A few weeks ago there was news of this “human authored” certification for books. Newspapers and many other things should think about something like that, too. If that existed, it would certainly be something I would look for when deciding whether to subscribe to something or not…

someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK

Tangentially related, but I only just now learned about this env var, and the console do not track proposal. While it is a practical solution to the problem of many different env vars… I’m also so annoyed that it’s necessary at all. That it’s required to set some env var to opt-out, instead of being strictly opt-in which such things should always be. Maybe I would like the proposal more if they had called the env var DONT_BE_SPYWARE.

Yeah, it’s really horrible how they are rolling back progress, and it’s happening so quickly. For whatever it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for what you and other trans people have to experience.

Nr 9… uggh! Especially great the part in the article where they just deny it, while the reporter says it was still going on.

Thanks for the infos everyone!

I can live with mild annoyance, if it allows me to sufficiently separate things from Google. Banking apps and such could indeed be a pain point, but I could just put them on another device (e.g. old iPad, which I’m never really using anyway, so i could make it a special purpose device for “those few shitty apps that the world requires me to have”), since I never need that on the go on my phone anyway.

Nr 7 would be amusing if the context was not so evil. It’s weird also how they allow gay but not transgender (oh no I said the word!), but I guess the question is “for how long”…

Nr 8 is just… wow. Very surprising that they don’t care at all and/or are super incompetent. I wonder how much AI was involved in creating that site.

Well this is the final straw. Guess I’ll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)… but then, what? I don’t want a Google thing either :(

So I guess it’ll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone… there’s just no good option.

Or am I overlooking something? I don’t need many features or apps on a phone – I don’t really like today’s smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like “working mobile data” or “working GPS in a navigation app”…)

Oh no :((

Rust’s emphasis on “reliability” makes it a great target for AI

What?! Aaaaaaahhh! This makes me want to scream. After so many years of C++ misery and increasing frustration with it, and looking into various alternatives for years, I found that Rust is the lanuage which brought me back to actually enjoying programming. If they really ruin it with LLMs now, I don’t know where to go anymore in terms of programming languages.

this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich

That reply is indeed excellent.

Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

Or: does he even know what it is?

This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?

wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate

Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?

I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation.

Thanks :) Although I’m so far happy with my current setup.

I got tired of using a KB+M.

Using a mouse on the couch sucks, yeah. I still had an old unused Apple Magic Trackpad here, which (to my surprise) works perfectly with Linux, and with that it’s pretty nice.

I couldn’t bypass the Google account creation/login

That’s why I try really hard to avoid such things. I still try to (so far successfully) avoid having any Google-created operating systems anywhere in my home, because I trust them even less than Apple (for some years I used an AppleTV, but grew too frustrated with its limitations, and also Apple is becoming less and less trustworthy as well).

My solution currently: connected to an (older, non-smart) UST projector is a small HTPC (a little box from Asus based on an Intel N200, low power and fanless, but still has a GPU with a modern video decoding engine so it can decode even 4K video without issues). Since it’s a normal x86 system, I run a normal desktop Linux on it. To access streaming services, youtube, etc. I just use the web interfaces in Firefox. Big advantage of the setup is privacy, and best-in-class applications for playing local files (on streaming appliances that’s usually annoying and bad). And I can even watch broadcast TV on it with a USB DVB-T2 thingy, although I do that rarely these days.

Disadvantage: need to have desktopy computery input devices on the couch to use it (also have an IR receiver in there, but it’s not working well). Still, for me the upsides outweigh that downside.

Ugh. With this, and the recent articles about car makers collecting location data, and the multitude of news about car makers integrating LLMs, it seems that cars are going the same way as TVs, i.e. everything on the market is constantly violating privacy while also throwing ads in your face, and there’s no good models left to buy that don’t do it (to my knowledge). Wondering if there will be any good options left when it’s some day time for a new car…

Shows up like that in the local (non-US) version here too.

And this would have been such an easy way for Google to show a little bit of (at least symbolic) resistance to everything going on…

Maybe your monitor was trying to protect you

Yep, I’m certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days… (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)

Thanks! I uninstalled it and things appear to work normally.

There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it’s really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I’m greeted with:

Note: I have absolutely no idea what “Fcitx” even is. Or why and how it’s launched, or whether I’m actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to “improve the experience” with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I’m just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don’t even want to know how much lifetime I’ve already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

I like to use -- in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?

Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.

Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.

(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. Wow, great. Let’s fire all the programmers already!

Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.

And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once… in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.