valerie wrote: However, I think things were a lot more fun back then. It was all a big new discovery
with all sorts of weird scripts and stuff.

Reward sites, GPT, or whatever you want to call it weren't an industry then. "The internet" was the industry. That's what made it interesting. It was all big new discovery, because it was all big and new invention. I used all the surf bars, and the portals, didn't use the email, safelists, only one or two traffic exchanges, or anything like that. All the interesting ones died though. I'll never understand how GoThruUs was beaten by Yahoo.

I made more money writing some of the insane scripts people asked for than using them. There were only about six people in the world who knew any code and weren't tied to a big name startup. I exaggerate, but it felt like that, at least.

Yeah, I once wrote a Gif87a viewer in Q-BASIC just to prove it could be done. It took about ten minutes to load an image, and you could fit about twelve on a disk - with the viewer - if you used FDFormat to get the storage up to 2MB.

Then some other guy wrote one that was twice as fast. I can't remember his name now, he also wrote the shoot 'em up called Momentum.

Edit - Mallard, that was it. That's why I couldn't remember his name, he only used a nickname.

Oh, we had mass mailers alright. The problem you had was that we could still charge you thousands to write it for you. And we did.

Yeah, I miss them too, but I already mentioned them in another thread, so I went back even further for this thread.

I pulled six figures from them.

I miss FidoNet. I made a fortune on Fidonet. Buy 3 or 3,5 inch floppies in bulk, fill them up with Public Domain software, sell them for £2 for the 3.5 inch or £5 for the 3 inch + P&P. Those were the days.

Okay, now we're screwed.

Artificial intelligence: Google's AlphaGo beats Go master Lee Se-dol - BBC News

It'll be fun, because Clixsense isn't going to handle the exception. When it rolls over, the script is going to be confused. It's either going to think it's paid someone, or try to pay someone else, or pay everyone twice, or break in some other spectacular way (or, in fairness, it might just die).

But what are humans if not explorers? We must journey there and discover!

Are you one of the robots that will steal our jobs? I ask because you do keep failing the Turing test.

Tasks you need to earn badges before you get many. There's an entrance exam thing you can do to earn your first badge, though they've gone out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to find. It shows up at the top of one of the job pages, I don't remember where exactly, but not in your dashboard. They're pretty incompetent like that, so there's probably a lesson in there too.

There's a $10,000 limit imposed by PayPal. You could probably cause some interesting out of range exceptions if you cashed out at £10,001.

We should probably ask for an ignore button. I've already got a userscript to ignore the worst users, but we could probably do with a native thing.

You're not supposed to talk about other programs here, it's unfair to advertisers. I would have gotten away with AllAdvantage since it's a decade and half dead, but you've gone and ruined it now.

You're also completely wrong, however, even they don't claim to have paid out anything close to that amount - you're just saying words out of your mouth.

It's not even close to a record, because reward sites started during the bubble.

Clixsense has paid out a mere tenth of AllAdvantage's payouts.

I spend half my life compiling. When you're compiling, there's not a lot you can do, other than wait - but you can't leave your computer, because something might go wrong. If you've assumed it's going to take an hour, and come back to find it failed ten minutes in...

I play KoL first, but there are only so many adventures you can generate a day. Then I do social media, but there's only so much inane crap you can read a day. Then I do Clixsense. It pays for my dev server, while I'm sat here twiddling my thumbs. Sure, it'd be nice if I earned more, but not nice enough to be worth the effort - it's just something I do to get through limbo.

I also won't look, but I would say I also thought I had retired young - until the dotcom bubble burst.

In tech, a degree is almost embarrassing. If you say you're a CompSci grad, everyone rolls their eyes - because in CompSci you learn how to be a structured code, objected oriented, code monkey. The big multinationals want CompSci grads, but everyone else is more interested in seeing your git logs (the tech equivalent of a portfolio).

You'll impress an interviewer more if you ported doom to ASCII art for fun than if you've got ten years experience in whatever it is they're recruiting for, You do have to learn, you just don't need to learn formally.

At least that's the same colour as a star. I wasn't completely wrong.

Darkstar2 wrote: Same for slot machine, it works based on a pay table a payout % over a set number of spins (millions) so in theory if you play the same machine non stop you will eventually hit something, even though each spin the outcome is random and you have the same odds.

(Slot machines have had variable odds since Scorpion 4).

I did tap as well, but not as far - it's very difficult to do both ballet and tap beyond foundation. They screw your ankles up in mutually exclusive ways. Also did "Modern" which was basically disco.

Too old now though. I can barely reach my toes these days.

I am qualified in Ballet to Grade 8.

You can make fun of me if you like, but I'm harder than you, so I wouldn't recommend it.