Rose

I use the YouTube TV app.

If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I’m just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I’ll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

Protip: Number may go bigger, but I’m not changing this behaviour.

I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn’t like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

Well, we’re barely in the era where people can safely say “MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we’re pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too”. Patents expire on the day they’ll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don’t expire that easily.

I’m a photo nerd. Uhhh… keys, flashlight, swiss army knife, phone, pocket camera (Ricoh GR III), wallet. If I go anywhere I usually pick up a bigger camera (Nikon Z fc, or if I get serious, the D780, with 50mm / 24-120mm / 70-300mm lenses). There’s also a whole lot of random mystery stuff in my bags. I don’t want to think about that stuff too much, I’ll just get a headache

My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)

Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

…I’m not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

To be perfectly honest I’ve sadly had little means to go around the town, bus tickets add up. But snow is melting, life is good, spring is coming.

If you want more riveting photography like this, check out my Pixelfed! Features both new and old photos.

There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

Don’t worry, this is very old news.

OpenOffice.org was basically stuck in a bureaucratic hell of their own and couldn’t really do major decisions without the leaders’ approval. I think Sun Microsystems/Oracle was involved.

Some high up developers got basically kicked out by the governing folk, so they decided to start the Document Foundation to make LibreOffice, and vast majority of the developers followed. They were just happy to be actually able to do something.

OpenOffice got donated to Apache Project and there’s been very minimal maintenance on it ever since.

Firefox. I’m not happy with how Mozilla Corp is operating, but I’m not switching to a Firefox fork unless there’s actual developer exodus (akin to what happened to OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Ultimately, at this stage, those forks depend on upstream Firefox developers for 99% of the work.

My Xbox gamertag/Steam id is “Rose in Shadows” and also using “Rosa Umbrarum” and variations.

The inspiration came from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The last line of the novel is “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (“The rose of the past endures only in name; we hold the bare names”) Which is why I usually put “Yesterday’s Rose” in the name fields.

I don’t know much of Latin at all. Also, the z in the username was for edginess, to make it a Notorious Hacker Alias or someshit.

As pointed out, Goodreads has been owned by Amazon for a good while. And they also own slices of some other similar book sites (LibraryThing, for example, and some other site that was merged into Goodreads).

Also, to avoid doing unpaid labour for Jeff Bezos, go from Goodreads to Bookwyrm!

“Not the sharpest bulb in the tree”

What I need is “this post really seemed like a good idea when I was drunk, but in retrospect, maybe it’s not”.

Basically not much. This month, 133 megabytes as of 18th of January. And all of it it’s free anyway.

I don’t really need mobile data aside of stints to the town, every place I need to go to probably has Wi-Fi anyway. We have a municipal Wi-Fi network at public institutions, it probably helps a lot. (And I don’t even use free wifi at commercial institutions.)