Posts by hedgie 310 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2023
Not a regular Youtube visitor, but I've noticed with Vivaldi on Mac and uBlock Origin I get a black player window which requires clicking on it, and then takes a couple of seconds to load. Mild nuisance if one is watching long videos (QI episodes for me almost exclusively, since my alternative there is torrents). Total pain if it's shorter ones since autoplay breaks entirely.
I suppose I should just dig up the Pi3 and set up a pihole.
Also depends on the purpose of fooling the system. Just not wanting to be identifiable and effectively followed everywhere by the machines, particularly if one doesn't have nefarious intent, standing out to humans is not an issue. Looking like a weirdo, especially in a large enough city isn't going to raise too many eyebrows, and most people will just dismiss it. Same with wearing a mask that looks like it's there to prevent illness/spreading illness. Looking like one is obviously trying to fool the cameras is going to raise more actual suspicion.
Like right now, I've got bright blue hair. It does stand out, but most people just dismiss the oddity. Then again, I'm not trying to go everywhere unnoticed. If I wear weird makeup, I'm sure I'll get some street harassment, but again, most people will end up just file it under "none of my business", so it would prevent automated tracking everywhere I go. Part of defeating automated tracking is the social engineering aspect where people might notice but not see it as an attempt to avoid said tracking.
You don't really even have to make yourself look like somebody else, just prevent the cameras from reading everything right. A bit of abstract art on one's face, or say, having a giant triangle (including one eye) with black makeup as part of it would certainly make you stand out to *humans*, but the trick is to look like either someone with health concerns (the surgical mask) or some sort of harmless eccentric rather than someone deliberately trying to avoid tracking.
IIRC, you don't even need a full mask to defeat them. The masks that were everywhere during the height of the pandemic would do, and attract far less suspicion. A lot of East Asian people in particular are known to wear them if it's the height of flu season or they have a cold, and in recent years I've seen far more Westerners follow that example. The right makeup would work as well. I suppose the "cybergoth" look could catch on just to defeat the things.
But sadly, I don't expect any real change unless somehow, a government that actually wants to work for the people bans that shite, and I'm not too optimistic about that given the general worldwide trend for authoritarianism.
Exactly. You don't really *need* any AI nonsense for something so basic. Something similar to Spotlight on Mac is sufficient for searching documents, including .pdf and .doc files for whatever search string you put in, and I have found useful enough to have on a keyboard shortcut. Any decent desktop search would be able to go through a user's documents and retrieve what one needs, even if it has to download data from a remote "drive" in order to do so.
I could see the use of an "AI" to provide summaries of documents rather than searching particular strings, or to find specific images based upon content (ie, that silly one of a dog wearing sunglasses that you don't remember the file name of), but it comes at too high a cost. I don't *want* any online storage provider to even be able to read my documents, let alone have some data-harvesting bot looking through everything for $DEITY knows what purpose. And since M$ has shown itself to be a purveyor of spyware, if I have 0 trust in any provider, my trust for M$ to not mishandle it is a negative or imaginary number.
I'm just glad there's no reporting option for "too fscking easy", since I'd probably be in trouble then.
Of course, I also wanted to allude to the classic ""Windows is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition." (source unknown)
Especially on something *big*. Even the one device I have running services (ssh, key authentication only) gets poked at constantly. I've had IDS logs hit thousands of login attempts overnight and countless scans all on one tiny pathetic host. The RasPi probably spends more time blocking[1] that crap than it does actually doing anything that I put it online for in the first place. All that on a piddling tiny home server that's just a target of opportunity because it's *there*. If there was actually anything in/on there that was of real value to anyone else the number and sophistication of attacks would probably be exponentially higher.
I suppose that attacks like this are the consequence of skimping on paying enough to have staff who are competent and care enough to lock it down well and only have people who are willing to work for the peanuts they reluctantly throw out.
[1] 90% of which seem to originate in China or Russia, and the rest some combination of Eastern Europe, Iran, and Israel.
