Are gamers really interested in achievements? I almost never see anyone discuss video game achievements. To me, achievements are mostly distracting and cringe, with their pop-up notifications and poor attempts at being witty. A transparent attempt to force engagement and replay value.

There are people in my friend group who are completely into achievements. If they don't get the "100% completed" achievement (got all the achievements) they feel like something is unfinished. They will gather friends around for multiplayer sessions to get multiplayer achievements. Some even go so far as to scan the list of achievements to see what they need to complete them before they start the game (or not, if they feel something might take a lot of time and/or effort - the The Stanley Parable one about waiting 10 years or something).

Others I've found play Xbox GamePass games in the most "optimal" pattern to get achievements the quickest with the fewest replays.

Then there are people like me who don't really care because there are achievements I know I'll never get, so it doesn't bother me because I don't have the time, skill or patience to bother.

Achievements were something baked into the Xbox360 from the start, it took Sony a few years before they implemented a similar system for hte PS3 (calling them trophies). I remember seeing a Red vs. Blue thing about the Xbox360 and new features and showing off the achievements.

So like Celcius and the superior Kelvin

Do it in freedom units. Fahrenheit and Rankines.

Is it worth it anyway? The purpose of Epic Store is to check what games they're giving away every Thursday, collect your copy and never bother to play it. Your don't even need a client for this.

Well, if you can save $100 off a game, why not? If you can get the new Epic Games Store launcher to give you GTA 6 for free, rather than paying what, $100 for it off Steam, wouldn't you use the EGS version?

By the same measure, if you can get Vbucks for free it would be well worth it for people as well.

404 media had been showing how weird the glitches are. Good job. And like everyone already said, who even cares how fast it starts. Are we even talking about feature parity? Does it have a smaller memory footprint? Does it tax the system less when games are running?

But is it glitchy enough to be useful? I mean, how long until we can use this launcher to get free games? That's what people really want to know - how long until a glitch makes everything in the store is free so you can buy every game for $0?

Or for some people, to get vbucks for free.

Surely there's plenty of vulnerabilities we can use to exploit this.

I've already run up the Jolly Roger again, sigh, streaming was good whilst it lasted but sadly it was never going to last that long.

I don't even bother with that. There's just so much content out there that there's no need. Streaming only content? Doesn't exist in my world - and there's still way too much content available legally for me to ever watch.

There's just so much competition for your attention that there's always something I can do, between books I haven't read, TV shows I haven't watched (OTA, anyone?), games I haven't played (both video and board), etc. A whole class of content not being available to me is just a relief that I'm not burdened with having to devote hours to. Hell, my YouTube Watch Later playlist could use some trimming as well.

(And content like Star Trek? Well, CBS puts them out on physical media which I prefer, so I do legitimately acquire those). Sure I do want to watch a ton of content available on say, AppleTV like Silo and Severance and such, but I don't think about it too much because there's just so much other content around for me to consume it doesn't bother me that I'm not seeing it.

Surely the media would never exaggerate and sensationalize?!?!?

Sales are down. Yes, I'm sure the higher console prices aren't helping. Or the fact that we're so late in the generation. But sales aren't down by *that* much, and the game comes out in a month, and they've already sold 95 million PS5s. Selling a few hundred thousand less consoles, not all of whom would have bought the game anyway, isn't going to make that big of a difference in the game's sales. It's a small percentage difference in the number of total consoles sold. But a pirated copy of the PS5 game that runs on PC, when there isn't a native PC port? That would make a big difference.

Except console sales haven't nosedived. PS5 sales in August 2026 are around 72% what they were two years ago (so before the RAM crisis), which can just as easily be accounted for by the fact that the console launched six years ago, and they've already sold 95 million of them: we're very late in the generation. Even if sales were the same as two years ago, that wouldn't represent a very large percentage difference in the size of the install base by the time the game launches in November.

I wonder if they planned to do the PC port this soon, or if this is an urgent reaction to the rapid progress of PS5 emulators like AnyPS5. If they had released the PC port a year or two later like usual, there's a very real chance that PC players would be playing pirated copies of GTA6 on PC before the official release, hurting sales.

yeah the Space Age technology of some screws and an O-ring were lost technology to the wearables space for the past 15 years... along with replaceable batteries that that allowed.

