good thing, something to celebrate.

Anyway, it was also weird to me how Tildes didn’t seize the moment with the Reddit drama a couple years ago. As I recall, they just weren’t trying to be the target of that migration. That was the first time I’d heard of it. Seems a nice place, from all my impressions of it.

It’s amazing how an appealing product can become so grotesque just by attaching Meta’s name.

Glad there’s a way to free them up.

When I was a kid, I saw my mom cut expired cards in half when throwing them away.

Ever since then, I always strategically cut my old cards into several pieces, making sure to break up the number, chip, date, name, etc. I’ll throw them away in separate trash cans and maybe wait to throw some pieces out after we take out the trash for a week.

Lol, it’s pure silliness, no one is desperately piecing cards together out of my trash. (In reality, you’d probably just find compromised cards online, or go hit someone with a wrench.)

But this headline makes me feel ever so slightly justified in my goofy behavior.

I mean, I’d (almost) never buy a digital version of a game I want to play on console. Physical or it might as well not exist. It’s not no one, but it’s not enough people to matter either.

But aside from ‘no one’ being a slight overstatement, I think you’re dead on. It’s good if the physical copy does better than expected or whatever, but it was always going to be a drop in the bucket. Still, hopefully they keep printing them even if small quantities.

Indiana Jones on Switch 2, also from them and in that case the only real physical version, seems to be sold out all over the place too.

I think there’s a market there for sure. But I don’t know that we should read too much into it. Could mean there’s a ton of demand, or could just mean they way undershot their estimates for how many to ship.

From the article:

The policy summarizes itself this way:

It’s fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

Uses in the first category are allowed, sometimes requiring disclosure. Uses in the second category are heavily restricted.

Seems pretty level-headed to me.

Good book! If you’re interested in game history or id, definitely give it a read.

“We built the phone in between” [a smart phone and dumb phone] is a pretty appealing tag line. In the last half of the 2010s, when I finally dragged myself into getting an actual smart phone, I really wished I could get a flip phone that was more capable. The feature phones still on the market at the time seemed to be right out of 2003.

This implementation seems a little off. It has the flip form factor, and can run most android apps, great! But then it sounds like they arbitrarily block browsers and ‘social media’? I think just leave them out by default, and let people go that route if they want it. The form factor already limits how well some of those would work.

They didn’t entirely miss the mark there. They publicly released the version after that and the world became worse. That certainly fits for some definition of ‘dangerous’, even tho it’s probably not how they were thinking.