Hey, I’m seeing your posts all over the All page, I guess this is important to get out there.

They’ve removed all the towns everywhere, if you zoom out on the country you see the larger pins, but the entire country seems to be marked as not belonging to a town. Not just the South. Obviously it’s most disgusting to see places like Maroun el Ras wiped off the map, but this is weird.

So a few different places in iOS that show place names don’t work properly. For example, my family and devices in Find My still show pins but it says “Lebanon” and not a town name. It’s like the entire country is marked as wilderness.

I don’t actually suspect something meaningfully nefarious here, probably a disgruntled product manager who doesn’t think we’re human at worst or a bug more likely. But I’ll be thrilled if Apple gets a PR problem from this.

The terrorist mass murder entity has a history of renaming towns and settlements so this is an especially sensitive topic to me

I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.

The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.

Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.

I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.

AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.

All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.

I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.

I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.

Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.

There are like eight cities in the US that give me hope for you guys.

Not a crazy amount of hope, to be clear. But I like seeing this more than the good old find out half of the imperial boomerang.

I have to find a new home at some point and it’s good that not every single community in one continent has decided to continuously shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity. I’ve got friends who moved to Boston and they say it’s nice. Frankly any place where a house costs eight billion dollars better be nice.

I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

They’re hit or miss. They aggregate a lot of the important tech news, but frankly, I wouldn’t trust them for anything important like figuring out what size and alloy of meat cleaver is the best for changing the SSD in my computer.

…No? I’m pretty sure that was the first massive wave of relatively diverse active users. Lemmy was pretty fringe before that happened. I think there are tens of thousands of us.