umbraroze

I've been on social media for quite a long time, and I've noticed that people have one thing in common: people just like to read the headline and argue endlessly.

(See? I'm doing it right now: writing this part of the comment before reading the article!)

This raises the question: If there is no headlines any more, what's left?

An endless barrage of people grumbling about nonsense that isn't even tangentially related to anything? People given a new excuse to pretend the source wasn't posted in a debate? (...okay, so this is already what's happening at the birdsite, so I can see why Musk considers this just an aesthetic change.)

That's a pretty good point. A lot of people don't realise that even casual photography can serve a lot of roles, and a lot of "boring" photos can still be very useful. You might not even realise how useful the photos can be later. I've found some old photos of mine that don't really look like much at first glance, but there might be some detail in them that gives context for the rest of the image set.

For example, a lot of people take photos of their food. Some might say "well, that's a clearly pointless habit", but think about it this way - today, it can serve a journaling purpose (so what did we eat last week? stick these things in a food journal so you can get a better idea of your calorie intake?) and maybe later it can serve as historical evidence (okay, so what did we all eat 10 years ago? Remember when McD did this goofy campaign? etc etc)

Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

Welp, another Google service that was too beautiful for this world.

Time to move my subscriptions to other podcatcher then. [taking a quick look at various migration options] Hmmm. What to write on Google Podcasts gravestone? "Here lies Google Podcasts. It never supported OPML."

with listeners migrated to YouTube Music

Damn. I migrated my Google Play Music purchases to YouTube Music and to this day I have no idea where they actually went. If I hadn't downloaded the local MP3 copies with the terrible joke of a client software they had, I'd have been screwed. Went back to just buying music on iTunes.

I had a momentary panic because it's the end of the month and I'm low on money... but then I remembered I deleted my Twitter account and life has just been absolutely peachy since then.

That's right! However, remember that bananas have potassium-40 in it, which is radioactive. Not much, though. So be very very mildly careful around bananaphones! /old joke

Twitter for me was always just a place to shout random ramblings to void. It didn't help that I barely followed at all what other users were saying. Always felt like I should, in fact, not just speak my mind, because in the recent years the site was really terrible at banning dipshits and the Musk takeover was a clear signal that things will never be getting better in that regard.

When Musk took over, the fact that the site started experiencing creaking at the seams when devs were laid off was a huuuuuuge red flag. My biggest IRL friend decided to leave Twitter after the Musk takeover. With nothing else to genuinely follow, I decided to GDPR-dump my past stuff and leave the site too.

I like Mastodon. It's like Twitter and Identica back in early 2010s when you could actually see random strangers posting random shit. Can see fellow shouters-in-the-void. And they're usually not dipshits.

Well, Google Photos shouldn't be considered a "backup" solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there's just no guarantee that they don't modify the data on cloud. "Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals." ...and there's occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.

I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee's DAM functionality.

I use Debian because it runs on everything, and XFCE because it runs on everything and I've never wanted to waste much of the oomph on the GUI anyway. Looks and feels and works well enough, and that's all I care.

In Ruby, the convention is usually that things are duck-typed (the actual types of your inputs don't matter as long as they implement whatever you're expecting of them, if not, we throw an exception). Type hinting could be possible, but it basically runs contrary to the idea.

Now, Ruby on Rails developers are expecting some kind of magic conversion happening at the interfaces. For example, ActiveRecord maps the database datatypes to Ruby classes and will perform automated conversions on, say, date/time values. But from the developer perspective it doesn't generally matter how this conversion actually happens, as long as there's something between the layers to do the thing.

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that plan displayed “moral idiocy”

Musk: "Moral idiocy? Moral idiocy?! I'm not a moral idiot! I'm an immoral idiot! Besides, chess is a kid's game! 1v1 me in Polytopia, bitch! Bet you can't understand fog of war, noob!"
Kasparov: "...very well. Please show me how these pieces move."
[15 minutes later later]
Musk: "I can't BELIEVE I fell for that."

Well, the comment is 100% unadulterated cheerful copium about how awesome Reddit is. And encouraging other users to keep using it. The second comment is 100% r/TotallyNotRobots.

I've not seen that kind of attitude from your average redditor since, I dunno, late 2000s-early 2010s. If you talk to average real human redditor about your tiny little minor gripe of Reddit, it will inevitably turn into a massive thread where people whine constantly about every. single. little. thing. that has gone wrong over the years.

That's what organic engagement is supposed to look like on Reddit.

I used to use Ubuntu on my netbook years and years ago, until I came to the conclusion "dammit, at this point, I would have had easier time if I had just installed Debian to begin with", and installed Debian