umbraroze

Obligatory Jacob Geller video

These days Windows boots really fast to the login screen (which has a reboot option).

If you log in, it'll start loading all the usual shit, and that will take a few moments on SSD. (And a few geological megacycles on a HDD.)

A good shellacking. A wallop, even.

The Church of Alpha the Utterly Indifferent, from "The Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke?

Having really hard time converting Kindle books lately, especially since last time I tried this, the deDRM plugin couldn't handle the newest Kindle for PC versions. Is there an easy way that doesn't involve getting a physical Kindle device? Does the Android thing work?

Google Play Books allows publishers to set the DRM policy. Some titles are not protected and can be just downloaded as EPUB. For the DRMed books, it can send them to Adobe's ebook reader/sync app, which (last I checked) can be decrypted by the Calibre deDRM plugin.

I don't hate AI (specifically LLMs and image diffusion thingy) as a technology. I don't hate people who use AI (most of the time).

I do hate almost every part of AI business, though. Most of the AI stuff is hyped by the most useless "luminaries" of the tech sector who know a good profitable grift when they see one. They have zero regard for the legal and social and environmental implications of their work. They don't give a damn about the problems they are causing.

And that's the great tragedy, really: It's a whole lot of interesting technology with a lot of great potential applications. And the industry is getting run to the ground by idiots, while chasing an economic bubble that's going to end disastrously. It's going to end up with a tech cycle kind of similar to nuclear power: a few prominent disasters, a whole lot of public resentment and backlash, and it'll take decades until we can start having sensible conversations about it again. If only we would have had a little bit of moderation to begin with!

The only upside AI business has had was that at least it has pretended to give a damn about open source and open access to data, but at this point it's painfully obvious that to AI companies this is just a smoke screen to avoid getting sued over copyright concerns - they'd lock up everything as proprietary trade secrets if they could have their way.

As a software developer, I was first super excited about genAI stuff because it obviously cut down the time needed to consult references. Now, a lot of tech bosses tell coders to use AI tools even in cases that's making everyone less productive.

As an artist and a writer I find it incredibly sad that genAI didn't hit the brakes a few years ago. I've been saying this for decades: I love a good computerised bullshit generator. Algorithmically generated nonsense is interesting. Great source of inspiration for your ossified brain cells, fertile grounds for improvement. Now, however, the AI generated stuff pretends to be as human-like as possible, it's doing a terrible job at it. Tech bros are half-assedly marketing it as a "tool" for artists, while the studio bosses who buy the tech chuckle at that and know they found a replacement for the artists. (Want to make genAI tools for artists? Keep the output patently unusable out of the box.)

I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something

Times New Roman is wayyyy too classy for Trump Administration. They should switch to Comic Sans MS.

...Oh no, I'm re-heating font jokes that people older than me found funny decades ago. What has this present political climate reduced us to?

Physical copies of Half-Life 2 are probably, dunno, considered unholy artefacts or something. (The very first versions of Steam were not fondly remembered)

I'd love it if that was a menu item in a restaurant. "Lefty nonsense". No explanation. If you ask about it, they'd just say "you'll just have to find out". You see, cooking is an art, it tells a lot about the artist. Will you get served social commentary thick with sarcasm or do they just reveal troubling things about themselves? It's a gamble.

Sorry haven't had coffee yet

🤦🏻‍♀️ What about the people who don't use social media? Or have used social media for less than 5 years?

Or people who disclose a suspiciously wholesome 5 years of social media use? Or use social media platforms that allow backdated posts - how well are those going to be scrutinised?

Why am I even asking? This is all so stupid. People only want to travel to places where they won't be immediately grilled on what they think of the dictator. (...Out of curiosity, what's the process like for North Korea? Strictly for comparison.)