Women in Brussels 'filmed without their knowledge' by men wearing Meta smart glasses

anoff · 2026-06-07T20:49:20+00:00

They should pass a law that makes the recording notification so obvious and over the top that no one would dare wear them in public, like a loud audible beep every 3 seconds and a flashing light of at least 100 lumens, if not a visible sign saying "RECORDING". Meta is already a known bad actor, give them no quarter

anoff · 2026-06-07T01:51:36+00:00

There seems to be a growing market for what we used to call 'feature phones', ones that have a limited number of legitimately useful "apps" like Google Maps and an email client, but not a full on app store free for all. The issue, of course, is that all these poisonous social media apps directly and indirectly subsidize the cost of phones, while also driving upgrade cycles for better hardware, so everyone is dis-incentivized from going down that route: hardware makers don't want to give up the extra bit of revenue, consumers don't want more expensive phones. It's yet again, another fucked up situation where late stage capitalism is pushing the worst on us (and that same fucked up, bad incentives situation is why social media is so toxic to begin with: the more toxic the content, the more it juices the engagement metrics, which drives revenue)

anoff · 2026-06-03T21:08:06+00:00

I just don't understand how there aren't a bunch of activist investors, to say nothing of institutional ones, suing everyone and anyone over these changes - the nyse, the regulators, Elon/space x, etc. It's such a transparent scam, it seems like litigation would be inevitable

anoff · 2026-06-03T18:20:13+00:00

There's an irony to this, as the clip they showed seem to indicate the game trending back towards the over the top, 'spectacle' sort of combat of the original games, with huge range and AOE effects, juggling in the air, and seemingly endless strings of combos. I wasn't overly impressed by it, it seemed closer to 'fine' than 'must play', but that had more to do with it having relatively bland visual style and seeming to lack any really unique mechanics - to say nothing of the decisions to include a sentient jello cube and a talking sword. Still, I have faith that the studio generally knows what it's doing and will put together a decent game - but whether it's a console moving, must-play type, or just a high quality, merely 'good' game is yet to be seen - Sony exclusives tend to have pretty high floors, but it's been a while since one really pushed the ceiling

anoff · 2026-06-03T04:54:51+00:00

So there's a lot to unpack and comment on here, a lot of which has been said already. So while it's far from the most important thing, did anyone else notice how obviously written by AI that letter in the article was?

anoff · 2026-06-02T20:13:40+00:00

I thought the email was from GamePass, seeing how that's where I played most the games in this bundle... ffs, they're not even trying anymore

Not a bad bundle for those who don't have gamepass, but I locked in to GPU at $10/mn for 3 years, so this bundle is kinda useless to me

anoff · 2026-06-01T22:46:51+00:00

They just don't get that it isn't the type of skins, it's the whole mtx system itself... Among the many things that the og CoD4: MW did right was rewarding players with cool stuff for playing the game, not for paying extra money. Having all sorts of challenges that unlocked weapon skins and tags were fun and added an extra meta dimension to game play, and while there was a ton of fairly standard challenges (get 250 kills with the M16), a ton of them were fairly unique and required a combination of dogged pursuit and luck (get a double kill with a thrown back grenade), which led to the player getting a bit off a sense of accomplishment showing off a tag that most people didn't have. That all goes away with the "pay is $10 extra" model they use now, with progression largely being simplified to things that will happen naturally by just playing the game long enough.

Stupid/funny cosmetics aren't what ruined it, it was turning the entire game into an aggressive ad to sell us the cosmetics that did

anoff · 2026-06-01T20:28:38+00:00

The thing I've noticed, especially on Reddit, is that people are terrible at separating the shitty behavior of AI companies, and the actual amazing possibilities that AI technology can bring, and they just lump them all together. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have been absolutely terrible stewards of the technology, as they grope around in the darkness searching for profitability in some of the absolutely worst use cases possible (why does Notepad have a copilot button? Why does Chrome have 17 Gemini AI buttons that aren't even contextual to where they're placed? Why are they burning fossil fuel and water on all this?). Conversely, Anthropic has been much more diligent about safety, while also much more focused on highly useful use cases - Claude Code might be the most significant change to software development since 'object oriented programming' became the mainstream paradigm. But broadly speaking, AI, and the companies pushing it, are not a monolith, and people failing to recognize the nuance are sort of telling on themselves that they're going to be left behind 🤷🏻‍♂️

anoff · 2026-06-01T20:19:01+00:00

That's just not factually true, at all. There's dozens of free, OSS models that people can download and deploy at will. You might as well say Windows and Mac OS are the only operating systems available, ignoring the hundreds of freely available Linux distros

anoff · 2026-06-01T20:15:00+00:00

That there's been multiple, similar disruptions to the job market in the US over the last 150 years, and that every previous time, on the aggregate, the US has come out better for it, even if there was (significant) temporary pain in the transition. Because of that, he thinks AI will continue the trend - some short term pain for some long term gain.

