Rose

Motherf-

🤦🏻‍♀️

I started writing a clock app of my own because the Windows 11 clock app didn’t have a proper analog mode and it’s pretty useless. (Windows 3 clock app had analog mode, why not Windows 11?)

Some time ago I was ranting that instead of adding an analog mode, Microsoft will probably just pointlessly add Copilot to the clock app.

…Don’t blame me! I was just pointing out the obvious direction Microsoft is going for, whether we like it or not!

Aaaaanyway. This summer’s project is to figure out how the hell the Godot layout system works so I can make the layout responsive and I can release 1.1.

I use the YouTube TV app.

If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I’m just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I’ll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

Protip: Number may go bigger, but I’m not changing this behaviour.

I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn’t like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

Well, we’re barely in the era where people can safely say “MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we’re pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too”. Patents expire on the day they’ll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don’t expire that easily.

My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)

Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

…I’m not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

A candy that plays music while you eat it

This is the sort of misapplication of technology that traumatised me as a kid, dammit

Ultrasonic chef’s knife

3 years ago I wrote a cyberpunk novel for NaNoWriMo. In it, one of the hoodlums was waving around a “compu-knife”. A knife that you have to pair to a smartphone app over Bluetooth, or it won’t work.

All together now: Cyberpunk was meant to be a warning, not just an aesthetic.

(I know, I know, the article doesn’t say the knife needs to be paired to an app. I feel lucky about guessing it does though)

Boomers in the 1980s: “Those damn robots took our darn jorbs”

Trump in 2025: “We’re giving these jorbs to the robots”

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?

“We’re building the Eschaton Immanentising Machine, from the famous theological treatise ‘Don’t Immanentise the Eschaton’”

(Also, using LLMs sounds a lot less efficient than the exhaustive search described in The Nine Billion Names of God)

One of my recent software projects has an “ignore” list feature, but I guess I have to update the terminology to “include/exclude” if that means chuds will stay away.

Heh, I’m getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I’ve actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.

(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn’t need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)

Funny thing, over here, OSM actually got weird rural stuff for a couple of rural towns I visited frequently about a year before Google Maps (and other proprietary services) was usable there. I think it had to do with some open-data drop from the government.

And seeing the services grow side by side also kind of gave away what their priorities were. Google: putting the local businesses and services on the map. OSM: document every single cool and convenient foot and bike trail.

I’m fed up with the streaming services, so I’m getting back to my big pile of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

I was randomly reminded of the “BD-Live” thing that I tried long ago. One of the most janky joyless things I had ever seen. Some marketing person had decided to do a marketing thing for movie promos and trailers and had forgotten that the thing was to be visited by actual people.

This sounds like it was cooked up by the same people. Looks like marketing people building a Thing.