I suppose I just look at it that way since even if I wasn't often hung-over (student and all) I'd struggle to tell someone what the change would be until I had counted it out (ie, doing the sums in my head) unless it was *really* simple. It was kinda the "child counting physical objects" level. It's sad to admit that right now it took me almost 30 seconds to do the subtraction of 10.75 from 20 in my head with the numbers as a sort of abstraction, and the counting method would have been faster.
I was gaming, and the last system I built with an Nvidia card was ages ago. ATI hadn't opensourced their drivers yet, and the ATI card I originally ordered wouldn't work with the blob of the time and I was stuck with onboard VGA graphics until I sent the card back and got the Nvidia one. *That* blob worked just fine on Linux. Except when I switched to a rolling version of SUSE. Usually every six months or so, the kernel was too new for the blob, and since I *was* doing stuff like gaming, the OSS driver wasn't good enough for the performance I needed.
Thankfully, when that happened, since I had system snapshots enabled, it took just a couple of reboot cycles to revert all the updates and I just waited a few weeks for the blob to catch up with the kernel I was using. Annoying when it did, but it only took a few minutes to deal with.
I was always able to compensate by just counting up. If you work a till, you want to keep the money given you in plain sight anyway, until the transaction is finished just to deter scammers, so I could always see what I was given. So if the total was $10.75 and I was handed a $20, it didn't require any real maths. Just pull out a quarter, that makes $11, then 5 singles and a $5. I never had a problem making change counting up like that, and the machine trying to be "helpful" threw me off more than anything else so I never bothered. But if I was expected to try adding or subtracting numbers in my head, I was useless beyond rounding to integers and producing an estimate. That usually reared its ugly head when someone wanted to know what something cost after tax (unlike VAT, sales taxes in the US aren't generally included in the displayed price) and I would have to just punch it in. Got a brain BSOD just trying to do that.
Funny thing is that when it came to actual maths, I was pretty good; I had no problems with Calc or any of that, and was able to see the relations between bits in formulae to help remember them better. But once numbers started getting involved, then I'd have to rely on a machine.
I only mentioned the trailer park as an example of having to learn through necessity, and it also being a sort of situation where most of the people around would have some level of craft/repair skills. Some of the most cherished toys I had as a kid were made by my grandfather who did carpentry as a hobby. The rocking horse swing, little wagon + toy chest, and such. My father did that sort of thing as well for at least the earlier years of my life. It's definitely easier to look at something as either "fixable or makeable" when there's someone around who already has the ability to do so and teach that kind of thinking.
It doesn't help that almost everything these days seems designed to be disposable. Almost impossible to do most of your own work on a modern car, for example, even if they were teaching auto shop in school or someone nearby did it at home. One reason the "right to repair" movement, and the states and countries legislating it are so important. Not just so people can save money and reduce waste/resource consumption, but just to be able to learn how to do it. Both my G4 and G5 Mac towers didn't even need tools to open the case, there was a convenient lever. The G5 I could easily replace fans, add disks, and do a fair bit of servicing with a single screwdriver at most in terms of tools. The iMac, not a chance of even getting that thing open with just what I have laying around. Even my Thinkpad isn't designed to be serviced by the user.[1] I've been fortunate that thus far, the last hardware failure I've had before it was getting time to replace the thing anyway was a PCI SCSI controller on the G4. I certainly don't have the tools to service most of my devices, and I really don't like it. But we're also living in a world where most people have no opportunity or necessity to even learn, and necessity especially is a very good teacher.
[1] A couple of years ago, I had a panic when I thought that the charging port was busted, but apparently it was a dud charger.[2] I still tried taking it in to local repair places and none would touch it. The charging port is soldered on, and I was repeatedly told that I'd have to send it in to Lenovo to get that fixed.
[2] I think I'm currently on charger #5 after maybe 3 years. Except for the one that snapped when the cord got kicked, the others just died silently.
I've always been pretty terrible at sums, it was more of a matter of quick thinking to figure out a way of doing it. To make it easier, I just wrote down any specific product once the first person ordered one, and added tally marks to its side any time someone got another. I'm legitimately surprised that the count at the end was off less than $2.
