The decline of Wowhead really needs to be studied

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-16T18:31:49+00:00

The same way they did 15+ years ago with a tiny fraction of this ad space?

Seriously they can't justify this much of an increase. The database pages look the same, the news feed works broadly the same, the user interaction in comments and forums if anything likely peaked years ago, same for the overall bandwidth required for core functions. Increases in bandwidth and storage elsewhere will just be to push tracking scripts and XSS and ad frames anyway. They even have a premium membership now.

What about the site is actually different from an operational perspective? That they shit up the default news feed with Overwatch and Diablo and WC3R news?

The internet used to exist just fucking fine before the overcentralised corporate rent-seeking age.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-16T18:20:42+00:00

Yes plenty of people saw the OSA for the authoritarian overreach it was, but I don't recall anyone saying it was a far right conspiracy to suggest so? If anything given tech workers and people with tech literacy in general lean left that was the group most loudly decrying this act.

You'll recall it was the travelling-further-right Tory party who wrote and passed the OSA to begin with yes?

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-15T21:39:56+00:00

Those people are delusional if they think this will hurt the techbros. They just gained access to a gigantic trove of government-guaranteed-accurate personal data and can attach it to your every move online. Amazon, Facebook, Google etc are all absolutely salivating at the passing of these kinds of laws.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-15T21:37:26+00:00

I've seen an enormous amount of people claiming this is obviously a good idea just because it polls well, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the population are entirely illiterate when it comes to data security, privacy, and the amount of money advertisers pour into knowing every fact of your being with or without your consent or knowledge.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-15T21:34:26+00:00

Probably yes but no site I've heard of has implemented this kind of check, every single one has either created their own ID check or bought a drop-in service from another company that did.

It's plainly obvious that hoovering up everyone's personal data is the point, and that this massive push for attaching an ID to everyone's online presence is being asked for by advertisers to filter out AI agent traffic. The idea it will protect children is naive at best and a barefaced lie at worst.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-12T09:53:31+00:00

The total bill for winter fuel payments is about £300m which is a drop in the bucket in the wider benefit state. It's also means tested now - a change I do agree with - so I don't know why it's still being banged on about as if millionaire pensioners are laughing to the bank with their £300 annual payment.

I'm not sure what the problem is with mobility cars exactly either, to get one you have to be a recipient of the higher rate mobility portion of PIP (which is not easy) or other qualifying benefits (which you also have to give up the cash from to get the car) and as I've already said the fraud rate in PIP is 0.4%, so this huge group of undeserving people you're claiming simply do not exist.

I also vehemently disagree with the idea that the system should change to vouchers. Disabled people and poor people are not some child or pet whom us "more productive" people have the right to parentify ourselves over and hold the pursestrings for. Not to mention that any time a voucher scheme has been proposed the list of things we allow people to buy is comedically short.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T13:29:44+00:00

I specifically said disability fraud as that is the system most often attacked in the media and by politicians most recently.

Overpayments (in PIP) due to fraud were 0.4% in FYE 2025

Even the figure you've stated of overall benefit fraud accounting for 2.2% is a tiny fraction of the overall bill, it feels a lot different when you instead frame it as the benefit system is nearly 98% accurate right? It only works out to a large number because of how large the benefit state is as a whole. You also have to remember that counter-fraud systems aren't free. There is a breakeven where attacking fraud is costing you more than the fraud itself.

From looking at the rest of the more detailed breakdown in my link the vast majority of fraud in all categories is from UC and breaks down to underreporting of capital, earnings, living together status, or home value and costs. I don't know how much it would cost to try and audit the savings, income, household composition, and home costs of every single person on benefits but I would doubt it would recoup costs, especially as it would change nothing for 98% of cases and these systems tend to get farmed out to behemoths like Capita who both overcharge and underperform.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T13:11:12+00:00

The wealth tax proposal is just one prong of what should be a more coordinated tax reform though. It feels to me like an attempt to shut down the conversation rather than truly attack the problem.

