Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren’t a thing

Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn’t actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.

Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything

Finland is basically “File a report if your income changes enough to affect your tax bracket. You’ll be issued a new taxation statement. Send it to the employer. (If unemployed, don’t bother, the agency who pays you already knows.) Your employer/the agency will send the taxes owed to us. You’ll be sent an annual tax proposal - If you have no deductions, you don’t need to do anything, if you do, then it gets mildly interesting. If you get tax returns, you don’t need to do anything if we have your bank details. If you owe us, oh boy, we’ll let you know, don’t worry.”

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.

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.

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.”

I had taken a photo of the pile of junk in my home.

AI facial recognition in ACDSee swore it could pick up my father’s face in the jumble.

I feel like I was visited by a ghost.

Rest in peace, dad. (sigh) No, I know you would not approve of this mess and would tell me to hurry up and clean the thing up.

Did someone say… cookies?

I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.

Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?

Maybe! Or maybe this whole new concept of dogness actually is something that needs rational consideration. Given no forthright consideration at all, it could be rejected at face value in every possible scenario! It is not at all unreasonable for the Homemade Dog to point out that additional time should be spent to consider their merits.

And that their rejection is still a sad fact, because they were a homemade dog and as such they were made with love. Nothing really changes that fact.

Glory days of Halo Reach / (hot take) Halo 4 / (even hotter take) maybe even a little bit of Halo 5 (but we don’t speak of the early days of Master Chief Collection) were my favourite era of Xbox multiplayer.

Halo Infinite is pretty good as far as mechanics go, but the community aspects are a shadow of its former self, and I’m not sure 343i ever completely understood this.

(I’d probably say “I wish we had Bungie back” but as a Destiny player I’m pretty sure Bungie is slipping too.)

Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.

It’s more like a turtle and its shell.

Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!

Technically, emoji doesn’t even have specific flags, they just have country codes, conforming to the ISO list - actually choosing which flags will be included is up to the individual implemeters. Regional flags got a little bit complicated because they need to establish the conventions first.

Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

Because this set a dangerous precedent.

Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

Meanwhile, me aboard a train: “Oh you can get whole massive meals on restaurant cars these days? No thank you, I’ll get a coffee and one of those overpriced naff sandwiches.” (Well, the Finnish train sandwiches are pretty good, but they are hella overpriced. Like 7€. WTF.)

The Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness”

Wikipedia: “Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome”

Oh I have a Forever Mouse. Bought a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical in 2001 or so. Still works. Use it with my Raspberry Pi sometimes. Also bought another Microsoft wireless laptop mouse like a decade ago. Still works just fine.

…The Logitech mouse that I bought against my better judgement in 2020 is starting to show signs of fatigue.

Also how the everliving hell do you add AI to input devices? Are they just going to guess what I’m pointing at?

No, can’t have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.

This is a clown car. That’s the most reasonable explanation.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (the Netflix anime) is pretty damn great and well worth the watch.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty decent game too. Not a masterpiece it was originally hyped up to be, and a lot of things in the game just painfully remind me of things that other games do better, but it’s still a pretty damn gripping game with pretty incredible atmosphere and style. Probably pretty high in my best games of the decade list.

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

Salmo has two AI packages commanding him to take five loaves of bread to the Two Sisters Lodge at 10am and to the West Weald Inn at midday, but the packages never execute as he has no bread in his inventory and the packages are of “escort” type, meaning he doesn’t actively seek any out. It’s possible this bug was introduced to avoid another, more serious one: if bread is given to Salmo using the console or CS, he will walk to one of the inns as commanded, take a bite of bread, and the game will crash. (UESP)

Right, this is classic Bethesda stuff right here.