I always liked “not the sharpest bulb in the tree”.

(Because it kinda makes sense. Some Christmas lights have pointy bulbs. But nobody picks them for sharpness.)

Never mind the old flippediroo of the day and month. What I want to know is why is there a dash in front of the date. I thought the separators went between the things to be separated.

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.

Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

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.

I had taken a photo of the pile of junk in my home.

AI facial recognition in ACDSee swore it could pick up my father’s face in the jumble.

I feel like I was visited by a ghost.

Rest in peace, dad. (sigh) No, I know you would not approve of this mess and would tell me to hurry up and clean the thing up.

Most of my photography gear falls under “well, that money could have been spent more wisely”. But photography has been one of my major ways of dealing with depression, so I absolutely don’t regret it. I can’t really put into words how good it felt to finally get a Camera That Didn’t Suck.

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?

(Adapted from XKCD)

There are 5 zillion hotkeys.

“5 zillion hotkeys? Ridiculous! We should add dedicated buttons for common operations.”

There are now 5 zillion hotkeys and “media buttons” nobody uses.

…

Seriously though, a lot of old keyboards in ye olde computers had dedicated buttons for a lot of things, but then people figured out software defined, remappable key commands are actually pretty neat. You don’t need a dedicated “Help” key if it’s usually mapped to F1. Moving back to dedicated keys is, ummm, sometimes unwarranted?

Intercepted message:

No no no no no no.

You throw the board out of the window.

The opponent goes “Oh no! My board!” and runs after it.

You have failed the basic training, agent.

A turtle! 🐢

• Great lifespan
• Even better defensive skills
• No need to go to a dentist on the account of not needing teeth anymore
• Great software development skills due to Shell Access

Edit, almost forgot:

• Wider housing options (unless they, I dunno, fill the sewers with concrete or something)
• Possibility of martial arts training

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.

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.

Meanwhile, me aboard a train: “Oh you can get whole massive meals on restaurant cars these days? No thank you, I’ll get a coffee and one of those overpriced naff sandwiches.” (Well, the Finnish train sandwiches are pretty good, but they are hella overpriced. Like 7€. WTF.)

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?

No, can’t have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.

This is a clown car. That’s the most reasonable explanation.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (the Netflix anime) is pretty damn great and well worth the watch.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty decent game too. Not a masterpiece it was originally hyped up to be, and a lot of things in the game just painfully remind me of things that other games do better, but it’s still a pretty damn gripping game with pretty incredible atmosphere and style. Probably pretty high in my best games of the decade list.

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.