They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.

Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do

The weird part for me isn’t that the corrections are online. It’s that the whole book isn’t a searchable help page with all the errata patched away.

I actually found this because I was following a guide that needed Process Explorer to find out which damn program was catching my controller before DS4Windows was.

It was Firefox, specifically the Stable Diffusion WebUI for some reason.

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

Kind of reminds me of some of the Windows 7 fantasy wallpapers, especially img19

The only gesture it still needs is swiping a comment right to left to collapse the entire comment thread

The guy’s name was David. In the game, you’re chasing after an inventor who crossed different parts of the world, building giant pinball games on fields. You’re following in his footsteps, fixing the pinball games that have fallen into disarray using the lessons you learned.

Googling a little, it seems like that was a different game called Pinball Science, also by David Macaulay. So I definitely had both, probably got them both around the same time. I vaguely remember the setting for TNWTW being an island with different buildings with different themes of things to discover.

Those disks were super hard to get where I was, too. I live in Lebanon. My parents moved heaven and earth to get me quality entertainment, and the older I get the more I realize how much effort they put into making me a cultured kid.

Now I really need to spin up a VM! I also want to waltz around Beaumaris Castle in Encarta, and check out all the stuff in Encarta that I didn’t know to appreciate when I was a kid.

Oh yeah. I remember this. You learn lessons and then apply them to build a pinball system, at least in the sequel, creatively named The New Way Things Work. I spent years on all kinds of edutainment software made by these guys.

I genuinely believe that our generation got some kind of golden age for interactive educational stuff. DK/GSK were releasing banger after banger, I believe I’d still enjoy these as an adult! The virtual museums just speak to me, conceptually. I don’t know what similar stuff came after, but all the software I see young kids interacting with now is ad riddled digital nonsense sludge. Even the stuff that should be more than just entertainment.

All those old DK CDs should be available on the Internet Archive, by the way. Just need to finally get around to setting up a damn Windows XP VM and I’ll be looking through a lot of these with fresh adult eyes.