I’m doing my part of adding Project Gutenberg books I read on Bookwyrm, with links to the PG pages. If you can’t find them on Bookwyrm, just add a new edition manually.

Years ago I added the PG editions and the links to Goodreads too, but they removed the link field from the books entirely, those Amazon bastards.

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.

Gotcha. Summary:

Group name: Some shit that 12-year-olds would be embarrassed to use as a gang name, but surprise, the guy who came up with this shit was 60+ or something
Ideology: The same ol’ shit, you’ve heard it all before
Identifiers: Well, this kind of shit, they kind of stick out from the crowd
What to do: The usual

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.

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)

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn’t even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn’t fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.

When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it’s not very, you know, precise. So I’m well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.

But it is a potential scifi plot point.

However, I will concede that it’s probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.

Uh huh. Interesting

(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) “In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts.”

The ghost of dead Game Boy also came with ghosts of dead batteries. …So many dead batteries. Many coming from tragic circumstances, such as almost reaching the last level of TMNT 2.

Wolves have a peculiar view of the passage of time and their relationship with other wolves of the pack. They think of were-wolves, are-wolves and will-be-wolves.