umbraroze

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.

/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.

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."

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.