wernsey

So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.

Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]

I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.

It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.

Now technically it would be illegal for the grocery stores to collude in price fixing like that, but they'll hide behind the fact that all of them will buy their surveillance pricing data from Google [1].

Google will tell all of the competitors exactly how much they can charge you for your eggs, and you'll get the same price everywhere.

It was probably broken by design, allowing the politicians to brag about how they're doing something, while the lobbyists managed to carve out such large loopholes for themselves that it will in likelihood never be a real deterrent.

For example: surveillance pricing is allowed if users opt-in so consider how many times you've clicked "I agree" on websites recently to get past some legalese wall of text blocking you from the content.

Another thing is you can't sue a grocery store, but you can petition the AG to sue them, which they will do only if they feel like it.

Not to mention that it applies only to grocery stores, not hotels and airlines and other industries which are inclined to do surveillance pricing

I've had it on every Windows computer I used at work since forever now, and it is extremely useful to be able to use things like `sed` and `gawk` (and even `make`) from the command prompt

The appeals to people in Southeast Asia being scammed reminds me of a blog by Cory Doctorow last year: Every complex ecosystem has parasites [1]

The gist of it is that technology can be useful, but that usefulness comes with a price: sometimes bad actors are going to commit fraud or other undesirable actions.

As an example, you can reduce the amount of banking app scams to 0% by simply denying any banking apps on phones. But because of banking apps' usefulness we're not going to do that, so there will be some non-zero risk that you will get scammed.

As a technical user I chose Android for its usefulness, accepting that there may be a (minute) chance that I get scammed, but it is a risk I am willing to take, and Google will unilaterally take this choice away from me.

Still, I don't believe Google's security concerns are sincere, so I think I just wasted my time typing all of this

"I got into an argument on Discord about how inefficient CBR/CBZ is, so I wrote a new file format. It's 100x faster than CBZ."

It has some charts, notes and comments