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.

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

To me this doesn’t sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it’s just a sidebar that displays a web page.

Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. “Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?” “Well it’s a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don’t like it, you can just remove the button.” “Well I still don’t like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?” “What bloat? It’s just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible.”

One problem, if it even is a problem, is that NaNoWriMo uses a honour system for the word counts. They had word count verification in past but it accepted “obfuscated” manuscripts (each letter replaced with random letters, or something similar). They don’t have any way of assessing the quality of the writing, and that absolutely goes against the spirit of the event anyway.

(For a lot of writers this could be the first time they try writing a novel. Last thing they want is an algorithm rejecting their work if it sounds too much like AI. That’d be fucking horrible.)

Ultimately, NaNoWriMo isn’t about quality of writing, it’s about getting into the habit producing text for 30 days. Using any AI to create novel text goes straight up against that idea.

I’ve always said it’s OK that you’re not producing your 100% best prose in some NaNoWriMo days. Or just come up with tangentially related ramblings. It’s, uh, a postmodern composition technique. But try to use a brain, OK? AI will just produce irrelevant nonsense. One of my fave technique is that if I’m really desperate in NaNoWriMo, I fire up lipsum.com and generate a day’s worth of lorem lipsum nonsense. I can do it once. Then I must remove words from that block if I exceed the daily quota.

I’ve had bad feet since teen years, and I’m in my 40s now, which means sitting down once in a while is no longer just a suggestion. One of my big whinges (practicing whinging in case I ever get old) is that there’s just not damn enough public benches. And I live in a city that has public benches and has brought them back. A little bit.

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.”

Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.

Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”

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.

Most of my photography gear falls under “well, that money could have been spent more wisely”. But photography has been one of my major ways of dealing with depression, so I absolutely don’t regret it. I can’t really put into words how good it felt to finally get a Camera That Didn’t Suck.

I had weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of old Finnish comedies because my late father was into that stuff.

Also: Not an obscure film, but to me, the definitive version of Terminator 2 was the one I recorded off TV. I have it on Blu-Ray, but it’s just not the same.

Yeah, the biggest tragedy of technobros pushing generative AI everywhere is that as a result of that, everyone just had to adopt the stance that you can’t trust a damn thing these days.

At least previously, this kind of disruption led to nuance. Photo manipulation has been around pretty much since the dawn of photography, so now we as a society have developed nuanced view of it over the past couple of centuries. Now, photographs used as evidence in criminal cases have different standards than photographs used in advertising - former has strict standards because it’s a serious inquiry requiring hard evidence, the latter has lax standards because the viewers understand that the photos offer an “enhanced” truth. But generative AI? It just got dropped on our lap all of sudden. We as a society can’t deal with it yet. We’re not ready.

Sorry I just had coffee

“You think this is bad, this–this chicanery? He’s done worse. That car park! Are you telling me that a man just happens to park a car in that small spot? No, he orchestrated it! He exited through the sunroof!”

I’ll get YouTube premium once they fix their damn TV app.

• If I resume playing a video from history, it often plays the ads, then re-plays them shortly after. (You know, at the point when it hit me with a fucking 55 second ad and I backed out and said fuck no, are you shitting me. Double points if the ad it tries to play again is also ridiculously long. I just keep refreshing it until it gives me 5 seconds to skip. I’m not much of a gambler, but this much I can gamble.)

Admittedly, this bug is not applicable to Premium. Being ad-skippy and all. But it’s indicative of the overall quality of the app. For example:

• When long-holding a video in all circumstances, I it should give me a full menu. Like, with the “go to the channel” option? …doesn’t give that to me in Subscriptions view. This might come as a surprise to YouTube, but I don’t always like watching Whatever The Algorithm Feeds Me. I might, you know, choose to watch the 10 episodes I missed. To do that, I need to actually like to go to the channel in question.
• …Or any of the channels I like or are particularly interested at the moment. There’s no way to pin this shit either.
• Speaking of which, the fucking way to browse my subscriptions is fucking atrocious holy shit. It’s useless. This is Google. They don’t do user experience research. They half-ass everything.
• On my smart TV, sometimes the buttons just fuck up. Sometimes I can’t control this shit. Because my TV operating system was designed by particularly deranged people, they thought “closing” or “restarting” any given app was space technology that no average consumer can understand, so they reduced that to bare minimums: the only way to restart the app is to pull the plug. This is just fucking demeaning.

A collaboration between Google and Samsung, people! Two giant corps serving millions of users! And they expect us to pay monthly fee for this holy shit

…sorry for the rant.

They attacked gamers.
Gamers.

(I don’t remember how the rest of the copypasta goes, because I’m a leftist video game enjoyer and try to distance myself from Gamers®.)

That said this probably won’t go anywhere. In the Gamergate days the right wingers kept outright insulting Gamers® and the Gamers® just did some mental gymnastics. Political literacy among Gamers® has gone to even deeper depths since.

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?

Other generated pictures similar to this, even more questionable:

Cyber-Teacher: “All right, children. This here is a Turtle. An Ancient Shellmaster.”

(Pay no attention to the milling people and the certainly not turtle like freaks of nature in the background)

Kind of feel about that about software updates.

I used to have a personal project site that ran Drupal. I don’t know how things are now, but back then, every module could be updated automatically, except for the Drupal Core itself which had to be updated manually.

The one time I went “oh shit, a core update - nah, I can leave it after the weekend”, the site got hosed by malware.

(It’s a Jekyll site now. Drupal was a bit of overkill for it anyways.)