CountVon

People who are too cheap to refinish old stairs. Source: I bought a house that had carpet on the stairs, and when we pulled up the carpet we discovered a worn out eyesore that cost thousands to update. In our case the previous owners were a cash strapped family of two young kids with a third on the way. They needed a bigger place for their family so I don't fault them for going cheap on the stairs. The all-white paintjob and industrial grey carpet in the photo scream "landlord special" to me, so I'm less inclined to be forgiving in my assessment of the stairs in the photo.

I think that's a heavy duty banister bracket, like this one:

Some banister brackets have a swivel type arrangement so that the bracket can be vertical underneath the handrail, no matter the angle of the handrail. Basic heavy duty brackets like this one are completely fixed in orientation, so they're installed with the vertical support at an angle to support the handrail. I suspect the bracket in the photo is at a 45ish degree angle and only looks vertical due to the perspective. The banister has been deliberately cropped out of the photo to make the perspective as confusing as possible.

Personally I think the photo was taken from the top of the stairs looking down, based on the wear in the carpet.

Wow, Elon Musk really looks like hammered shit in that photo. Like a sack of smashed arseholes. Like ten pounds of shit in a six pound bag. With any luck, his own personal choices will mean that we won't be collectively cursed with his continued presence among us.

For me it's cheating

Remind yourself that, in the long term, they are cheating themselves. Shifting the burden of thinking to AI means that these students will be unlikely to learn to think about these problems for themselves. Learning is a skill, problem solving is a skill, hell, thinking is a skill. If you don't practice a skill, you don't improve, full stop.

When/if these students graduate, if their most practiced skill is prompting an AI then I'd say they're putting a hard ceiling on their future potential. How are they going to differentiate themselves from all the other job seekers? Prompting an AI is stupid easy, practically anyone can do that. Where is their added value gonna come from? What happens if they don't have access to AI? Do they think AI is always going to be cheap/free? Do they think these companies are burning mountains of cash to give away the service forever?? When enshittification inevitably comes for the AI platforms, there will be entire cohorts filled with panic and regret.

My advice would be to keep taking the road less traveled. Yes it's harder, yes it's more frustrating, but ultimately I believe you'll be rewarded for it.

My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don't trust ChatGPT. In the end, we'll need citations anyway, so it's faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn't listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.

Don't worry about it! The point of education is not grades, it's skills and personal development. I have a 25 year career in IT, you know what my university grades mean now? Literally nothing! You know what the thinking skills I acquired mean now? Absolutely everything.

They have a responsibility to ensure that games they sell continue to work.

How do you figure that? Valve sells you a game, and they publish the system requirements for that game. If a game doesn't work on your system then they'll give you a refund as long as it's within the refund window. Beyond that, they owe you nothing. For 32-bit titles, one of the technical requirements is 32-bit OS libraries. Let's say Windows 12 removes support for 32-bit software. What do you think Valve will do? I say they'll mass-update the system requirements of 32-bit titles to indicate that they're not compatible with Windows 12 and higher. Historical precedent is on my side here, because this is effectively what Valve did when Apple dropped 32-bit support from OSX.

They ship libraries on Linux so there’s a common base, and they should also do so for 32-bit games. GOG does this for older games using things like dosbox or whatever, and Steam should follow suit.

The libraries that Valve ships for Linux support are essentially Proton. They've invested a lot of effort into Proton because there's a strong business case for doing so. 95% of Valve's customers game on a Windows OS (source: Steam hardware survey), which means that Microsoft could present an existential threat to Valve if Microsoft attempts to lock down their platform. Having a functional alternative OS could dissuade Microsoft from making any anti-competitive moves. Plus, of course, without Proton there's no Steam Deck. I think making money from Steam Deck is only Valve's short term goal though, which is why they're opening up Steam OS to other handheld makers. The long-term aim is to shift gaming away from closed-source to open-source platforms so that Valve's business isn't reliant on any one OS vendor.

There's no business case for doing the same with legacy 32-bit titles. There will be no new 32-bit titles going forward, and there's hardly any market for existing legacy 32-bit titles. Valve would need to compete with GOG, who's already doing much the same thing, and GOG is barely profitable as it stands. GOG's 2024 profits were a paltry 1.1M profit on 199M revenue (source). That's a profit margin of about 0.5%, which is not a healthy indicator in a for-profit business. 5% is generally considered low, 10% or better is a healthy margin. GOG is essentially being propped up by CD Projekt Red's Witcher/Cyberpunk money (CDPR has 468M profit on 801M revenue in 2024; a profit margin of 58%, which is wildly high-margin). Valve could prop up a money-losing 32-bit compatibility project with all their income from 64-bit software sales, but I doubt they would.

