umbraroze

joined 6 months ago
[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Sorry for the potato photograph, my phone was a potato, I was a student after all

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

/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.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

Computer terminal is literally called a terminal because it's the thing on the user side end of the long long wire that starts from the big big computer.

One of those things that make a lot more sense if you think hard of the history.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

To me this doesn't sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it's just a sidebar that displays a web page.

Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. "Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?" "Well it's a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don't like it, you can just remove the button." "Well I still don't like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?" "What bloat? It's just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible."

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

One problem, if it even is a problem, is that NaNoWriMo uses a honour system for the word counts. They had word count verification in past but it accepted "obfuscated" manuscripts (each letter replaced with random letters, or something similar). They don't have any way of assessing the quality of the writing, and that absolutely goes against the spirit of the event anyway.

(For a lot of writers this could be the first time they try writing a novel. Last thing they want is an algorithm rejecting their work if it sounds too much like AI. That'd be fucking horrible.)

Ultimately, NaNoWriMo isn't about quality of writing, it's about getting into the habit producing text for 30 days. Using any AI to create novel text goes straight up against that idea.

I've always said it's OK that you're not producing your 100% best prose in some NaNoWriMo days. Or just come up with tangentially related ramblings. It's, uh, a postmodern composition technique. But try to use a brain, OK? AI will just produce irrelevant nonsense. One of my fave technique is that if I'm really desperate in NaNoWriMo, I fire up lipsum.com and generate a day's worth of lorem lipsum nonsense. I can do it once. Then I must remove words from that block if I exceed the daily quota.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago

I've had bad feet since teen years, and I'm in my 40s now, which means sitting down once in a while is no longer just a suggestion. One of my big whinges (practicing whinging in case I ever get old) is that there's just not damn enough public benches. And I live in a city that has public benches and has brought them back. A little bit.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago

Speaking of aviation, I have no idea why Americans use such a boring term as "airport". I mean, the guys invented half of the aviation technology and then they just use the term "airport". Such a waste of potential.

The international standard term is "aerodrome". Say it like you mean it. It's a term with gravitas.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Apropos of nothing - a few months ago I was looking at one of the sites that curated Fediverse block lists. (Can't remember which one.)

Now some of the blocks were quite reasonable. If a hundred site admins look at your site and go "wait a second, these guys are Nazis" and block the site, that's not so controversial, OK?

But some of the blocks were, uh, how do I put this...?

Individual drama between site admins and their cliques.

Beef.
So much beef.
So much beef that I immediately thought "gee, how can c/vegan even safely exist in Lemmy? There's so much beef everywhere."

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

This was so long ago that I unfortunately don't remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 98 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

I can't remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They'd proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say "that's all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention." 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably "MS", because of reasons. ...and 15 years later, people still regularly go "What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?"

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by umbraroze@lemmy.world to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
 

I don't know if the Twitter account "Threatening Music Notation" posted this, because I'm no longer on Twitter. This is, however, music notation which is kind of threatening.

Football chant originating from 2014: "Putin is a dickhead! La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la." (etc.) (Repeat until sleeping off your hangover. However, in the FIFA World Cup 2018 in Moscow, it was more like "repeat until disqualified" I suppose. Because Russia couldn't do "repeat until dead" at that point. It would have been too blatant. Little green men just quietly made Ukraine not qualify on the games. No one can explain that.)

 

Aka the anti-nuclear-war movie that traumatised me as a child.

 

BONUS PERIOD ACCURATE MACHINIMADOTCOM MEME: Yes, I Am A General

 

Original title: [Super turbo mega hella fucking cursed] "We've Got To Stop The Mosque At Ground Zero" - Trade Martin

The final say on US patriotism.

 

My random tales:

One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. "Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets." (I almost sent back a message saying "thanks for your concern, but I'm in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you")

Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)

Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying "the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff".

 
 

I'm genuinely sorry about posting shit a week ago. I was drunk. ...I'm less drunk now. This is genuinely awesome, however.

 
 

[Not my photo obviously]

 

Despite the obvious levity, this is actually serious. It was made by why the lucky stiff, a pretty prominent member of Ruby community, back in the day. This, however, was part of his mysterious burnout manifesto, for lack of better term. He really really bloody needed a break.

"programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

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