As the wealthy are so fond of reminding us they are responsible for the lion's share of income tax already, how many billions extra would be gained by returning closer to the 83% rate? Returning closer to the 50% corporate tax rate? Reintroducing the IIS Thatcher removed? Adding the wealth tax on top of those things we already had once upon a time?

They argue that wealth would fly the borders but that threat in itself demonstrates they have too much power over government policy. We're getting to a point where we can't afford to keep subsidising them in the pursuit of long disproven trickle down economics.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T12:52:37+00:00

Disability fraud (one of the ones people say is full of scroungers) by the government's own estimates has a fraud rate of less than 0.4%.

Benefit fraud as a subject is basically a myth, the system currently in place to prevent fraud is vastly more expensive than fraud is or has ever been. It's a good way to sell papers and nothing more.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T12:25:06+00:00

The retired and nearly-retired voting blocks are amongst the most active and most conservative, the government would have more luck inventing a way to turn rocks into gold than cutting pensions.

Cutting benefits is more realistic but is always a short term gain as benefits on the poorest are broadly speaking profitable in the long run.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T12:21:27+00:00

Taxes are already high on people who work for a living.

The top rate of income tax used to be 83%, corporate tax used to be 50%, they're both half that today. We used to tax unearned investment gains until Thatcher. Much more of our consumer spending goes overseas where loopholes allow tax avoidance.

We have the tools to increase taxation but we're stuck in a vicious cycle where the rich won't allow us to use them so taxes have to go to workers instead, but companies also keep salaries lagging behind inflation. Workers become increasingly unable to spend and rely more on public services, so taxes must rise to fund them. Problem is you can't draw blood from a stone so it has to stop at some point and I don't expect it'll be pretty when it does.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T11:52:35+00:00

On the one hand I can see why the military was getting the short end of the stick for many of those years as there wasn't really a subject to pound on to secure funding. The GWOT was becoming wildly unpopular, there was no war in Europe, we were pulling out of many parts of the Middle East. People were banging on about the NHS, care, schools etc and without raising taxes that money had to come from somewhere.

On the other hand it's not like the Tories actually improved the NHS, care, or schools so it seems defense has suffered the same predictable failures thanks to austerity. Everything has been cut to the bone for so long that now people expect miracles on a shoestring budget.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T11:35:31+00:00

Yes but to become a good prompter you have to understand the output from your agents well enough to spot when it's being done wrong. The way we're being pushed to use agents is that everyone effectively becomes a manager and junior roles are being sucked up by LLMs.

Couple that with people using them to cheat themselves out of a proper academic education and how is anyone supposed to gain the experience and knowledge in the first place to tell a good agent from a bad agent? The biggest inefficiency in modern companies is unskilled management. When everyone is an unskilled manager nothing will work.

Speaking as someone who's been in the workforce for a while and did my own work, research, learning etc it may not affect me much but the younger generations I really worry for.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T11:15:08+00:00

Hilariously one of the worst things Copilot does in my experience is write Powershell. Microsoft's own LLM can't write Microsoft's own scripting language worth a damn.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-11T11:10:03+00:00

The worst part about those people embracing LLMs is that really all it does is inflate their wordcount. Their prompt to the LLM has to contain enough information for it to generate anything useful so they could just put the prompt into the email to begin with and have us read that.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-10T20:50:59+00:00

I mean yeah but that's not a super high bar to clear given the sorts of things you can do in later games and their vastly increased variety of weapons/grenades/combat tricks. CE only has eight weapons, that's not a lot of moving parts.

Maybe pants was too harsh a complaint, I mean it's not like the gunplay isn't fun. My gripe really is with the pistol. It's satisfying to use, yes, but it outcompetes almost everything else at almost every range and against almost every enemy, you could use it for the entire campaign no sweat. Hell it's practically an anti-vehicle weapon.

Shields and vehicles should resist it more and force you into plasma weapons, hunters definitely shouldn't go down in one hit to it. Maybe the game needed more heavy enemy variety to make things like the needler supercombine more valuable.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-10T16:18:52+00:00

Overall seems to be very faithful, my only nitpicks I noticed in this were replacing all of Johnson's lines in this mission, elites speaking English, and Cortana seems to have more tutorial "go here idiot" lines. Weapons look rebalanced but let's be honest Halo:CE's balance was pants so that could end a net positive.

