Don’t hold your breath, they took over a year to fix the disappearing cursor issue on some distributions of Win11 in 2024-2025, the cause was rooted in the interaction between the brand new desktop window manager and the legacy cursor rendering path that hadn’t been updated since Vista, when moving the mouse between an application rendered with modern XAML components and a legacy system window, the cursor would sometimes become fully transparent, it was still there but invisible to the user until system reboot, turns out that building fluid fancy modern UI elements on top of a legacy Win32 framework does that sometimes.

Something I realized years ago.

There are many “dystopian” works of fiction where the characters actually get housing and enough food for their needs provided by the government free of charge in exchange for ideological compliance or at least pretending to. In these settings the government functions as a totalitarian entity micromanaging all aspects of existence, so the “freedom” to starve to death is effectively eradicated along with other freedoms.

By decoupling survival from labor market participation, or more accurately, by making the labor market an extension of the state, the system achieves a level of physiological stability that is undeniably attractive to anyone who has ever experienced the existential dread of housing insecurity or food scarcity in the current system.

In many dystopian settings, such as the works of Huxley and Orwell, the terror comes from the watchful eye of the state and the fear of punishment for deviation. In our current system, the terror comes from invisibility and abandonment, being ignored by a system that definitely has the resources and the means to feed you (roughly half the food produced today is being wasted) but refuses to do so unless you prove useful can definitely feel more dehumanizing and dystopian than being strictly micromanaged by an overbearing authority.

It reminds me of a case in my hometown where a second thief stole a stolen vehicle from the initial thief, so the latter went to the police to report it, which, of course, led to nothing but his arrest.

Very fond of the PS1 as it was my primary console during childhood, especially the many JRPGs of the era but also other games like Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Syphon Filter, Soul Reaver 1, I go back to these every now and then.

The unconstrained expansion of credit following the end of Bretton Woods system could only lead to the long term devaluation of the currency, something that’s theorically infinite is also inherently entropic.

“You better have fun and love your work so much that you do unpaid overtime, or else!”

I hope it stays this way. Karma systems inevitably create tribalistic echo chambers, where people downvote others simply because they disagree with a statement but lack any logical counterargument. It is an attempt to silence dissenting opinions, a form of behavior that is both extremely toxic and primitive.

Taxi (2004) was inspired by the French movie of the same name from 1998, and Just Visiting (2001) was based on Les Visiteurs (1993), they are both hollow, sterilized versions of the originals and made the fatal mistake of thinking they could just swap out the setting while keeping the plot, something that almost never works.

The original Taxi is a gritty, high octane love letter to the sun drenched city of Marseille and the broader French Riviera, it thrives in the collision of two distinct worlds, a taxi driver hailing from the low income suburbs of the city and the fancier world of career law enforcement, uniting against a common enemy in a chaotic investigation.

Les Visiteurs is a genius satire about the collision of medieval religious values and modern consumer society, making equal fun of spirituality and materialism through its various characters.

Just watch the originals with subtitles.

I can’t wait to shoot my way around war torn half destroyed cities with pristine advertising signs in the next Battlefield.

“Generate an image of David Tennant as the Doctor on the BBC.”

Came here to say this, lowest attachment in countries that pay in the most, highest attachment in countries that receive the most.

It’s not perfect, some German areas around the Rhine seem to have a high attachment, as well as Luxemburg, but there is an undeniable pattern.

Build a product -> make it free or very affordable -> create dependency -> collect user data to improve product resulting in more dependency -> create a near market monopoly if possible -> make it paid only or make the free version a lot worse so users have to pay -> cross fingers that no alternative emerges or just buy it and shut it down if you can.

Always the same pattern.

That’d be 691077 regular sized hamburgers laid next to each other in a rigid grid pattern, 797502 if laid in a hexagonal pattern, 891720 if squished.

Create a captive audience through monopoly or near monopoly on a given market, then charge them more for a worse version of the product, reducing costs and maximizing profits, it’s always been the goal with corporate capitalism, look at the whole Copilot and GitHub situation right now.

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I’m definitely writing that down for my next super scrabble with proper nouns at grandma’s.

The simple fact of using the word “citizens” instead of people sounds awfully dystopian to me.

The strategy is always to gain a monopoly or near monopoly on a market before pushing for the enshittification of the product to reduce costs and maximize profits, once customers have become dependent on said product, then pray that most choose the path of least resistance which is staying and dealing with the worse and more expensive version of what they’re used to rather than retraining or restarting from zero elsewhere.

Capitalism 101.

Remember that there exist alternatives to the big three US payment processors.

China’s UnionPay is pretty much global now, one can open a bank account remotely in Hong Kong or Singapore and go through UnionPay.

Russia’s Mir is the answer to the current geopolitical situation and the country being cut off from SWIFT, they are backed by UnionPay and are accepted all over Asia, Africa and increasingly in Latin America, many local banks in these parts will give you a card with Mir if you request it.

India’s UPI is also gaining traction in the subcontinent, in Europe Wero is rolling out as an answer to US dependency.

You don’t have to be a prisoner to the three American processors, even in the US and Canada, UnionPay is gaining traction as a result of the demand from the Chinese diaspora and business owners.

Competition is good for business.

Edit : typo car -> card

Wait, isn’t this the same guy who, two years after this post, disowned one of his own children because they came out as transgender?