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.

The companies that market machine learning tools to investors and the masses have not been set up by people who believe art has value. Everything is content, and content exists to be aggregated alongside advertisements or displayed for a fee.

I genuinely hate that actual artists can’t use a lot of pretty neat novel digital levers to make stuff. Because it’s synonymous with garbage. The ability to leap across the uncanny valley has lost all novelty and is downright banal now.

But the answer to your question is the same as every desperate attempt at getting a “good” use case for slop generators. It’s for cranking out low effort trash.

As a dedicated fan of walking simulators I can already see the amount of shovelware we need to dig through to find the good stuff multiplying by orders of magnitude.

It’s been a year since I played INFRA and I’ve thought about it without fail at least once a week and it damn well isn’t because they haphazardly made boring environments.

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.

I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

CalcKey? FireFish? Developers of Discord alternatives are just a special kind of person. Their efforts are commendable of course.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.

Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

Errands, dishes, cleaning the house, illegally unpaid overtime, Sisyphean traffic, overeating, illegally unpaid overtime, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, researching projects I don’t start, near-catatonic day sleeping, opening and closing my kitchen cabinets to look inside, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, staring at the ceiling listening to weird internet music, programming 0.04% of a new personal project, Sisyphean traffic, errands, staring at the ceiling listening to podcasts about the terrible football team I follow, researching projects I don’t start, overeating, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, cleaning the house, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, near-catatonic day sleeping, researching projects I don’t start, staring at the ceiling listening to nothing, illegally unpaid overtime, dishes, traffic, ceiling, dishes, unpaid overtime, podcasts, sleep,

The game I’m currently playing is great! I haven’t been able to play this last weekend though. Please ignore that Steam says I haven’t launched it since November 4.

I’ve hit procrastinating games that I want to play. Do you understand where that leaves other things that could be more important?

If the Mullvad desktop app could just exclude the Tailscale ports this would be fixed. I like their implementation but I would much rather have the full controls of the Mullvad software itself especially if I’m on a desktop.

I think I’ve heard somewhere an opinion that someone preferred the original atmosphere of the game even if it was flawed. I do wonder if they have a mode for that.

I haven’t played the game so I don’t know, but that’s the first thing I think of for some reason

I’m so vehemently opposed to using their euphemism for it. “Age verification” is just the marketing name for it, it’s identity verification.

Huh. Reddit used to allow VPN users to access images they host even if they didn’t let them browse the platform anonymously. Guess they “fixed” that.