I think what really messes "the kids" up is that they've never had to do so many of the things that older generations (including the older half of millennials) had to fight with. They could always just push a button and they'd be online (if it doesn't just connect automagically), and never had to deal with installing all the networking stuff onto Windows 3.1 (or whatever, memory is fuzzy) and troubleshooting it. Even most Linux users these days don't have to fuss with drivers unless it's for some esoteric hardware. Last time I had to was because the Nvidia blob didn't like the bleeding edge kernel I was using. And since hardware isn't designed to really be user-servicable, people don't learn how to fix that stuff.
The same phenomenon occurs across generations with those who have always had someone else deal with that stuff. I used to be really salty about all these people who seem to be utterly unable to do basic things having way more money than I do. Then it dawned on me that they always had someone else to deal with that thing; they haven't been forced to learn. And the one rather younger friend I have who *is* good at problem solving any situation grew up in a trailer park. She never had the luxury growing up to have someone else do it, or just buy a new one and was forced to learn.
Yes, any device. When I was a student, working in a coffee shop for beer money, we got a paper jam in the till on busy Sunday morning. The whole till locked up, and neither of us had the key for manual drawer release.[1] My co-worker was spending as much time as possible digging it out with a pocket knife and even removing bits to *find* the fscking thing, while also trying to keep coffee brewing and other things running. I had to pull out a pad of paper for scribbling down every purchase, dump the tip jar onto a spare bit of counter, and use the contents thereof to make change for people while also making drinks/dealing with customers. Because there were only two of us and no one could focus on clearing the jam exclusively, it took at *least* 90 minutes to get the jam cleared and the till up and working again.[3]
To this day, even a "normal" paper jam fills me with anxiety and dread.
[1] I suppose that since the owner was at that store 6 days a week, he didn't think anyone else would need one.
[2] There were normally three, including the owner who actually *did* work as hard as he expected his minions to.
[3] And then we had the "fun" of punching all the sales in and sorting the shop's money from what we used out of pocket for making change. The task of actually handling the money fell upon me, and I was in that transitional state between "still drunk from a late Saturday night" to "hungover as hell" at that point.
fair enough. Yes, the people running the scam are getting rich and it'll be everyone else holding the bag one way or another when the final accounting[1] is done. In a way, it's the sort of thing that has happened countless times before but it's just so sickening to watch helplessly like some Cassandra.
[1] Yes, I know it sounds vaguely eschatological, but then again, I'm partially looking forward to the AIpocalypse.
I'll admit when I posted last night, I didn't think of the details of the financial angle beyond "keep bubble going". Then again, thinking of all the details of his self-interest financial angle required more mental bandwidth than knocking out a pithy line or two when sleep meds are taking hold.
Exactly. AI is a cash sink that hasn't produced returns, and trying to do it but in space even worse. The most logical reason for this acquisition is to prop up shares that are likely going to crash soon if things remain as they are. Also, I expect various "unforeseen" problems that he'll explain away to account for the massive losses and keep the wool firmly over the eyes of investors.
That is assuming that there *is* a logical reason for all of this. It could be that that, given his reputed drugs use, he was high as a kite, actually *thought* he had a brilliant idea and none of the sycophants around him would even try to talk him out of it.
Thanks. I didn't know she was a nun at first, since most of them are allowed to wear normal clothes instead of the penguin outfit. She was just another face I recognised as someone who comes in there but hitherto hadn't really talked much with. Since the evening started out during "happy hour", I assumed that she was just another person who had finished the workday and wanted to relax. Which *was* technically true, but when I asked where she worked again, the reply was "St. Gabriel's, I'm a nun". And yes, there were many drinks involved. Their vows have things like "poverty" and "chastity", but not "sobriety". Nuns and priests tend to have boozing and gambling as their allowed vices, even though they have to donate the proceeds from the latter.
Fundamentalists of any stripe, whether religious or political scare the shit out of me, and I don't think that fear is misplaced. They can't be reasoned with, and will break the bits off of people that don't fit into a narrow world view.