Just because it has a replaceable battery doesn't mean it's user replaceable.

Watches and such you often had to take to a watch repair shop to change the battery because they could make sure the O-ring didn't degrade as well as ensure it still retained waterproofness by making sure it stayed clean and likely lubricated. Heck, if you read the warranty they often voided the waterproofness guarantee once you pop open the lid and it was the company that replaced the battery who provided the guarantee if it stops working.

Sure, it's easy to do, but often you automatically lose the IPxx protections once you open the lid. Everyone accepted that because that's why you paid the watch repair company to replace the battery for you.

From the article: "Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere."

Well, there's your problem. Stop doing stupid things like that.

But then if something goes wrong, you realize there's no one in the store who can fix it, right? The store manager would have no idea what the panel does. They're going to have to get a technician over to fix whatever it is.

Maybe you haven't done the whole "drive two hours to flip a power switch" thing, but you'll find the vast majority of issues people have are trivially easy to fix things like that. People don't interact with the panels, other than maybe accidentally by bumping into it or something and then changing a setting. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing (i.e. a teenager who bumped the control panel while bringing in more pop tarts from the back) to fix it. But you also don't want to call in a $200/hr technician to push the button to turn it back on as well.

Those things pretty much have to be remotely monitored and often adjusted remotely because there will not be anyone in the store who knows anything more than "The panel has a beeping red light on it".

Granted, the security should be better - VPNs and such aren't terribly expensive things, and any reasonable supermarket with a backend inventory system already has a VPN to corporate so the HVAC techsn can access every panel through the VPN that already exist.

(One should also note this happened in France, and shopping habits in Europe are quite different from the US - namely in that many people shop daily - they pop into a really tiny supermarket for a few bits of produce and such and 5 minutes later they're back out with dinner ingredients. The weekly "big shop" you do in the US isn't really a thing.

When you take the time to understand the AI-written code ( often using the AI to explain its own code ), there is no problem and you can proceed significantly faster than without AI.

The problem is that that work to gain understanding is boring.
While I often had to do it in the days before AI, I did not become a programmer to spend all my time understanding code I did not write myself.

True, however I have used AI to help me fix bugs in code I didn't understand. But I didn't let it make blind PRs for me. I had it make the changes, then I reviewed all the lines that it modified and asked it to fix lines that looked wrong to me. It produced working code, but I didn't like the way it initialized a structure that was central to the process. I had to ask it to fix that by using what already exists because it created a maintainability nightmare.

But I knew that not from understanding the code at a deep level, I knew it from my years of experience that code that looks like that would lead to problems years down the line.

Now, since I was unfamiliar with the details of the code, I did have it produce documentation about what it did, as well as how it worked and other things.

If I did it myself, it would probably take over a month. But with AI, the task itself was complete in about 3 days, but it took me another week to figure out what it did and carefully review the code it changed and how to fix its issues. By the time I was ready to submit it for QA testing, it was a full two weeks.

I don't mind using AI, but I'm not the kind of person to use AI blindly. My coworkers have asked why I do stuff manually - and it's because it's faster for me to do it manually than for me to figure out how to tell AI how to do it, let it do it, then understand what it did so I can submit it. AI just becomes another tool in my toolbox. Heck, I still coded up a few things from scratch - it did not occur to me to ask AI to code up a trivial tool I needed.

What it really shows is just how young and unknowing new developers have become to choose a name that has an obvious history.

Or those who fail to learn from the past. I mean, people seem to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, and with AI, they're doing it faster than ever.

It's like "I invented something new!" makes big news, when in reality you just reimplemented something old.

This is especially true in the retrocomputing arena, where people would reinvent the technology we had over again because they didn't realize we had a solution back then.

It's only a matter of time when people playing with a 386 or something reinvent HIMEM.SYS or EMM386.EXE and think they're the smartest in the world.

Especially because AI makes people dumb in that way.

You have no idea (and it is designed that way) how many of these systems exist or where they are located. Flock cameras are made to be easily seen. Others are designed to be hidden from public view.

They've been around for decades. The land borders have ALPRs that read the license plate for everyone entering the US. They're also used on toll roads - the ALPR is on the gantry you pass that reads your transponder. If you don't have a transponder it snaps a photo so they can bill you.

