umbraroze

[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn't have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven't played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

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)