I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.

It’s a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes “hell yeah, a solid 7/10”. …except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.

It’s an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don’t like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we’re talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn’t have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I’m pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don’t think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It’s nonsense.

I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.

I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.

Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?

I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.

Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Yeah, the biggest tragedy of technobros pushing generative AI everywhere is that as a result of that, everyone just had to adopt the stance that you can’t trust a damn thing these days.

At least previously, this kind of disruption led to nuance. Photo manipulation has been around pretty much since the dawn of photography, so now we as a society have developed nuanced view of it over the past couple of centuries. Now, photographs used as evidence in criminal cases have different standards than photographs used in advertising - former has strict standards because it’s a serious inquiry requiring hard evidence, the latter has lax standards because the viewers understand that the photos offer an “enhanced” truth. But generative AI? It just got dropped on our lap all of sudden. We as a society can’t deal with it yet. We’re not ready.

Sorry I just had coffee

I’ll get YouTube premium once they fix their damn TV app.

• If I resume playing a video from history, it often plays the ads, then re-plays them shortly after. (You know, at the point when it hit me with a fucking 55 second ad and I backed out and said fuck no, are you shitting me. Double points if the ad it tries to play again is also ridiculously long. I just keep refreshing it until it gives me 5 seconds to skip. I’m not much of a gambler, but this much I can gamble.)

Admittedly, this bug is not applicable to Premium. Being ad-skippy and all. But it’s indicative of the overall quality of the app. For example:

• When long-holding a video in all circumstances, I it should give me a full menu. Like, with the “go to the channel” option? …doesn’t give that to me in Subscriptions view. This might come as a surprise to YouTube, but I don’t always like watching Whatever The Algorithm Feeds Me. I might, you know, choose to watch the 10 episodes I missed. To do that, I need to actually like to go to the channel in question.
• …Or any of the channels I like or are particularly interested at the moment. There’s no way to pin this shit either.
• Speaking of which, the fucking way to browse my subscriptions is fucking atrocious holy shit. It’s useless. This is Google. They don’t do user experience research. They half-ass everything.
• On my smart TV, sometimes the buttons just fuck up. Sometimes I can’t control this shit. Because my TV operating system was designed by particularly deranged people, they thought “closing” or “restarting” any given app was space technology that no average consumer can understand, so they reduced that to bare minimums: the only way to restart the app is to pull the plug. This is just fucking demeaning.

A collaboration between Google and Samsung, people! Two giant corps serving millions of users! And they expect us to pay monthly fee for this holy shit

…sorry for the rant.

Did someone say… cookies?

I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.

Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?

Other generated pictures similar to this, even more questionable:

Cyber-Teacher: “All right, children. This here is a Turtle. An Ancient Shellmaster.”

(Pay no attention to the milling people and the certainly not turtle like freaks of nature in the background)

Technically, emoji doesn’t even have specific flags, they just have country codes, conforming to the ISO list - actually choosing which flags will be included is up to the individual implemeters. Regional flags got a little bit complicated because they need to establish the conventions first.

I was just reading about pirate radio stations. One pretty bitter post by a busted pirate radio operator went like “while a large number of police officers were busy chasing us through the forest, a guy got stabbed to death in the downtown. I think the raid on us was a gross mistake of police resource allocation.”

This is like that, but even more petty.

Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

Because this set a dangerous precedent.

Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

The Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness”

Wikipedia: “Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome”

Oh I have a Forever Mouse. Bought a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical in 2001 or so. Still works. Use it with my Raspberry Pi sometimes. Also bought another Microsoft wireless laptop mouse like a decade ago. Still works just fine.

…The Logitech mouse that I bought against my better judgement in 2020 is starting to show signs of fatigue.

Also how the everliving hell do you add AI to input devices? Are they just going to guess what I’m pointing at?

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.

Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”

Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…

I think it’s only a good thing they’re not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it’d have to be an external app anyway.

I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I’m perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.