If you ever parked your car there are mobile ALPRs that check to make sure you don't park too long (since chalking tires is a 4th Amendment violation). This applies whether you're parking on the street, or in a parking lot - the city has mobile ALPRs as do the companies that are in charge of parking lots making sure you paid and your parking is still valid.

Flock is more than a decade old - they provided a service for private businesses to have ALPRs monitoring the parking lot of HOA streets.

The main problem is Flock is treating it as a network - little isolated silos of ALPRs is not a bad thing - and for decades that was the norm and no one really cared or minded.

But Flock treats it as a network - the bigger they grow, the more monitoring they can do. And then it becomes their advantage that they can search any vehicle from anywhere. But that goes way beyond what the cameras were initially installed for.

ALPRs that are isolated aren't the problem. It's when you start linking them together that things become problematic. Just like how individual government databases are fine in isolation, but things get scary when you start linking them together. You give the IRS lots of personal information, with the expectation that they will block access to that information from other departments.; Ditto the census and other agencies. While it seems utterly repetitive to keep providing the same information to each department, by keeping each database separate and isolated, it provides a lot of privacy.

But when databases are linked, things get scary and you end up with surveillance. It's why data brokers are a concern because they are buying up data from everything and then linking them together.

Our problem is we have several systems that use SSL for internal network authentication, but there is no way to automate them. We have phone system hardware that requires an SSL cert to communicate with the handsets around the office, but we have to go into a web interface on it to copy and paste the cert each year. We have the same thing for an internal camera/security system, same thing for a badge system. All of these things are local, not on the internet, yet require SSL certs for internal authentication with clients, and no way to automate these as they are just stand alone devices. As it is itâ(TM)s a pain in the ass to update them, but if we have to do this on a monthly basis itâ(TM)s just absurd.

What do you mean there's no way to automate them? None of the systems you described need someone to be physically there - they just rely on someone going to some web page and doing something.

And that's purely an HTTP thing, maybe with a little SSL thrown in. I mean, other than selecting the file to upload, it's just code (your web browser), interacting with other code (the TCP/IP stack in the computer) interacting with network stuff, then interacting with other code.

As far as the other end is concerned, someone needs to upload a certificate file every so often to it using the HTTP interface it provides. A web browser uses HTTP to get data and display and interact with it. It's just code.

And code that emulates a web browser is some of the most common code out there - for some reason HTTP(S) seems to be one of the most popular protocols to do stuff with.

To the point your situation could be handled in many ways. Maybe you could creatively use curl to log into the web interface and do the file upload - you get back a cookie or authentication token from the login and that needs to be passed back when doing the file upload (something curl can do as well).

Or you can pick your favorite scripting language and use it's HTTP classes to pretend to be a web browser to do the same thing.

Or you can write something using libcurl to do the same thing.

And for those who want to poke around, a program called "postman" can help with forming HTTP requests from basic HTTP(S) interactions to more elaborate ones involving JSON RPC, SOAP, or other API mechanisms. Just remember to document thorougly what your code does in case it breaks and you need to do it manually.

Sounds like theres a need for an easy automation solution.

The problem isn't the automation, it's when the automation fails. Do you remember how to fix the certificate manually? Or do you rely on the automated tool to never fail, and it just did?

It's easy if it's regularly practiced or someone documented the steps, but it's rarely going to be practiced (likely forgotten if the automation works for years) and documentation gets lost. It might be in a great spot in the IT wiki and IT documentation, but that gets forgotten about as platforms migrate. People also leave.

Suddenly, the automation fails. Maybe it got a bad certificate from the CA. Or maybe a parameter changed that triggered some unforseen bug in the automation. or an update was run that had a bug when used in the environment. Now it fails. And you're screwed, because no one knows how to fix it.

Automation works, until it doesn't. Then things that were relying on it break. Maybe you're lucky and you catch things breaking early to realize what is happening. But chances are, one day you'll try to log in, and you'll get a big "Certificate Expired" screen on the browser and suddenly your VM clusters are inaccessible because they don't have valid certs (seen this happen with openvirt) and the company is at a standstill becauze nothing works.

The danger of automation isn't when it works. It's when it doesn't and no human has touched the system in years because of it and tribal knowledge has dissipated in the winds, documentation is lost, and no one remembers how the system worked.