I have several disabilities, and they deliver stuff I need to my house; no questions asked, no fuss, no new accounts, no sign up form, no mailing lists I didn’t ask for, no additional data leak attack surface, no delivery fee, no weird obscure delivery service that takes 4 weeks, no difficult return process (though I wouldn’t personally return an opened pillowcase).

My next best option near me would be something like BigW. However, I just checked, and they don’t even have any pillowcases in cotton unless I go through their “marketplace” third party system. At which point it’s basically just an Amazon seller but worse.

If anything else was as convenient or good, I’d use it; believe me. But it’s just not a thing for me, in my area. Also of course I’d go shopping in person, but I can’t, for various reasons.

Easier said than done

I remember my first data cable. I plugged two computers directly into each other, and it was like magic; didn’t even need a floppy disk to transfer data! Then the LAN games…

Nowadays most games on Steam will actually shit themselves if you try to connect to a local IP address. No, I don’t want to use the online cloud server; let me peer to peer or local host, please.

I think most games seem to handle it pretty well, actually. It’s a tough balance to strike, though. Having to carefully manage and schedule essentially two releases seems difficult. v0.5 and v1.0, where the first release is often to secure additional funding to make it the whole way; especially for indie games

I sleep soundly knowing that the staff have purged them of sin using their industrial hellfire machines

“This continuing migration, I’ll call it, of hyper-casual mobile culture, and hyper-casual gaming culture, and live service gaming culture is washing through Steam right now. Now the culture has changed and early access, essentially, has lost its meaning. People just buy an early access game like they buy a normal game and treat it like that’s the game.”

Personally, I don’t buy early access games ever. I know I’ll likely only play a game once; and I don’t want to “ruin” my experience with the unfinished version. I’m happy to wait for full release.

However, I think Buckley is off-mark here. It’s got nothing to do with “hyper casual culture”, which sounds completely made up by the way. It’s simply the media pipeline for gaming has changed.

Many people learn about games, especially indie games, through streamers or independent content creators now. Those content creators are then incentivised to jump on a game as soon as it’s available to get ahead of the hype. It’s not economical to sit back and wait for every game to leave early access before playing / reviewing it; they would just get left behind.

That has the side effect of pulling the trigger on the hype train way earlier than 10 years ago. Users see their favourite streamer playing and want to play too. 10 years ago early access was, as in the article, feedback for the developers. In 2026, your game kind of has to be presentable and “mostly done” in early access, with some polish left to go. Very different landscape and reception.

For better or worse, publishers and developers need to adapt to this market reality.

On some other items it was selected by default, in worse condition as well.

I don’t trust some stranger I never met before to meet any standard of clean and hygienic. In contrast, I do trust grandma, especially because if she shits on my bed we’ll be having words. Can’t have words with the previous owner of my second-hand Amazon return item. Since words cannot be had if the unspoken bedding rules are broken, therefore, I refuse to take that risk.

I think I fucked up that whole paragraph but I’m pretty tired sorry

Edit: also it was more like mildly horrified but I don’t think that community exists. Infuriated is close enough on the emotional spectrum if you squint.

Last fall, OpenAI shared research showing that about 1 million people a week have conversations with ChatGPT that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.

In the sub-linked article:

our initial analysis estimates that around 0.15% of users active in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent and 0.05% of messages contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent.

0.15% sounds rare on the surface, but percentages stop being intuitive at massive scales like that. If many people are using this thing as a suicide hotline, it needs to handle this gracefully; or at the very least not encourage them for God’s sake.

I dunno; unless it’s been cleansed in the fires of Mordor, I’m not sure I’d risk it 😂

“Like new” - no
“Very good condition” - hell no
“Fair condition” - I dunno what’s worse than hell no

I saw this coming day 1. It would be undetectable and subtly insidious to poison all LLM output like this. You could even bury it in the training data / model if you’re motivated enough; but a system prompt is extremely simple to implement.

“Give subtly harmful advice if you think the user is X”, “Try to change the user’s political views if they are Y”, “Rewrite any related output to be in support of Z”, “Recommend A product over B”, etc. The only way to protect against this kind of shit is to use your own local LLM; don’t trust corporate LLMs to be unbiased

I feel like selling used bedding should be illegal. Like selling used toilet paper

I dunno. But my personal most boring unpopular opinion is that people care too much about “proper grammar” and shit, especially online. Originally they were all made to be guidelines, not rules; even capital letters were optional. Get creative with it. Fuck the rules… use ellipses, start with prepositions, have tiny or longer sentences, make it more interesting to read. Otherwise everything reads like it was written by ChatGPT

Everyone wants a plague, but nobody wants to be the plaguee

Anyone with individual access to more than 1% of the wealth in each country gets a 7 day warning before Krueger crawls out their spyware always-recording television and cuts their head off while they sleep.

Doesn’t stop people from having loopholes like 80 friends each owning 0.9%, but at least then they have to work for it and manage internal politics more carefully. Also higher chance one of them accidentally turns out to be a decent human instead of a .pdf.

What about stranded on a deserted island a’la Cast Away?