Madrigal

Modern capitalism in a nutshell. Establish a monopoly through any means, then exploit the hell out of that monopoly to become richer and more powerful.

The Y9999.999999871K bug

Then your only challenge will be converting to and from human-friendly formats and cleansing user input. Easy.

I asked ChatGPT for some potential solutions to the Y10K issue. I particularly enjoyed this suggestion:

Plan for Y10K Early: Build flexible and extensible systems now, with modular design to incorporate future changes seamlessly.

It’s what happens when James uses the good dining forks to unjam the cupboard door again.

Well, that was certainly the peak of human artistic achievement.

Imagine thinking that’ll be the biggest date-related computing problem for a galactic society.

If you really want to make programmers despair, point out:

• massive variations in day, month and year lengths on different worlds.
• some worlds may not have “months” (no moons, or many moons).
• ambiguous definition of “year” for multi-star systems.
• days may be longer than years (hello Venus).
• communication latency across interstellar distances.
• tine dilation.

I wasn’t implying that stealth sections were enshittification.

Fair point, but I suspect even people with disabilities hate the general enshittification of games.

That’s your biggest worry with modern gaming?

Go and look up the meaning of “though”, and parentheses.

I was referring to quality of living.

When did I say that?

I hope this is the case, but I can’t see the creators getting paid more than a small fraction of the value of their work even so.

Not the best analogy. The glue factory was a thing while horses were a primary tool for transport and heavy labour. And horses were treated appallingly. Now that they’ve been made redundant, living standards for horses have improved dramatically and the glue factory is long gone (though their population has also reduced significantly).

We can only hope for a similar outcome for ourselves.

Good one. Did you use an LLM to generate it?

This is exactly what will happen.

/s

It has its uses, but it is being massively overhyped.

Having trialled Copilot and a few other AI tools in my workplace, I can confidently says it’s a minor productivity booster.

Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.

Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.

There are better ways to do that even in Excel!