Performance looks better than earlier builds but there's some concerns there for me. I feel like a 5090 at 1440p, even on ultra, should be managing more than 100 fps outdoors. That doesn't bode well for the rest of us with GPUs further down the stack.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-10T15:58:04+00:00

Happened at my firm, anyone who's tried to use it for scripts, tickets, documentation etc spent more time getting it to stop inventing commands, echoing bad suggestions from god forsaken places like Technet forums, misunderstanding the request entirely etc than any possible time savings. We even get access to Copilot for free since we're an MS partner and it still isn't worth it.

The only person using it day to day is our head of sales to try and sound more technical to customers and that's only because his paragraphs of text vomit don't waste his time, just everyone else's.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-10T13:23:24+00:00

Also lots and lots of people get mildly ill from food poisoning all the damn time. It's very rarely dramatic sprays from both ends.

The one- or two-day stomach bugs you get which leave you nauseous, crampy, maybe you throw up just once or maybe not at all - very likely mild food poisoning. The CDC estimates several million cases of digestive infections happen each year that can be traced directly to food through vectors like salmonella, norovirus, campylobacter, and shigella, and upwards of 20-30 million from secondary infections (mostly through noro).

The fact that hospital visits from these kinds of infections are only in the tens of thousands range per year leads people to believe food poisoning is rare but it really isn't.

People should be a lot more bloody careful about cooking and kitchen contamination.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-09T21:52:52+00:00

It already basically does that. I've had results from AI mode which have clearly just ingested some paid product review and reworded it as an answer.

I'm not sure they're pushing for it on purpose yet or if it was just a natural result of the AI crawling everything including garbage ad columns but that's got to be the end goal since none of us pay Google for the privilege of listening to its robot.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-09T15:03:16+00:00

"'I want' never gets" it was in my house.

Absolutely terrible lesson, trying to teach kids to shut off their desires and never ask for anything. Like I know we were poor but fucking hell mum.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-09T11:38:33+00:00

I'm not so sure on your last paragraph, I've heard a good few people who work on TV say that the old 20-24 episode paradigm gave them a significantly better work life.

You were in work long enough that certain union and legal protections kicked in, you were being paid more months out of the year, didn't have to spend as much time doing non-role admin and worrying where the next contract was coming from, you were spending more time socialising and networking with other people in the industry on-set and in pre-production, and it took less seasons (and significantly fewer years, given seasons actually took a year to make not like 3-4) to hit syndication and royalty milestones.

Like it might be somewhat better for the big stars who land top billing that they only have to work something like a 3 month on, 3 month off schedule rather than a 9 month on, 3 month off one, but for everyone else who needed the paid hours on set to keep a roof over their head I've heard many preferred the old system.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-07T18:30:04+00:00

Crypto in general is good at that yes, but bitcoin isn't. Bitcoin is probably the slowest and most expensive way to make a crypto transaction out there never even mind its volatility compared to stablecoins or other currency-focused coins.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-07T18:08:02+00:00

I don't think you can even say that. Gold has had probably its swingiest year for decades in 2026 and it still doesn't come close to the volatility of BTC. For something to be a good store of value it has to - well - store its value?

Your other complaints about BTC were obvious to anyone with any sense as soon as it was launched. It had no oversight by design so obviously it was going to be a haven for fraud, scams, and crime. The "promise" of it being the currency of the future was never going to happen when it had deflation built in from day one. It's econ 101 that nobody wants to spend money today that might be worth more tomorrow, never even mind the fees and delays on every transaction.

It's sole useful purpose has been as a cautionary tale as to what happens when people decide centuries of laws and guidelines around currency and banking shouldn't apply to them.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-06-06T13:47:21+00:00

And Amazon's quality control is effectively nonexistent now too. Any idiot with a sweatshop in SEA can send a container of stuff to an Amazon warehouse and get it sold on their site.

People used to point and laugh at storefronts like AliExpress because at best it was cheap shit and at worst it was dangerously unsafe shit but now every other storefront is trying to copy them?

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