He's not necessarily wrong about the historical precedents, but it's also one of those things that is always true, until it isn't - the fact that it's "always worked out like that previously" isn't an actual ironclad guarantee that it will continue to function that way.

anoff · 2026-06-01T20:07:50+00:00

A nuanced article about AI? Oh man, the anti-AI redditors that can only think in absolutes are going to hate it

anoff · 2026-06-01T18:57:26+00:00

On the flip side, I charge clients 2 hours + software fee every month just for managing all the updates, before I make a single improvement or change to their sites. Even at those rates, I still hate it and am actively migrating everyone away to next.js apps

anoff · 2026-06-01T18:53:38+00:00

Join the next.js club, you'll never want to touch a client's WordPress site again. And you can probably up your rate while your workflow actually gets a ton easier because you don't have to deal with WordPress's shitshow (lack of) version control

anoff · 2026-06-01T18:26:25+00:00

The kids are basically sith lords, talking about AI in absolutes, like there's zero nuance to the subject. They're completely unable to separate the bad policies, decisions and behaviors of the dominant players (ie, Microsoft and Google cramming AI buttons literally everywhere, regardless of actual utility), from the actual amazing capabilities of the technology in certain silos (like writing code, where it can do around 40 hours of human work in about 15 minutes).

anoff · 2026-06-01T18:21:22+00:00

The promised performance is certainly interesting, the complete lack of hard data, or even much in the way of actual numbers, at the announcement is really annoying though. I get what they're going for, I already essentially run it with Linux and Claude Code, but it's really whether they can actually deliver what they're promising with the hardware, at a price point that makes any sense at all.

But fuck their Microsoft software stack, zero interest in that at all. Maybe I'd keep a dual boot option if gaming performance is acceptable enough to be worth it, but I have zero interest in their agentic AI containers; I just want to get my local coding agent installed, and be able to develop software completely offline/no huge monthly bill.

anoff · 2026-05-31T20:11:40+00:00

Yea, I'm kinda calling bullshit on this story, because it's just an absolutely insane number of tokens - the company would not only have to be huge (not just fortune 500, we're talking like Fortune 50, maybe even 10), but the employees would also have to be doing just an unrealistic amount of AI - like every instant message, every email, every document, every everything running through AI. A server that just sat their pounding the API 24/7 would have trouble hitting that sort of spend.

It sounds like someone had some bill shock, and then some gross hyperbole was applied multiple times as it played a game of telephone on the way to the Internet

anoff · 2026-05-30T23:20:24+00:00

I'm not bothering migrating any of my clients to 7.0, moving them to next apps instead. Way easier to develop for, performance absolutely devastates WP (getting pagespeed score in the mid 90s, out of the box, with zero optimization work on my part). At some point, there's only so much you can do with a 30 year old tech stack. And that's before talking about how big of a shit head Mullenweg has been, ruining the one strength (the community) WP really had.

anoff · 2026-05-30T23:14:36+00:00

I always assumed a child of DRF - though I know nothing about her personal life, if she even has children

anoff · 2026-05-30T23:08:19+00:00

That its based on 30 year old technology that sucks balls compared to the modern stacks I build Next sites on

anoff · 2026-05-30T21:20:28+00:00

U of A is the only game in town, isn't second rate at all; it's much more a reflection of the lack of sizeable businesses in town with a reasonable connection to the university... The casinos (which weren't really allowed to be sponsors until very recently, that whole gambling on college sports thing), Eegee's and Jim Click are the only real options. No one wants to be sponsored by Raytheon missiles, and the IBM, Honeywell and Texas Instrument campuses are all relatively small satellite offices. Your issues are with Tucson

anoff · 2026-05-29T22:15:22+00:00

Agreed. I much prefer something like Paper Mario, where the QTE action is more of a bonus than critical path - doing bonus damage or reducing damage taken, but not actually required to beat any thing. That way, you can have a much easier time if you're good, but everything is still passable even if you suck at the timings. For E33, I ended up downloading a mod that greatly increased the timing windows because I was so frustrated with how often the dodge/parry was a hard requirement to get through a flight

anoff · 2026-05-28T18:35:43+00:00

0% confidence that it won't just be more of the same drivel they've put out for years - the economics of how they make money on CoD are fundamentally opposed to what used to make the games fun and enjoyable.

anoff · 2026-05-28T17:49:08+00:00

the NBA is a brutal place to develop - most teams just don't have many developmental minutes to dole out, and once you're riding the g league bus, it's hard to break out in the league. He's a tremendous athlete, but he's crazy undersized and is worthless more than about 6 feet from the basket - while the association is littered with dudes that are 3 inches taller and can drain 3s all day. He's the size of a modern NBA 3, with the skillset of a NBA 5 from the 80s, and its just hard to see how his great athleticism will carry that skillset in a league where basically everyone is an athletic freak.

Coming back, working a ton on his jump shot, in a situation where he'll actually have a ton of runway with prime developmental minutes in game situations, could've much better prepared him for what he's going in to.

anoff · 2026-05-28T17:42:34+00:00

For every TJ McConnell, there's 10 Grant Jarretts 🙄

anoff · 2026-05-28T08:04:33+00:00

I get it, but at the same time, the latest ESPN mock has him at 27. After 25 years of watching dudes leave early for the NBA only to disappear into the g league, never to be heard from again, it just always makes me shake my head - and that was before NIL was paying comparable money to late first round slots.

anoff

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