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Cake day: October 29th, 2026

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  • Fair point. I will say this, the low quality of Chinese goods isn’t entirely their fault. They enable it but it also comes from higher up.

    I knew someone that was building some device, I forget was it was, and they were in China sourcing parts. That is when you see the game and they know exactly what is going on. You are after a specific capacitor, they will bring out 10 of the same product ranked in terms of price and quality. The 5 cent part, that will last 5 years or 1,000 hours, the 50 cent part will last 30 years or 10,000 hours.

    Most producers will just go for the cheapest parts available to get the prices at the end down or to increase profit margins. China can make brilliant high quality parts, just those that control the pricing will always go for the low end and then blame it on Chinese manufacturing.

    But also, many Chinese manufactures offer these parts knowing this, so it goes both ways.





  • A few years back I was talking to an acquaintance that worked in the NSA for about a decade, he was far to casual when he said “Oh, yeah we have back doors in Linux and all over the open source world that haven’t been discovered.”.

    I mean, yeah, that tracks but did he have to be so proud of his achievement. He was one of those, ‘see if it can be done don’t question if it should’ kind of people.

    I suppose it is a part of their NOBUS “NObody But US” strategy but with the code being in the open, that is a dangerous game to play with it being discovered by others. Nowadays with LLM’s able to do mass analysis of code, I do wonder if there is some regrets in putting those things in there?

    But also I suspect a lot of it probably needs physical access to the machine as just sending a few packets to a machine probably isn’t enough to get it into an executable state.

    Either way, interesting guy, wouldn’t trust him with anything!




  • To be fair, Reddit has been Zombie Reddit for about 5 years now.

    When they received $150 million from Tencent in 2018, the writing was on the wall. You cannot accept that kind of money and keep to the original aspiration. The IPO just accelerated it.

    The amount of slop on there nowadays is wild! Even the smallest communities are being overrun with it and they don’t give a damn because it is good for business short term.




  • I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.

    It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.

    But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.

    A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.

    The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.