I don’t think I had a PC game that wasn’t pirated. Literally everyone shared PC games. There used to be programs that would crack the copyright protection codes when they tried to use those little discs in the early 90s.

Console game piracy existed, but it was super rare until the PS1 era. PS1 kind of fell into the same timeframe that cd burners started becoming more common in the household, especially as the millennium approached. Once those mod chips showed up, it was a piracy explosion. PS2 onwards was a little harder to crack, so it wasn’t as popular as PS1 piracy.

When the world started commonly getting online in the late 90s, that’s when the ROMs and the emulation scene started appearing. I think I discovered emulation sometime in 1997. It has been around for a little bit, but was just becoming a bit more widespread at that time.

I straight up deleted LinkedIn. It’s too much information thats made publically available, it’s a constant pipeline to the black market for compromising info (and it’s already too late), and it’s just literally the most straight up annoying thing I’ve ever used. The people are fake (I mean they are real but they are straight up annoying), the jobs are mostly fake, and it’s a constant stream of scams, recruiters trying to mine your info and mislead you, salespeople peddling their crap constantly.

No thanks. Seriously give it a try, because that shit is toxic

I’m starting to believe the same.

It’s definitely gotten pretty weird. I’m on my last warning for inciting violence over saying I’m surprised no one has gotten killed yet, in a poorly designed traffic intersection that results in near-daily collisions near my house. Seriously. Someone reported it for inciting violence, the mods on the thread removed it and Reddit warned me and banned my account for a period. I’ve had a few other ones that were pretty random too.

The payoff is for the executives.

My advice to literally everyone, is cut your output to zero. If you are at one of the AI vision shit shacks, play the game. Absolute garbage slop output. Call in sick lots. Take your vacation. And check the fuck out. Push buttons with no thought or foresight. If someone asks you to show them how you do your job, mislead them at every turn, and don’t show them how to actually do it. Pretend to. I have one of these AI consultants coming in next week to “help me” by having me show them all my tasks so they can “automate” some of my mundane tasks. I’m going to smile and show them 5% of what I actually need to do 🖕🏼

That will maybe happen, but it’ll be at suppressed wages. That’s what happens every economic downturn, if you are at the top, you benefit. Everyone else gets another layer of prosperity chopped off underneath them. You’ll have precarious employment for a couple years and then gladly accept a job you wouldn’t even look at right now.

I’ve got a new Thinkpad for work, and it’s actually been pretty good so far, I’m pleasantly surprised. The battery lasts the entire day, it’s consistent…

I’ve also had elitebooks, and with HP when you get a good one it’s generally good. But it sometimes took a couple attempts to get a good one. Never got one to go the distance either. I’m not necessarily hard on my work laptops either, they get used, but it’s not like I’m throwing them around like frisbees or anything.

I can say this succinctly: Tesla is going to fucking collapse on a lot of very stupid retail investors.

I mean don’t get me wrong, people can stay irrational longer than you can stay insolvent, but Tesla legit makes me shake my head. First off, buddy clearly has major major mental problems, yet he clearly controls the board and runs this company as his own personal fifedom, committing all sorts of shit that in any other country and regulatory system would probably nearly have him behind bars. None of this is priced in.

Tesla hasn’t innovated from a car perspective since 2020. Everything has been smoke and mirrors and bullshit like the Cybertruck. FSD? I have a Tesla in the garage that couldn’t reliably drive itself automomously down my alley way, let alone in real world situations. Yet the autobots claim it’s driving their cars fully, which is legit absolute bullshit. FSD has gotten better, sure, but it absolutely needs pretty much full attention and thats nowhere close to changing. So was it full driving by the end of year 2016? 2017? 2018? 2019? In six months. 2020? 2021? 2022? 2023? 2024? 2025!!! 2026!!!

