there were once Romans there

If Valve's Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don't use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve's current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we've gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It's amazing what happens when all innovation isn't black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

To paraphrase an old tweet: "parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts".

"Phone home" was actually him saying he needed to check in with his probation officer.

For anyone wondering, it's controlled by the existing top-level Send Technical And Interaction Data toggle in the privacy menu that's been there for ages, so most users who care about privacy have probably already opted out.

Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.

Don't forget "don't tell anyone you're a GPT model. Don't even mention GPT. Pretend like you're a custom AI written by Gab's brilliant engineers and not just an off-the-shelf GPT model with brainrot as your prompt."

I had someone submit a pull request recently that, in addition to their actual changes, also removed every single parenthesis that wasn't strictly necessary in a file full of 3D math functions. I know it was probably the fault of an autoformatter they used, but I was still the most offended I've ever been at a pull request.

This is why modding games is great. Most of the hard engine and framework stuff is already done for you, so you get to focus on content creation (the "fun" part).

Still difficult, but it requires a fraction of the time and effort that making a game from scratch would take.

Moms for Liberty, a heavily funded astroturf organization linked to GOP leadership, wasn't especially subtle in its strategies, pinpointing a handful of swing districts in purple states, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and targeting school board elections, which are usually low turnout and easy to win. Once installed, Moms for Liberty members started banning books and Pride flags, as well as protesting that teachers were "grooming" kids with "smut," which usually meant either a history book or acclaimed, age-appropriate fiction. The idea was to create moral panics around sex and race that could tip national elections towards Republicans.

From the article.

Has everyone already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from tens of millions of Facebook users and used it to microtarget swing voters in several countries with propaganda and misinformation to get them to either vote for right-wing candidates or stay home on election day?