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.

Of course Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz.

It is famously a prison where the worst criminals went. And just as famously, a prisoner escaped, never to be seen again.

He’s just planning ahead. Personal plans. They’re not particularly good plans, they’re not cunning plans - in fact, they’re pretty stupid plans, to be perfectly honest.

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

American police forces have never really considered the optics, have they? Or sociopolitical implications? Yeah, these are not in their vocabulary. (I don’t know if the word “vocabulary” is in their vocabulary, it has too many syllables.)

Anyway, you need to think about the optics and sociopolitical implications before you rush headlong and grab a dick. This is common sense. Not to these officers, though, apparently.

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.

Everything about this news makes me wish I could shout “oh for crying out loud, will you just shut up, you deeply deeply weird man” at Trump’s face. Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the world and I have other worries to deal with.

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

Episode 230: Google
“…over there, you can see a YouTubeAI datacenter on fire. It’s not supposed to be like that.” - Roz, probably

I hope the locals were like “I didn’t know which car to boo for, so I booed to all of them”

So. Emergency bunker under the White House.

Excuse me. How many nuclear weapons the other countries have pointed at the White House, exactly? …never mind, that’s top secret intel or something. But since the answer likely is “more than 1”, I’m not sure why they’re doing this, unless Trump is stupid or something.

Anyway, isn’t the current US national emergency procedure basically “if the POTUS is in the White House, get him pretty much anywhere else but the White House”? You know, the whole deal with the Air Force One and the Nuclear Football and all that nonsense? …actually, I think Trump is just stupid or something

I’ll much rather remember Scott Adams, the guy who described a Pointy-Haired Boss (for the youngsters who never read Dilbert, think of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover days), not Scott Adams, the guy who recently desperately tried to rehabilitate the Pointy-Haired Boss character to be more reasonable. (Because that has never actually happened in the actual industry. Dilbert was meant to be a satire of what actually happens in the industry. Pointy-Haired Bosses are eternal.)

Also I never forget the experience of reading The Dilbert Principle (1996) for the first time. “Oh yeah! Most of this stuff is pretty good! Except this one about female coworkers, yeaaahhh, this is a little bit suspect.” (Again, for the youngsters, we didn’t have “sus” back in the day.) Foreshadowing is a literary device wh-

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)