PhobosAnomaly

Is this a circleblock?

i’m in

I can’t say there’s anything that really jumps out at me aside from maybe the presumably mirrored Super Mario World…

…but Argick running a non-Sonic game? Sure I’m up for that!

I had to chuckle in an exasperated way when I opened the Xbox app on my phone… and there’s a fucking Copilot tab in there as well.

I understand the use cases for AI, but Microsoft seems to be throwing the whole lot at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Really?

My seed ratio is going to be OVER 9000!!!11

Doesn’t matter what version it is, the drop at 1:50 is an absolute banger

Sorry friend.

If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.

Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.

Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.

“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.

Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.

“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.

“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.

So much for being good with cars.

Charizard origin story.

haven’t got opposable thumbs, have they?

I mean… that’s one definition of tourism I guess?

I’m very much a “leave only footprints” sort of guy - I know Brits have a bit of a shit reputation particularly when it comes to inexpensive package holidays, but I think tourism and learning about the rest of the world promotes a greater understanding of the only planet we live on. Whether it’s food; culture; history; or scenes of key historical events - it gives a window into people’s own gaps in knowledge or empathy.

I agree that an economy based entirely on tourism is a house of cards in itself, but I don’t think it’s a binary choice. Humanity have always had a nomadic element and there will always be those who want to travel, but it should be done sustainably.

Having experienced life in a city with a heavy tourism influence, it’s not the tourists that’s the problem, it’s counterintuitively a select few locals ripping the arse out of it.

• Housing shortages and sky high rents because homeowners and flat owners stick their places on AirBNB and other types of peer to peer services they provide access to;

• Ludicrous policies imposed on residents by locally-contracted private enterprises like event managers extending their road closures and parking suspensions a quarter mile away from their actual event areas, fucking over residents who actually live there for the other eleven months of the year;

• Zero hour contracts for those in gig economy or service workers, who get used and abused for a few weeks a year and fucked off when the good times dry up, while business owners have made bank;

• Increased pressure on public services for a few weeks a year, caused by influxes of folk putting heavy demands on the staff but leaving local residents to foot the tax bill;

• …and the usual creep towards city centre locations trending towards tat merchants selling utter shite.

It’s important to note that none of the above is anything wrong, it’s just assholery for the most part…

…and then those small numbers of “locals” have the gall to blame Mr and Mrs Miggins from halfway across the globe for ruining the city. Fuck all of the way off

Wireback sounds like an AI cover of a Justin Timberlake single.

It’s a bit of a wank article to be honest - it doesn’t even go on to say if the SIM was delivered. Why not wait the extra day and publish the article after it was due to be delivered?

If it didn’t get delivered then it’s easy meat for Trump-kicking, and if it did get delivered then you’d get some sort of review from some other poor fucker daft enough to sign up to it.

Bit of a waste of time really.

I don’t disagree, but throwing out the concept of prepared statements and parameterisation to someone who has asked for an explanation of the Bobby Tables jokes is a bit heavy going.

Spot on.

As for the sanitisation, it can take many forms. Either characters that don’t usually appear in the context for that field (in terms of names, you can usually scrub most parentheses, more than one hyphen in a row etc) can be removed; copy it to a known encoded field such as unicode to get rid of characters with unusual properties; and making sure bounds are enforced to avoid overflows.

It should mean that your data is exactly that - raw data, and not commands or operands for the interpreter to act upon.

🎵 KEN LEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EEEEEEEE! 🎶

Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.

I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.

There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.

I got into Poets of the Fall in a big way after Late Goodbye. Their work is fantastic and they’re brilliant live.

I’m glad Remedy have stuck with them over the years, the Herald of Darkness song from Alan Wake II was a banger.

The first major story where I thought “oh noes” was the Canary Wharf bombing in 1996ish. It was the first time I’d ever seen a “we interrupt this broadcast…” moment and it was so out of the ordinary that it sticks in my mind.

9/11 was a wild ride too. Getting home from school and my old man - who never watched the news - had Sky News on. At that point, the replays seemed… incredible, in the most literal sense of the word.

many