And I definitely feel awful about what some folks have been going through for a while. Some months ago, I was at my local coffee shop, and there was a trio of students wearing hijabs at one table.[1] I was just sitting at one of the few tables where I could keep my laptop plugged in, and I didn't think anything more about their presence until the table next to me opened up and one of the girls got up and just plugged her devices in there to charge. I figured I'd be leaving in less than an hour so I got up to offer to trade spots with them all, since they could just push the two small tables together and I didn't really need to charge any more. The looks I got when I walked over to them, though, were chilling. They were genuinely looking at me with fear, the kind that comes from past experience. Wearing all black with 14 eye Docs and standing 6'4" and looking like I just came from a Laibach or Neubauten concert probably didn't help with that. I ended up stammering out that I just saw that someone needed to plug in and offered to switch spots with them. But yeah, the looks I got there were something that sticks with you. I have since gotten pretty friendly with one of them who always smiles, says "hi" and chats a bit[2] when she's in, but I still feel vaguely bad about that first interaction.
[1] Their accents placed them as some sort of West-Coast US, but ethnically Mid-Eastern.
[2] Friendly enough that she thought it was funny when I "accused" her of embracing stereotypes by being an engineering student and pursuing that kind of career.
Yes, most aren't too nutty, and the Vatican even *has* scientists on its payroll. Mainline Protestants are not much different,[1] except perhaps more willing to vocally support things like abortion rights and divorce. The Evangelicals are very likely to be fundies though. It tends to go hand in hand with the entire evangelism thing and wanting to convert people to their mindset. Doesn't leave a lot of room for differing views on anything or looking at things even remotely rationally, for that matter.
I must admit, I really find it uncomfortable to be defending the church in any regard, not just because of my own baggage but the number of things it *deserves* to be slammed for. Then again, criticism does tend to carry more weight when there's real justification for it, and giving credit at those times when it is actually due.
[1] I think there are a fair number of Catholics and, say, Anglicans alike who aren't necessarily big believers, but remain because of the community or it being culturally ingrained. Kinda like those Jewish folks who are theologically atheistic or agnostic but still attend services, at least on major holy days.
Full disclosure: I was raised Catholic and hold a lot of the kind of animosity towards the church that comes from extreme familiarity. I do firmly believe that the church as a whole does at least as much harm as good.
With *that* out of the way, it's a lot less monolithic than the church as wants people to think it is. It has the ultra-conservative "the mass must be in Latin, Vatican II was a mistake" and Opus Dei kinds of zealots who would jump at being the next Torquemada. There are also very liberal factions and orders who are refreshingly sane,[1] and everywhere in between. I went to a de la Sallian High School in California, which kinda helped cement my non-believer status, but even the mandatory religion classes took everything apart critically. Even they admitted that large parts weren't literally true but allegory or garbled in translation and only being written down decades or centuries after any events they are talking about. The other Catholic school in the region was a Jesuit indoctrination centre. It's probably a very good thing overall that there are now two successive popes who are on the saner side, and will hopefully bring more of the faithful to their side.
[1] I remember drinking rather heavily with a nun once.[2] After a few drinks, she was talking about stuff that would have conservative Catholics clutching their pearls and Pope Palpatine definitely would not have approved of.
[2] Didn't know she was a nun at first. She was just in the bar frequently during happy hour and I was in a chatty mood. Found out about her vocation after enquiring where she worked.
I'm quite jealous.
Unfortunately, deregulation combined with a lack of real competition means that any such service here over-charges and under-delivers compared to other developed countries. I can't even *get* fibre to the door for home internet and I live in a fairly affluent area.
Don't even ask what I pay for electricity, and the people in the next county over have municipal utilities and pay perhaps a third of what I do, with fewer outages. And while I do have top-tier healthcare, it comes at an extreme cost, nearly $300 a month and *that's* only 20% of the total premium, work pays for the rest.
It's a pretty shite state of affairs overall, and every pittance of a raise I get ends up being swallowed up by some bastards that I'm stuck dealing with.