So I mean price in robots that are clearly being driven by people, empty promises, a ton of bullshit. Mental illness, infantile behaviour, let’s call a spade a spade, people can do what they want with their money, invest in what they want, but this stock is 100% hype and 0% actual substance. I don’t care what sort of methodology you try to argue it meets. It defies any sort of logic or rationality. So could it hit 20,000? Maybe. Could hit zero. You might as well throw shit at the wall at this point. How it’s worth more than Toyota though, is a sign of how bad this whole downturn really could be.

That or just sure numbers. It kind of feels like when we got satellite as a kid. I spent two days of scrolling the guide before realizing I hadn’t watched a single thing. I was like great, we now have 500 channels of TV, but my life still sucks.

Us3n3t is wild for sure. I mean they’ve wrote the textbook on how staying obscure is the ultimate approach to success with most things. And it just functions. Plus the need for a bit of knowledge acts as almost an intelligence test to keep the morons (and the people who can wreck it) out.

I’m even more lazier than that. Pirate subscription. It’s still a subscription, but I’d argue the 10 dollars a month is worth my time to type an obscure tv show I’ve suddenly remembered into my TV, with one eye open at 2am. I’ve got nothing against a subscription or two, but I certainly am getting sick and tired of like a dozen of them.

All it’s going to take is a recession, and then it’ll be back with a vengeance. Because guess what’s first on the chopping block when money gets tight?

I mean the convenience of it all would say no, but these services have become so enshitified, they pull content constantly, you need to have a billion of different ones, and now they are putting stuff like Atmos and 4k content behind higher pay subs. Plus ads now too, which is infuriating.

So yeah I mean I’m sailing more than I have in the last decade. Because streaming is now just cable except I have to individually subscribe and not just have one subscription (which you just know is around the corner and then it will fully be cable 2.0).

I’m getting mighty sick of spotify too. The great thing about Spotify when it came out was convenience obviously, but moreso was that you didn’t have jammed full iPods or your phone wasn’t plugged up with music. But my phone’s like 256gb now, that holds a shitton of music, it ain’t no 8gb iPod. So barriers removed. And I wasn’t pirating basically at all the past decade either. So they only have themselves all to thank now. Solely. Greedy fucks.

Hey do you 'member that time they shut down Napster so no one would be able to download music anymore?

2026’s version of greenwashing.

That’s shitty. We are pretty big cucks up here for that sort of stuff too. Our telecommunications companies pretty much run our country, so it’s only a matter of time.

I noticed both yesterday mine is actually working again. I’m in Canada if that makes any difference. But it’s definitely haunting.

Honestly even ignoring all this for a second, I fucking hate those eero routers. OMFG. They have turned me into a slobbering ragging lunatic on more than one occasion. I just fucking hate routers as a whole, they’ve always been demon devices, but these ones especially can fucking blow up anytime.

Is that what the fuck is causing that?

Literally the best thing that people worldwide can do, is throw their smartphones in the garbage can. Go back to a flip phone, if you must. The timeline sucks, the world sucks, and the common denominator in what’s causing everything to spiral, is what’s in your pocket. Seriously.

I think it’s more addicting than cigarettes. I used to be a pack-a-day smoker once upon a time. That was a hard habit to give up. Like it took years to reprogram my body and mind to get away from it.

I’ve been continuously trying to cut down on my social media, because just like everyone else, it’s rotting my brain and affecting my moods. It’s literally just as, if not maybe even more harmful than cigarettes in most ways. It’s certainly a more potent addiction, that’s for sure, and it’s more dangerous. I mean cigarettes will kill you long term, sure. But social media will turn you into a socially inept, manipulated, raging angerbomb that is much more dangerous to yourself and everything and everybody around you than arguably cigarettes, and in a much shorter time span. You don’t even notice it either, it’s latent damage thats occurring (like cigarettes).

It’s a dopamine hit like no other too, and again, you don’t even realize it until you are self-conscious about it and working very hard at it. I’ve experimented with some powerful drugs in my lifetime, and it’s hard to explain to a lot of people because drug use rewards are more instant and much more apparent. But whatever weird brain reward system social media powers, I’m convinced it’s just as powerful of a hit as the hardest drugs. It’s certainly very very very hard to get away from.