I am so glad that I met my now wife in 2008 before all the app facilitated dating scene took off. I feel for folks nowadays try to navigate the mine field, never has it been easier and more difficult at the exact same time.

If I am ever in the position to be back in the dating scene, I will NOT be in the dating scene.

It feels like it would have been fun to be on the graphics team for the Katamari games. Every item is simple but you get to make thousands of them. Just look around the world around you and go "Yeah, lets put that in."

It is still one of those games that I wonder about the rendering tech, as it feels like it would simultaneously hammer the CPU do radial calculations or hit the display list/command buffer excessively and yet it seems to run fine on almost anything.

I mean the original was on the Ps2 with a limited MIPS core at just under 300Mhz and an obscure VPU0/VPU1 vector processor setup.

True, but there is a specific technique to it. Plants, hedges and trees add significantly to your radius. Once you can hit that level, you will grow rapidly.

This is one of those situations, even if they don't want to release specific code, they could at least release the specifications so that others could build the software stack for this.

I am dealing with it by walking away from the internet and connected technology as much as possible.

Unfortunately, generally if people can do something, they will. And with AI systems they have been given one of the largest short cuts possible, thus they take it relentlessly. There is no concern for quality so long as it is good enough to benefit them.

They will try to rationalize it but it typically ends up in moral corruption of "If I don't, they will."

It saddens me because I saw the vision of what computers and connected technology could be in the 90's and 2000's, only to see it turn bitter.

I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right. In assuming that many will take the power play and the convenience means that this is the path we take.

The more you can walk away form this stuff the better even if you don't want to.

I agree with this sentiment. I’m going back to books, notebooks and a unconnected computer if I genuinely want to learn some programming —- to bang my head against the walls so many times until I get it —- like what people did before the Internet era.

That's one of the reasons my new side project is using C99. No idea if it will work, but I'm hoping that once I get comfortable working with it I won't need to get help from Google/forums/LLMs as much, and I can have an actual good day again.

>I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right.

What essay is that?

Its like directly addressing a compulsive liar. They know, that we know what they are doing but they will never admit it to us.

We aren't there yet but one can definitely see the run up in action.

We prefer the terms, spice diplomacy, proactive landscaping, aggressive cultural exchange or unplanned synergy meeting.

Exactly, a notable time military tech has been deployed in public in full would be the TOR network. That was done to provide enough noise on the network to hide its purpose/make difficult to track.

So long as the targeted area is limited, you only need imagery data for set routes/areas and can keep local data pools reasonable.

Can already see the poor headlines of "Snapdragon chips used to bomb schools!"