It helps that both she and her husband had solid middle-class jobs and their house was paid off and kids all on their own, so they had a fair bit of disposable income. And she is one of the most obsessive But it was all the background data usage more than the game that really made it expensive to use for ops if not shut off. I think she said that background stuff could double or even triple the cost of the operation. She wouldn't let anyone who *didn't* have a way to shut down background data use touch the thing. And obviously, all of us used external batteries even for regular use.
I always biked rather than walking or driving, personally. Although in-town I was often faster than those driving to get somewhere quickly, because I could take shortcuts and avoid traffic.
Some of the data usage caps/costs for access is no joke. A friend of mine is a heavy Ingress player, having even bought a vehicle that can offroad comfortably and helped charter a helicopter[1] for operations. She frequently used a BGAN that charged about $6 USD per *megabyte*, and had to use an app that'd shut down all but the necessary data use to not run up huge charges with every use.
And here I thought it was painful that I'm paying about $100 USD/mo for 100GB of 5G tethering before throttling kicks in.
[1] Although she wouldn't fly on it, the people involved wanted to get a very tiny person in there instead to at least keep the cost down a bit.
Got the Mac on Sonoma and have no reason to do more than apply service patches at the moment. On the laptop though, I think I have taken leave of my senses, since I'm running a rolling Linux distro (Tumbleweed), but at least it's easy to roll back when (not if) something breaks.
Exactly. Every potentially useful application of "AI" would be in automating *small* routine stuff, and local models would be fine for all of that. These gen AI companies are just spewing nonsense (and now feeding on their own slop) that's only going to get worse. A lot of the dotcom failures were the ones with a silly idea or nonsensical business plan that we all laughed at, but others were just because they didn't have the money to keep going until profitability or because the technology (or connectivity) weren't there yet.
The gen AI seem more like the former, promising the world but failing to deliver, and all at a staggering cost that's being largely borne by the rest of us between the skyrocketing costs of hardware, and likely soon, electricity, job cuts by execs gleeful to replace humans with AI for a bigger bonus, and the environment.
Even some of the "failures" of the dotcom era were, unlike AI, based upon sound ideas. They just didn't have the leftover cash to survive after building up infrastructure to weather the storm. Webvan and grocery deliveries was great in principle, but they spent all their money getting everything up and running. The big supermarket chains were able to buy all that stuff up at firesale prices and started offering that service. For a while it looked like Amazon was going to end up there as well, but had enough to hold on and keep going.
Yes, and until they fix it, it should be removed. The devs can just resubmit once the problem gets fixed. It's not like removal would be the end of the world, and they wouldn't be the first to have to change something to comply with the rules in order to be listed.
So fight "censorship" by compelled speech? Governments forcing someone to put a product that the company finds unsafe or objectionable is far more totalitarian. It's Apple's walled garden, their rules, and that curation does make it far less likely to install malware than Google's Play Store. If that's a problem for people, they can buy an Android device. Maybe they shouldn't (and that's another matter entirely), but users trust Apple's store.
Further, removal isn't necessarily permanent. Xitter/Grok can fix the problem and submit it again. If there's a problem with a product, yeah, pull it off the shelves. It can always come back once it no longer does the things that got it removed in the first place.
Exactly (I posted similar at greater length before reading your post). Only reasons I'm even starting to look at a fairly high-end Mini to replace the 6 year old iMac are from Intel Macs falling out of support entirely and to counter ever-increasing software bloat. You and I both need far more power than the average user and *still* what we have works perfectly well. The average user has even less of a reason to "upgrade" as long as their stuff all works.
For art/photography, I need a fair amount of power, enough to comfortably work on fairly large (roughly 750MB without layers) .tiff files without noticeable lag. But I've *had* hardware that can do that for ages now, and the only incentive I have (aside from planned obsolescence ) to ever upgrade is simply to counter increasing bloat[1] in each new OS version or versions of the software I'm using. What gaming I was doing, until recently[2] meant I could run FFXIV with med-high graphics settings quite acceptably on a 6 year old iMac that was no longer supported, and that's *with* WINE overhead.
