Amazing find and well worth the read!

Food

It’s a great word. It can be almost any part of speech/grammar!

Same here. My accounts still exist, but I only ever access it now through old.reddit signed out. I still read info from a few communities, but never comment.

MMOs are probably a good indication.

I think researchers (or just casual investigators) studied MMOs to see how people might react in a plague situation (I want to say WoW, but it might’ve been EverQuest).

They ended up discarding/writing off their findings because they figures that there wouldn’t ACTUALLY be trolls who’d go around spreading the virus on purpose, and also that because the virus only had negative effects, no one would be doing actions that would nearly guarantee infection.

Of course, 2020 showed us that we really should’ve been looking at what people do in MMOs…

Depending on the age, they do it on purpose. Sometimes it’s because they are just figuring out social situations – doing X to person Y results in action Z.

You can find videos of babies pretending to be stuck and crying to get attention. When “unstuck” and not given attention, they stop crying, get themselves fake-stuck again and start crying again. They want the attention and coddling that they got the last time they were legitimately stuck.

I’m sure some babies know they’re faking it.

What do you mean by “trolling”? It’s not like that’s a word that has a consistently agreed-upon definition.

“Freedom” = You can choose what you want to do

“Security” = limits on what you want to do.

Not always, but generally.

Sometimes if someone else has more freedom, that can lessen your security/safety.

I was going to answer, but then you clarified on the body of your post that you only wanted answers from people in the US, lol

Like Elon Musk cutting government services to save the US taxpayer money.

…is what some weirdos I know seem to genuinely believe

I was interested in your post title.

But your post suggests your title was misinformed.

Your premise is “Ghosts must be real because an arbitrary 1% of ghost sightings must be real”. That’s not statistics, that’s you trying to convince yourself you’re right by misusing math.

Me: What??? Ok sure, Coworker 2

.

Small talk with coworker 1 doesn’t work at all because they will randomly randomly act condescending to you when you make a joke or say something that doesn’t land exactly with them.

…so are you coworker 1? Lol

As unpopular as this may be, LLMs (aka. “AI” like ChatGPT).

I don’t think we’ve seen something that’ll change the world as much as I think it will since the Internet was introduced. It will change the way we interact with computers. For a lot of people, it already has.

Steam is for paying for games that never get played. Most of us have hefty libraries.

Civ 6 was the biggest one for me. I missed GTA V though

Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)

But, it’s not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!

The sequel

The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.

This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said “We haven’t earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn’t really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn’t have a price], so let’s release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!”

Oh dear…

I don’t even understand how that would get past even the first couple of people using it. I imagine the idea was that they’d copy/paste the value into the password field. But did nobody ever paste the password into somewhere other than a password field and realize, “Hey, I can see this password!”…even accidentally?

Yeouch. How long ago was this? It feels like the standards for even junior devs have gone way up.

…but I guess even the C-students must find jobs eventually…?

The Excel wizards always impress me.

But now I want to see what happens when the equivalent of a caveman finds a magic artifact and creates some sort of precarious magic monkey paw solution, haha

Ahaha, what was he even trying to do? What was the purpose of that Excel sheet?