The Steam client is just a launcher. Why is it Valve's job to make sure that legacy 32-bit games continue to run? They're not the vendor of the game, and they're not the vendor of the OS. They're just a middleman. If the game vendor doesn't want to patch it to 64-bit, and the OS vendor doesn't want to maintain 32-bit compatibility, then there's simply no more support for that combination of OS and game. Valve isn't required to step in there.

It may surprise you to learn that Valve already switched the client to 64-bit... for Mac. OSX hasn't had 32-bit support since 2019, but it still has a Steam client! Valve didn't do anything for 32-bit-only Mac titles, except drop the "Mac OS compatible" tag once Apple had dropped 32-bit support. That's all they're ever going to do for 32-bit-only PC titles, when/if OS vendors completely drop 32-bit support.

32-bit is dead and it’s somewhat absurd that Steam is still 32-bit.

Tell that to anyone who bought a legacy title on Steam and now wants to run it on modern hardware. Leaving the Steam client at 32-bit is simply a low-effort way to ensure that the OS has the 32-bit libraries that will be required by any 32-bit title the user happens to launch.

I must have missed that negative sentiment entirely. I played all three and had no complaints. Did some searching, and apparently a lot of the gripes were related to levels being cut down in size / broken down into pieces to allow for a console release (strict memory requirements). Also I think they changed engines for the 3rd game, or at least a lot of people complain that movement and controls were worse in DS. I guess ignorance is bliss, cause I enjoyed them all.

Do you mean Thief: Deadly Shadows? That was the 3rd game in the series, and from what I understand it was pretty well received. The orphanage level alone is so highly regarded that it has its own Wikipedia page.

Now the 2014 reboot, just titled Thief, that was so poorly received the it basically killed the series. It might have been a decent game, but it was not a good Thief game.

lol yup

Like you, OP, I benefited hugely from a car extended warranty. Audi hatchback, 4 year factory warranty was extended to 8 years for like $2k? Didn't seem like a lot to spend for the added insurance in case something catastrophic happened. And something catastrophic did happen! In year 5, a factory sparkplug came apart and bits of it got sucked through the cylinder, gouged the cylinder walls, got sucked through the turbo, shattered all the turbo fins.

Without the warranty the car would have been a write-off. The entire engine plus turbo were replaced under warranty. They don't make that particular engine anymore so the replacement was used but had lower mileage. A lot of parts connected the engine are considered single-use by Audi as well. Engine mount pads, bolts, nuts, hoses, clamps, etc., their policy is to replace those parts when the engine is replaced. The list of parts replaced was four pages long.

All told, between all the parts and labour I'd estimate it was at least a $20k repair. Utterly worth the $2k I paid on the extended warranty. Oh, and I had a loaner for about six months while they were sourcing the replacement engine, so six months of putting wear on someone else's vehicle. Probably the best $2k I've ever spent.

You should be fine as long as you can refrain from wearing a MAGA hat or advocating for Canada to become the 51st state. I haven't talked with any Canadian who believes that all Americans are in favour of Trump's nonsense, so you shouldn't have any issues personally unless you start spouting some Trump-y talking points.

Do expect to see a lot of "buy Canadian" rhetoric. Don't take it personally, we're just really pissed at your president. Grocery stores in my area have started putting maple leaf symbols on Canadian made products, and most (maybe all) liquor stores have yanked US booze from the shelves. Anecdotally, I saw a lady yelp in shock and full-on hurl a package of berries back onto the shelf when she saw "Made in USA" on the label. From what I can see there is a strong, spontaneous "boycott US" movement. US produce is barely selling. Before stores added the maple leaf tags, shoppers were turning US products backwards and/or upside down on the shelves so other shoppers would know they were US-made.

The Canadian psyche is a bit different when it comes to patriotism. At a national level we've never been able to agree on what it means to be Canadian. Our identity is most firmly defined in the negative, in that we're much more likely to agree on what we are not. The absolute number one thing Canadians have historically been able to agree on? We are not American. We like and respect our neighbours to the south, but as the saying goes, good fences make good neighbours. We are adamant that the current US administration must stop trying to tear down the fence between us.

My parents are snowbirds, they have a condo in Florida. That condo is now on the market, and they're not planning to go back while Trump is still president. Maybe never, they're not sure. I only mention it because snowbird friends of theirs have experienced harassment from Florida locals. "Go back to your own country", etc., with clear hostility. I would absolutely stunned, hugely disappointed and utterly embarrassed if you were to encounter anything like that during your visit to Canada.

Holy shit, I didn't even notice the multiple abominations with electrical connections in that picture, I was mesmerized by the plumbing madness.