Whole point of the digression is that I have much higher hardware needs than the "average" user, and even so, my ageing system does everything it's supposed to. In the next year or two, it'll have to get replaced by a decently specced Mini, which I'll probably keep for about the same amount of time. Someone who only uses the web and office apps, and maybe whatever photo editing software ships with the OS to touch up family photos a little, play movies and music and similar has even *less* of an incentive to "upgrade", and again, are only going to be doing so from planned obsolescence and increasing bloat. The people who actually need every little incremental increase in hardware power are a tiny minority of home users, and truthfully, businesses as well.
So people have few enough incentives to upgrade until something breaks, either dying hardware or finding what they need is no longer supported. All this AI crap driving up the price of every component is going to further dent sales. And it seems like most people haven't bought in to the hype and don't give a shit about "AI PCs" in general. Sure, there's CMOT conning folks into buying one if they walk into a store, but more of the market is buying online.
[1] Thankfully, MacOS and Linux are far better about that than M$, but it still happens.
[2] XIV hasn't supported Intel Macs at all since the launch of Dawntrail, but with XIV on Mac I was still able to run it just fine until the launcher broke with the last set of patches. Right now, I can get on through the official launcher, and without the WINE optimisations but basically only able to craft because it's so slow, so I only log in to keep my houses. On the same hardware, once I get around to dual-booting and use an optimised Linux launcher, I'll be back in business, probably performing better than before.
The Enterprise is certainly large enough to have a say, warehouse-sized holodeck easily. It certainly could be possible to do all the things you're talking about without the users really noticing. Now, the DS9 holosuites and Voyager's holodeck would likely be much smaller (unless the station had one or two huge ones and several small ones) and you'd more likely to lose suspension of disbelief.
But yes, MST3K mantra time.
It's also just the market for that VR stuff is going to be a small one to begin with. Whether it's miners for whatever "cryptocurrency" or "AI", getting one that can run VR comfortably means a small percentage of users, except perhaps the serious gamer market. On top of that, I don't know the percentage, but a fair number of people get motion sickness[1] symptoms from the headsets as well. If that percentage is non-trivial, it's going to shrink the market even more.
[1] I wouldn't even *touch* VR because I'm sensitive enough that even playing a game using 1st person perspective on a laptop makes me queasy.
Yup. Decades ago, I was a paid intern for the city I lived in doing data entry for the pavement management database.[1] The software that we were using was ancient, and I worked on an isolated Win 3.11 box with NO networking at all. We had to backup and transfer the reports on floppies. Not only could the system not be upgraded, but even installing a networking stack onto it would break the software. So I don't think they were being security-conscious, but it just worked out that way.
[1] it contained the condition of every road and what was wrong with each one for knowing when to resurface them according to some sort of triage
Myspace from what I recall was kinda just basically an extension of the vanity pages you'd see on Geocities or Angelfire, but easier for users to make and link up with one another. As much as some of the pages were atrocities that *belonged* in the '90s, it really was never as actively malignant as the current ones. I think that one reason it's a "has been" now is that they never really mastered shovelling the shit at you for engagement and monetising/manipulating everything as well as FB. Or Xitter for anything that can fit in a short soundbite.
Even on my most active period on Usenet, there were still some web fora I read/posted on regularly,[1] and for one reason or another, they're all gone. One of the communities has migrated to Discord and largely kept together, but it's definitely harder to have long-form discussions using what is mainly designed for chat. Threading and such do "work" and make it usable for them, but far from ideal compared to something more static. Another benefit of either fora, or the comments here or similar places is that if you have something interesting to say, a number of people are going to read it, and possibly reply. I technically have Instagram and Blue Sky accounts[1] but largely can't be arsed to do much with them. Unless someone famous, or at least internet famous reposts your shit, or people stumble across it, it largely feels like howling into the aether. At least here, I know that someone has at least skimmed it and might engage by replying or some combination of up/down votes.
