umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 9 hours ago:
Having really hard time converting Kindle books lately, especially since last time I tried this, the deDRM plugin couldn’t handle the newest Kindle for PC versions. Is there an easy way that doesn’t involve getting a physical Kindle device? Does the Android thing work?
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 9 hours ago:
Google Play Books allows publishers to set the DRM policy. Some titles are not protected and can be just downloaded as EPUB. For the DRMed books, it can send them to Adobe’s ebook reader/sync app, which (last I checked) can be decrypted by the deDRM plugin.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 9 hours ago:
I don’t hate AI (specifically LLMs and image diffusion thingy) as a technology. I don’t hate people who use AI (most of the time).
I do hate almost every part of AI business, though. Most of the AI stuff is hyped by the most useless “luminaries” of the tech sector who know a good profitable grift when they see one. They have zero regard for the legal and social and environmental implications of their work. They don’t give a damn about the problems they are causing.
And that’s the great tragedy, really: It’s a whole lot of interesting technology with a lot of great potential applications. And the industry is getting run to the ground by idiots, while chasing an economic bubble that’s going to end disastrously. It’s going to end up with a tech cycle kind of similar to nuclear power: a few prominent disasters, a whole lot of public resentment and backlash, and it’ll take decades until we can start having sensible conversations about it again. If only we would have had a little bit of moderation to begin with!
The only upside AI business has had was that at least it has pretended to give a damn about open source and open access to data, but at this point it’s painfully obvious that to AI companies this is just a smoke screen to avoid getting sued over copyright concerns - they’d lock up everything as proprietary trade secrets if they could have their way.
As a software developer, I was first super excited about genAI stuff because it obviously cut down the time needed to consult references. Now, a lot of tech bosses tell coders to use AI tools even in cases that’s making everyone less productive.
As an artist and a writer I find it incredibly sad that genAI didn’t hit the brakes a few years ago. I’ve been saying this for decades: I love a good computerised bullshit generator. Algorithmically generated nonsense is interesting. Great source of inspiration for your ossified brain cells, fertile grounds for improvement. Now, however, the AI generated stuff pretends to be as human-like as possible, it’s doing a terrible job at it. Tech bros are half-assedly marketing it as a “tool” for artists, while the studio bosses who buy the tech chuckle at that and know they found a replacement for the artists. (Want to make genAI tools for artists? Keep the output patently unusable out of the box.)
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 1 day ago:
I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something
- Comment on hl shirt 2 days ago:
Physical copies of Half-Life 2 are probably, dunno, considered unholy artefacts or something. (The very first versions of Steam were not fondly remembered)
- Comment on Make me feel like a man 5 days ago:
I’m a trans girl, and this shit is the only thing that has even mildly piqued my testosterones in recent years:
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 2 weeks ago:
Tortoise: “I’m not a goddamn rock! You pooped on me for the last time! …Not so tough these days, eh, dinosaur?”
But seriously, not surprising. I heard that many tortoises, while herbivorous, will just happily munch all snails that rest on the greens. (For nutrition. And also to demonstrate superiour speed!)
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
My father had an Acer laptop. It broke.
One of my friends had an Acer laptop. It broke.
I think my father had a 486SX Acer laptop which worked wayyyy past its reasonable age, but it’s in the closet and the hinges look crumbly and I kinda fear that if I touch it it will be atomised.
Me, I’ve used Asus laptops since 2011, and these things are only slightly less resistant to nuclear explosions than Thinkpads
- Comment on The car of the guy who insists that you have a terminal case of TDS 4 weeks ago:
You just know the owner plastered the car with words like Joy, Knowledge, Self-control and Virtue because deep down they know they have none of those qualities and hope that this ritual will manifest them.
- Comment on You can do anything at Zombocom 4 weeks ago:
That’s not Zombo COM1:, that’s the serial port, the one above it. This is Zombo VGA.
