The ‘good’ news is you might not live through the next one.

Food.

Yeah our entire modern agricultural system is basically a process of squirting refined oil into the ground and then food comes out.

Drive up the precursor cost?

Well a whole bunch of that process breaks, and that’s not even considering the oil burned to move things from one place to another.

Even if you solve that problem: Climate’s broke, ain’t gonna fix it at this point. That’ll fuck up food production massively as well.

Population control (culling) via food prices doubling or tripling every few years, and the chaos that results from that.

They’re hoping enough of us will die before we actually try to eat them.

I suggest making what stockpile of edible reserves you can now, keep cycling through it, eat a bit of it, replace more of it, etc.

We got the worst el nino in recorded history, AMOC is currently giving out, as is the ‘doomsday’ glacier… and roughly 1/5 to 1/4 of the world’s oil just stopped, it’ll take years to recover from the damage thats already done.

Everything that has happened so far will be a footnote compared to what happens next.

Its only a matter of time untill a gaming pc made out of Chinese architecture components is legally considered by the US to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Yeah, the whole plan is to have every US citizen’s 401k’s autobuy into the SpaceX IPO.

Your retirement fund is Elon’s exit liquidity.

Its a truly fantastic fraud.

Because… the Nasdaq… well a few weeks ago it changed its rules on the delay time between an IPO and it being part of the index, the index that everyone’s 401k’s buy into.

I guess you could say its going to be ‘epic’ when this all blows up.

See this is basically how the us economy works:

Poors roll over negative equity into their next car loan.

The ever diminishing ‘middle class’ basically does the same with homes, helocs, etc.

The owners roll over debt via corporate amalgamations.

But because the rich have a magical legal barrier of ‘all the bad and dumb things i do are a legal fiction doing them, not me personally’, well, the legal fiction gets what its due and/or evaporates when it can’t pay what it owes… and the rich remain on top.

Yeehaw!

So if you want an actual technical explanation…

Games on Steam have Steam Achievements because they are coded in such a way that certain game events/conditions hook into the Steam API and then award you the achievement on Steam.

To take a game that has achievements that work with Steam, or … whatever Xbox Live is called now, or PSN… and make them work on GOG… you have to recode the parts of the game that trigger achievements, you have to add in the API that links to your GOG account and triggers the achievement to flag.

That takes work. Its arguably, technically, a kind of porting.

So either GOG or the game’s devs would have to do that work.

If nobody does, no cheevos.

Or, sometimes, a game will have its own totally internal achievement system that is local to it, basically like a sort of save file, kind of… but then you’d still have to hook that up to whatever platform’s achievement system/API.

Or or, I guess, it might be possible to make some kind of… basically shim, like a crack, or sort of emulator kind of thing, that ‘hijacks’ the game exe and runs it inside of itself, monitors for the achievement triggers for whatever system the exe you have calls out, and then basically translates that into a trigger for the… GOG or whatever else achievement system.

Basically Goldberg but for GOG.

But that would either require GOG’s achievement API being open source, or someone reverse engineering it, or basically ‘acquiring’ the source code through probably not strictly legal means.

And then if you use this, using it could/would count as hacking PSN or Xbox Live or GOG Cheevos or whatever.

tl:dr; Many GOG games don’t have cheevos because somebody would have to actually do a significant amount of coding to make that work, and that doesn’t always happen.

Like, for Godot, the game engine, there is an addon that adds support for hooking into the Steam API to make achievements work on Steam, if you release the game on Steam, and also of course coordinate with Valve and do all the stuff they need from you so that your game and its cheevos are accepted as part of your game and Steam’s support for it.

But you can also just not do that.

And save a lot of time.

Maybe add in cheevo supoort later in an update, or maybe never.

… I legitimately did not know that nearly all of those are LLCs. Ridiculous.

Fast. Cheap. Good.

At best, pick 2.

This applies to code and coders as well, despite management’s inability to comprehend reality.

Microsoft tech support:

Ackshually… what you’ve identified is not a problem, because my boss has a greater ability to rationalize the existence of problems, than solve them.

Therefore you are an idiot, stop harassing me.

Wow thats like… the exact opposite of a thing I would want to experience.

I guess good job on creating a business model as rage bait?

Ah, so there’s so much evidence that denial is now impossible, and its time to start sacrificing people.

Oh please implode faster Microsoft, you are so immensely horrible in so many ways.

Because those one are how Palantir makes money.

I mean… yeah.

IMO, those are the kind of people who should be on a list… not trans people who would like to be able to use a public bathroom.

But, we live in a world where apparently 40% of cops with access to camera networks that track liscense plate movement, use that to stalk their exes.

Yeah, my only quibble would be that for the violators, well, they do get off on power tripping, being able to fuck with other people in ways that they cannot prevent or stymie.

Its basically the rapist/groomer type of mindset.

So it does end up being sexual, but basically via extra steps.

But yes… its fucked up either way, also fucked up as a potential business model.

POV porn exists, you could just actually work out an agreement with a strip club to basically rent it out to do a shoot one day, if you wanted to end up with pretty much the same kind of video, except everyone involved actually signed up for it.

I don’t know if you’ve been to a American strip club.

Rules often tend to be more like ‘guidelines’, that don’t actually exist as long as you appear to be following them, appear to understand the concept of plausible deniability, and/or are throwing around enough money to make people look the other way.

Pay the cover, play it cool, don’t ask stupid questions, don’t get caught?

I can absolutely see this happening.

Grok, undress her, render this entire scene as if she had no clothes… or was only wearing cellophane, whatever.

… Its still wild to me that people will do something like that, when you can literally just go to a strip club and look, or look at the vast, uncountable amount of erotica or porn that people freely post of themselves.

… Oh dear god.

Somebody is going to wear these things into a strip club and sell it like a fucking virtu in cyberpunk 77.

You can record a video of someone shopping, and then feed it to a visual AI.

Blamo presto, now they’re a shoplifter, or at least everyone on social media thinks they are.

The possibilities are endless.

They are less expensive.

EDIT:

Sorry, I misread the parent comment.

You would use them for literally anything you typically or potentially could use a phone for.

If you are not playing video games on your phone… there is basically no common reason to have a top spec brand new phone.

What do I want my phone to do?

Make calls, send messages, run a web browser, check emails, take a picture or video every once in a while, act as a notepad, check a weather forecast, have some map explorer, use some entirely 2D proprietary apps for things like… groceries or hailing a ride or checking my bank balance.

Pretty sure that right there is about 80% of people’s phone use case.

You do not need top spec hardware to do any of that.

You have the gaming thing to do the gaming stuff.

Double post, but:

I just now realized I fat fingered my own semi-manual autocorrect, and did not use originally ‘They contracted’, which is what I meant.

I have accordingly here made log of my revision commit, which should now be reflected above.

Apologies for any confusion this may have created, derp.

…

Ok, so we’re just actually doing the infinite paperclip machine.

… fuck you, Clippy.

I agree with you… its the people and the way they’ve basically conditioned themselves to act, not the LLM.

Also, to further confuse the metaphor:

You can’t dig your way out of a hole that you flooded, doesn’t matter how hard you pedal your mind bicycle.

I’m gonna try to say this gently:

Microsoft… is gone now.

They contracted terminal corporate dementia.

They’re not going to be the same anymore.

… I used to work for them.

Something like was inevitable, given their highly cliquey and authoritarian corporate culture.

They’ve imploded under the weight of around two decades of accumulating technical debt, around two decades of the guys and gals that huffed the most farts getting the most promoted.

They are now primarily a member of the military industrial complex.