I remember the last time I got messaged by some misogynist dipshit, way back in Halo 5, blaming me for losing the game. …When he was the worst performing player in the team. I just stared at the post game report and wondered how the heck the dude even managed to get a ranking as low as he did.

That must have been frustrating when the user base responded “but I already got my Blåhaj”

Frankly they should have nuked “OneNote for Windows 10” long ago and quietly replaced it with the Office version. Or better yet, not launch a separate version to begin with under the same name. But this is Microsoft, having multiple apps with the same name is just the norm.

AI business is owned by a tiny group of technobros, who have no concern for what they have to do to get the results they want (“fuck the copyright, especially fuck the natural resources”) who want to be personally seen as the saviours of humanity (despite not being the ones who invented and implemented the actual tech) and, like all big wig biz boys, they want all the money.

I don’t have problems with AI tech in the principle, but I hate the current business direction and what the AI business encourages people to do and use the tech for.

I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”

Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?

Well sure, but the summer actually makes up for it.

(Personally: I’m from Finland, have had depression with seasonal pattern. Winters aren’t that bad, early/late winter sucks though. Psychochemically, because the day length is noticeably changing and sleeping patterns get disturbed. Socially, because all sidewalks and walking paths get really slippery no matter how much sand and gravel they put there and going outside gets a bit scarier.)

Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”

Oh the term has rich history! First used in modern tech sector sense in 1975 about IBM.

[stern stare]

Forgotten the history, have we? I was referring to Microsoft’s tactics in the early 2000s.

Crypto bros have watered down the term and made it a laughing matter. They ruin everything they touch. Goddamn it.

I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)

Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.

Wait a second. You’re expecting Google to not FUD? Ha ha ha oh wow. I mean I didn’t actually expect them to do so, but yeah.

I run ad blockers. As a security measure. Ad companies collect insane amount of data and do a bunch of shady stuff whenever they can get away with it.

I want to support websites whenever I’m able, but the way ad companies operate just ain’t it.

If they clean up their act, maybe then I could stop using ad blockers, but it’s been decades and I don’t have high hopes.

Also using ad blockers for performance and usability reasons. For example, I used to use a bunch of Fandom wikis and couldn’t understand why people hated the UI. Then I saw how Fandom looks like without ad blockers and holy shit how can humans live like this

And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.

Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now. It still seems to work for titles in AZW3/MOBI that didn’t get DRM update or didn’t have DRM in the first place.

Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.

For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.

Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.

Well, duh, where else would a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad be?

I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there’s no reason not to support the format.

MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I’ve been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven’t ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)

Open source software doesn’t, by definition, place restrictions on usage.

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Clauses like “you can use this software freely except in specific circumstances” fly against that. Open source licenses usually have very little to say about what the software should be used for, and usually just as an affirmation that you can use the software for whatever you want.

“Linux is probably insecure. Also GPL sounds like communism.” …did I just get mysteriously whisked back to 1998? Because that was the last time I heard this shit.

Well, the ball is in the court of the public transport agencies, then! While OpenStreetMap cannot be expected to accept any and all kind of geographic data imaginable, OSM is meant to serve map data that can supplement other data sources and services.

I’m in Finland, and there’s at least a couple of Web services that do long distance bus/rail/plane route planning, all using OSM. Our municipal bus schedule service, mobile app and the bus stop displays have been using OSM for over a decade.

Funny thing, Pixelfed isn’t even a competitor to Instagram in the very very strictest sense.

Pixelfed is a federated service for posting photos.

Instagram started out as a service for posting photos, but it has become this… thing. I don’t even know anymore.