2 STORY GRAND FOYER

Does it go to a 2nd floor?

… … …No

Maybe I was unclear: I need to write alt-texts for images. I currently use a web service for generating those. Drag a JPEG in, it spits out a text string. Yeah, I know, I could just open every image in a giant big viewer and type what I see, but having AI assisting it takes maybe 15 minutes out of the workflow, total. Even with the mistakes it makes. And it makes a lot.

The best argument for asking people to use AI in moderation or quit it altogether is to just ask them to use AI for stuff and monitor how much of the stuff it gets right. (You know how the usual excuse goes - “Oh, don’t worry, we’re just using it as a tool”? Well use it like a tool then. Regular apps screw things up all the time, why is this one special? You have to babysit it.)

I use LLMs for image captioning, and it gets stuff right, I dunno, 75% of time. It’s genuinely handy in that I keep tossing it images that I have just thumbnails to work off of in the normal workflow and it can see stuff I forgot of because I’m a scatterbrain like that. But it can’t understand context, so I have to edit the captions anyway. And when it cocks up, it cocks up big time.

It goes WAY back.

The Apollo Guidance Computer software had a routine called KISSING. …about LM-CM docking, of course.

You saw the opening scene of Apollo 13 and thought only the astronauts used horny references in regards to the docking? Think again! So did the programmers.

Motherf-

🤦🏻‍♀️

I started writing a clock app of my own because the Windows 11 clock app didn’t have a proper analog mode and it’s pretty useless. (Windows 3 clock app had analog mode, why not Windows 11?)

Some time ago I was ranting that instead of adding an analog mode, Microsoft will probably just pointlessly add Copilot to the clock app.

…Don’t blame me! I was just pointing out the obvious direction Microsoft is going for, whether we like it or not!

Aaaaanyway. This summer’s project is to figure out how the hell the Godot layout system works so I can make the layout responsive and I can release 1.1.

Car owners: “We can’t use that one lane now if it’s reserved for buses! This is bad! We want to use that lane!”
Random passers-by: “Well, if you want to use that lane so badly, why don’t you use a bus, then?”
Car owners: “We can’t! B-b-b-because…!” 😡

I have no idea how my brain chemistry works, but sometimes when I’m depressed and I go to !historyartifacts@piefed.social and it seems to help a bit. It’s just neat stuff I guess.

My response: “I’m a software developer. Middle manager douchebags told me they don’t need my services because they think they can code their apps themselves. Ain’t my first rodeo. They’ll beg us come back to maintain this shit.”

(Happened last time with VBA.)

A while ago, there was a a YouTube video of people laughing at AI generated floorplans.

Because of course there was a company that tried to make an AI floorplan generator without a shred of thinking. They posted the “good” ones on their website, and even they had obvious weird details like completely misproportionate rooms, having ten bathrooms in a small house, and just straight up missing doors everywhere.

This is a photograph from real life. You can’t swear in real life. Or so we have been told, anyway!

Well, it doesn’t have to be in the sign. Just tiniest print in the event rules, buried somewhere in the website. That’s usually enough for this to happen.

All of the Steam soundtracks I’ve bought came in MP3 format, some also in FLAC for good measure. Can’t download it over web though, have to download them with the Steam client. Some games have bonus content that is just slapped in the game folder as MP3s or whatever.

Bonus soundtracks in GOG are also DRM free (of course) and downloadable over web.

Reminds me of Dogmeat in Fallout 3. I was really worried about the buddy when the wiki said Dogmeat can die. Bullshit. Every time I hit VATS after that, I didn’t see a dog anywhere, just a dog shaped cruise missile repeatedly flying at the enemies, killing stuff dead. In Fallout: New Vegas, they upgraded the doggo into a real dog shaped cruise missile.

[Insert obligatory grumpy stares from ircII/irssi/whatever-real-IRC-client users when they hear a Windows 95 user referring to the whole service as “mIRC”]

I literally just updated my CV and exported it as PDF/X. Then I remembered that a decade ago I sent someone else a PDF/X document and they were annoyed that they couldn’t add notes on it while reading it (because apparently Adobe Reader was stupidly designed like that, can’t just save an editable copy - dunno, I’ve not used that app in forever) and wondered if recruiters would be annoyed.

But then I was like “blaaaaah, recruiters, are they even reading this stuff anymore? Were they ever reading this stuff? Probably not. Shouldn’t worry about it.”

(Well, some did, once in a while. A few years ago I did end up in a few group interviews in which the recruiters apparently printed out my CV. In colour. …As I just updated my CV, I realised that I used only black plus one colour for the entire document, which means uneven toner usage. Recruiters vs Printers: No Matter Who Wins, We Lose.)

(I don’t know what the hell I’m rambling about, I’m giga high on caffeine, holy shit)

Funny thing is, I bought the Harry Potter ebooks back when they were only available through Pottermore. Last time I checked, you couldn’t actually download them through the website anymore. Which is funny because the site only allowed 7 downloads or someshit. (I think that I failed to download one file, that counted as one download anyway, and the queer idea of “fuck this greedy hag” started to percolate in my mind.) How many downloads did I need? One. Thankfully in the unlikely event I need to access this shit, it’s sitting in my Calibre library. Where it has been sitting ever since.

You can, you know, read another book

For Harry Potter fans in particular, may I suggest The Guy We Don’t Mention in the Same Sentence. You know. Terry Pratchett.

In this day, I’m a proud Debian user. (…STS-83 and STS-94 took Debian Linux to the orbit in 1997.) Open Source can into space!

Reminds me of the Cathode Ray Dude’s video on the nicotine ad display. Weird aspect ratio display, with an industrial PC with an immensely locked down Linux system.

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.