[1] One even decided to add a chat feature, which was just a web client joining an IRC server. One night I waited until there was no one connected to it, joined up (for auto ops) and kicked the admins when they showed up, letting them know when they came back in that anyone can take over a channel like that if they're not using a bot.
[1] The Instagram account is just for sharing artwork, the other I post TTRPG development stuff and babble a bit. I haven't touched the former in months since all my creative work lately is writing, and even though I have no following to speak of, I at least know that all the hot young ladies who *do* are all real, since I know them IRL.
I'm too young to have gotten on before '93, and wasn't really actively doing much until years later but yes. While the technology has certainly improved by leaps and bounds; it's easy to do things that we couldn't with the hardware/software of the time. And there are certainly far more sources of information, even good ones now. Now the whole corporate-owned social sphere controlled by a few companies, and actively manipulated not just to keep eyeballs on it and rake in the money, but also the dedicated disinformation efforts by various governments and interest groups. Even basic search these days is heavily manipulated and completely enshittified.[1]. There was meaningful competition in the earlier days.
Sure, nostalgia aside there was a metric shitton of crap out there. But most of it wasn't shoveled at you by some megacorp just trying to squeeze every last penny out of people and sell their data to advertisers. It wasn't controlled by anyone, and the only real controls were your ISP's ToS. Again, there was meaningful competition between ISPs too, not just a monopoly or duopoly in any given area. Everything you did didn't get monetised to further enrich a handful of twits.
Today, looking at my usage, El Reg is basically the only place I frequent where there are even long-form discussions. At least the chatter I participate in on IRC is the same, for better or worse. But when it comes to anything meaningful, there seem to be far fewer places to *have* real conversations, and with far less diversity in terms of the people there.[2]
[1] For quite some time, Giggle and others have flat-out ignored booleans like "-youtube" or "-yelp" when I'm looking for instructions or reviews, respectively.
[2] Most places are echo chambers these days. It does good for everyone to actually read and be faced with different views than their own, especially when the "other side" can express it coherently and isn't just a troll. It was far more educating for me to actually converse with those who aren't of a demographic I encounter in daily life, particularly those who are on the other side of the planet.
To a great extent, I actually agree with that statement. Part of it is that as much as the old timers were already complaining about the Eternal September, it still felt like something with endless potential to change things in a positive manner. The end of the '90s, early '00s I learnt a lot and went down some strange rabbit holes reading some dedicated hobbyist's horribly knocked together personal site on one of the free hosts. I spent way too much time getting into real discussions on Usenet and actual proper critiques to works I posted in a binaries photography newsgroup (can't remember the exact name right now), rather than just a mindless stream of likes or vitriol.
I think the lack of the big social media sites was a huge driver. Between Usenet, IRC, and the various fora people put together and others stumbled onto, there were organic communities developing and not under the control of a few tech overlords. There were even some trolls who were occasionally interesting enough to "adopt" as pets[1] I remember spending hours upon hours online and actually getting something out of it. Nowadays, it just seems like I do it to satisfy some compulsion or addiction. Granted there was a ton of shite back then too, nostalgia be damned. But it was shite made by people who were passionate/obsessive and not just shite algorithmically shovelled down your throat.
[1] Sometimes fun to play with and not obnoxious enough to just killfile or kick/ban depending on medium.
Seriously. I don't want AI crap, at least not as it is now. And you're right, Apple is almost never first with anything. From what I've seen their efforts are limited and more small "quality of life" things than grandiose. And for any use I'd have for any "AI" stuff, that's all I'd even consider touching. I could use something to summarise my documents so I can easily see what's in each one, without snarfing everything up. Or remove dust from scans without destroying the image/taking hours upon hours to do properly.
Wasn't talking about the account stuff, but Copilot everything and everywhere. Considering how universal the complaining about Win11 and everything about it, disgruntled users are a good potential market. Too bad the Linux Mint folks don't have a huge marketing arm to go after those disgruntled Windows users, and I'm just surprised that Apple's *hasn't*.
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