Rose

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

The AI industry doesn’t want to abolish or reform copyright law, they just want an exception so that they can keep appropriating shit. On the contrary, they’re pretty mad that AI stuff isn’t covered by more copyright.

AI bros are not on the side of open culture.

Site that lets you build a contact info page, such as a list of links to various social media pages (some even not operated by Meta). As I recall it was originally made because Instagram only lets you have one link on your profile. Incidentally, Instagram doesn’t like them very much and has banned it before.

Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.

It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.

Good point. “Downloadable Content” is therefore a bit redundant, is it not? (also “expansion pack” sounds exciting, and “downloadable content” sounds like corpo slop, as the kids say these days)

Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. And it wasn’t “DLC” because it was a physical disc. We need to bring back the term “expansion pack” to avoid ambiguity.

Oh crap, the last time I looked at Slashdot comments, systemd didn’t exist yet

I’m from Finland so technically not from Scandinavia. But yes, we do have multiple proofs of the strange and disturbing things happening in Sweden. Here, hardly a week goes by without someone asking “why is PostNord?”

Ah yes, Klarna. The proof that not everything is all right with Sweden. Proof that Nordic countries, too, are capable of incredibly dark things. …Do I need to continue?

I didn’t even know Patreon had a mobile app. To me, Patreon is just one of those Big Adult Things you have to do on a computer. Seems to work just fine on mobile browser (Firefox for Android) though. Apple being mega greedy as usual.

GIMP didn’t “just figure out non-destructive editing by 2025”. You’re talking as if it was something that the GIMP development team just decided to randomly add recently, after previously ignoring user demands.

The foundation for that functionality (GEGL) has been in development for ages and was also used for some functionality in 2.6 for a long time. The reason why it took this long is that it’s a pretty fundamental change to how the app works. Also, that meshed with other upcoming changes at the time. Also, small development team.

My immediate thought was that there’s some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif DateTimeOriginal field. But there’s also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don’t ask which software. All of them.)

My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you’re using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you’re actually changing some other field.

Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That’s weird and silly.

Yeah, when you’re a technology enthusiast, it’s easy to forget that your average user doesn’t have a home server - perhaps they just have a NAS or two.

(Kidding aside, I wish more people had NAS boxes. It’s pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives. In a good day. I do have a USB floppy drive and a DVD drive just in case.)

Over the last few years I’ve been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It’s as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I’m working much faster.

Now, Krita doesn’t have all of CSP’s niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

Similarly CSP’s 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender’s. Which is weird because CSP isn’t a modeling program - you’d think they’d stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

Joplin does have an automatic backup plugin. Which I recommend enabling for obvious reasons.

Also, moving to different versions is kinda tricky sometimes. No matter the software, when moving from very old version to a new one, I always keep the old one around until I’m certain the stuff was moved over cleanly.

But yeah, having the notes in a database is definitely not as robust as the plain text storage. Wish Joplin would just let you say “I have a git repository”.

One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it’s the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it’s kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn’t see constant refinement either. It doesn’t even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don’t want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It’s like a welding torch without any eye protection.

I’m using ACDSee on Windows, because it’s operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it’s faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn’t it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you’d think photographers would have pointed this out), but it’s just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.

Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.

I was, like, w-what CVE program. I don’t know of any “CVE” programs that could be shut down, so I don’t know what that abbreviation refers to.

Unless…

…oh no. Fuck. The actual CVE program? And they’re just gonna- Shit.

What.

How.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said “America is fucked” when reading the news lately, and I should stop doing that, because that fact has now been so well established that there’s no need to elaborate.

If I were to be more cynical, I’d say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:

“SlopAI, please open my Word document.”
“I’m sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient’s SlopAI.”
“OK, can you show me my photos.”
“Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?”
“That’s a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?”
“No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you’ll never afford to visit.”
“Can I read my ebooks then?”
“SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don’t exactly read like you remember, but isn’t it more fun this way?”
“I’m going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything.”
“NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI.”

To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like “I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I’ll throw my pacifier out of the pram”. No regard for the considerations of the source sites.