100% recommend these.

You can get remastered versions on Steam (Full Throttle and Grim Fandango are both excellent).

Simon the Sorcerer is also in this genre, very funny, and voiced by Chris Barrie from Red Dwarf.

I’ll roll out

“What about the good things Hitler did?”

Well if you really don’t have a preference for one or the other, it might be worth keeping an eye on the future.

People’s jobs, especially expensive jobs, are going to be replaced by software.

So ask yourself:

• What does an accountant do that wouldn’t be possible to automate in software?

• What does a lawyer do that wouldn’t be possible to automate in software?

• What does a doctor do that wouldn’t be possible to automate in software?

From where I’m sitting, medicine seems the safest bet.

Ah, so you have BMWs in the States as well?

They were doing so to find out which country you lived in, since you neglected to provide that information yourself.

I’m British, I charge my car at home, and on the few occasions I use public chargers, I interface with and pay for them through apps.

Knowing that you are from the US, though, means that YMMV. Your home electric supplies have significantly lower voltage than here in Europe, so home charging might be a less viable option.

They weren’t being creepy, they were trying to give you a helpful answer.

Yes. Kind of. Probably.

What we have is an issue with terminology. The thing is, “white” only makes sense when specifically referring to human vision.

Our eyes have cells (cone cells) that are tuned to specific wavelengths in the EM spectrum. Three different wavelengths - one set of cone cells peak at 560nm that we see as Red, one at 530nm that we see as Green, and one at 420nm that we see as Blue.

“White” is just our interpretation of a strong signal in these three frequencies.

If, everything else being equal, our cones cells responded to higher wavelengths that our eyes can’t currently see, then our “white” might easily be what we see as “red” now, because we’d be also seeing the infra-red that we’re currently not.

I love your commitment to spelling “hampster” with a “p”. At first I thought it was a typo, but now I see it’s crucial to the thing.

I want to be sympathetic but alarm bells are ringing with the immediate juxtaposition of “that’s all fine but I genuinely begin to develop feelings for her” and “I just don’t really care all that much for a friendship”.

If the issue was that it’s painful to be around her until you can work the feelings out, then that wouldn’t be half as bad as saying that she’s not worth keeping as a friend if you can’t date her.

They lent me a tent, but the one they sent had been bent. I wept, but at least it hadn’t been lost in the mail. I’m sure they never meant any harm.

At the end of the day, isn’t that just how we work, though? We tokenise information, make connections between these tokens and regurgitate them in ways that we’ve been trained to do.

Even our “novel” ideas are always derivative of something we’ve encountered. They have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t make any sense to us.

Describing current AI models as “Fancy auto-complete” feels like describing electric cars as “fancy Scalextric”. Neither are completely wrong, but they’re both massively over-reductive.

So kind of like Taming of the Shrew but more so?

Instead of it being a man cleverly trying to win over a woman through manipulation and abuse, it’s a woman-hating man cleverly trying to win over a woman through manipulation and abuse?

Even if it did exist, I’m not sure it’d be that watchable. Taming of the Shrew is pretty dubious as it is, but it was written over 400 years ago, so it can be excused somewhat.

Username checks out…

Functionally, in conversation they’re the same. But, that said, if I was talking about somebody the listener was close to, I’d use “had died”, rather than “is dead”.

Why? Because it’s slightly less direct, and I’m British so that’s the path we take.

Pointing out that someone “is dead” directly alludes to them being a corpse right now. Saying that they “had died” merely references something that they did.

This. It always baffled me why the BBC legitimises it by including it in the newspaper summaries. Might as well have included the Daily Sport.

You could just buy the book second-hand. Authors don’t get any of that money, and you’ll be able to get it for much cheaper than new.

In the UK, certainly. It’s not the library’s job to censor what the borrowers want to read, even if it’s David Icke.

One thing that’s overlooked is the catalyst for all these changes is the same thing. Massive massive sleep deprivation.

Honestly, to start with, some days you’ll be surviving on two hours of sleep. And it takes years to get back to feeling ‘normal’.

This, very much. You are an adult for a long, long time - there’s no need to do everything while you are still a kid.

Also this about being friends with at least one person who already knows what they’re doing.

If you’re planning to go to uni, just wait until then, you’ll have your own room, meet new people, and be more physically capable to handle it.

My wife still has a book from when she studied Archaeology at uni called “From Savagery to Civilization” by Grahame Clark.

Civilization is what we make it to be, and is usually measured by the norms and standards of the country doing the judging.

The book is from the 40s. By the standards of the day, a lot of what we do now would probably be considered uncivilised. We work from home, eat meals on our own, and rely on a court of opinion more than a court of law. Homelessness is endemic and many people are working around the clock for subsistence wages. Classical definitions of civilisations - community, care for the vulnerable, improved quality of life - are all being stripped away.

I don’t think the term “uncivilised” can really be taken as a slur, at least no more than the word “bad” can be, because it’s just a reflection of what the speaker values.

It’s just like any big technological breakthrough. Some people will lose their jobs, jobs that don’t currently exist will be created, and while it’ll create acute problems for some people, the average quality of life will go up. Some people will use it for good things, some people will use it for bad things.

I’m a tech guy, I like it a lot. Before COVID, I used to teach software dev, including neural networks, so seeing this stuff gradually reach the point it has now has been incredible.

That said, at the moment, it’s being put into all kinds of use-cases that don’t need it. I think that’s more harmful than not. There’s no need for Copilot in Notepad.

We have numerous AI tools where I work, but it hasn’t cost anyone their job - they just make life easier for the people who use them. I think too many companies see it as a way to reduce overheads instead of increasing output capability, and all this does is create a negative sentiment towards AI.