- Comment on Day 477 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 5 weeks ago:
Oh crap. Reminds me that for some reason or other (Mostly just time issues I guess, and because dualbooting Windows was pain I guess) I never completed Max Payne 2. As a giant fan of the first game I loved it.
Wonder if I need to go dig out the discs. Wait wait what, I already have them on Steam? How? When did I get them? Never mind. Hope these aren’t a massive headache to get running
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Time to quote the Bible to the boomers who always hypocritically claim to love it so much:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:” - Ecclesiastes 3:1
…and mayonnaise should be used extremely wisely: never in vain, never merely due to tradition - and no matter what, it should always be used with full knowledge about its true, if somewhat mysterious and indescribable-in-words purpose. Those who never consider these mysteries are not fit to decide whether it is appropriate to use mayonnaise or not.
[mic drop]
- Comment on US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment 1 month ago:
Come to think of it, the Covenant have a lot in common with American brand millennial Evangelists. Leaning really hard on immanentising the eschaton.
- Comment on Banana 1 month ago:
They’re completely safe what comes to Potassium-40 radioactivity! You need to eat a massive amount of them to even reach the point where you experience radiation sickness. Actually, you might experience excessive potassium toxicity levels first. (Or you might not! Human bodies are equipped to get rid of excess potassium.) Or, you know, you might experience the problems of stuffing too much stuff down your gullet. There’s only so much stuff you can fit in your stomach at one time.
- Comment on International Shitpost Wednesday! 1 month ago:
Turtle robot! 🐢🤖 Cutest robots of them all. Very programmer friendly. Very artistic.
- Comment on Sunlight special 1 month ago:
I see no problems with cooking meals with sunlight. (…as we say here in the solarpunk instance)
However, I do see the practical limitations what comes to attempting to cook meals with sunlight in the UK. I have heard the weather is often not favourable.
- Comment on Priorities 2 months ago:
Something something tech company CEOs
- Comment on EuLeR iS nOT a PHySicIST 2 months ago:
An old bit of wisdom: “Most scientific concepts are named after the second person to discover them”
- Comment on How many hands long do they get? 2 months ago:
Easiest way to avoid formatting the list is to put a backslash before the dot:
12345\. Blah blah...This was a common problem in Reddit in NaNoWriMo when people posted their daily wordcounts and what they had been doing.
- Comment on Sweet dreams are made of these? 2 months ago:
Chud: “There are some who seem to be ignorant of my ancestry. As I have subtly hinted for some time, the answer should be very clear: very European.”
Europeans: “…We’re kindly requesting you should never set foot on our beautiful continent. Thank you.”
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Well, whoever right-wing funnyboy made the original never went to school, so how would they even know?
- Comment on 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' 2 months ago:
There aren’t that many Premium™ Gamers®, and trying to pretend that that is, like, a legitimate target demographic to pander to is just sad, folks.
(The funniest gamer influencer backlash I’ve seen lately was against some YouTuber who blew ~$2K on gaming desk and a chair and called it a “minimalist” setup. People at large rightfully went “are you shitting me”.)
- Comment on Who plays like that x_x 2 months ago:
I use inverted Y look with pad controls. Because that makes so much more sense. (Normal mouse look is fine)
I like how many new games show accessibility settings on start but it’s still rare for them to have both subtitle settings and invert Y right there. And always a celebration when they are.
Games that don’t even let you invert Y are hella silly. I’m so glad Xbox lets you force the invert. Gotta figure out if you can do that in Windows/Linux.
- Comment on Trump posted this in Truth. 2 months ago:
“Redux” is the extended cut, which has ~45 extra minutes of stuff that was cut from the original theatrical release. Some of the scenes are great, but some could have been left on the cutting room floor. “The Final Cut” is basically the definitive extended version.
- Comment on Oppression.jpg 3 months ago:
The most cyberpunk thing I’ve seen, oh, this week, I guess
- Comment on Train your brain 3 months ago:
Yeah, well, Law and Ethics are two separate things which - very rarely these days - seem to cross each other. This is known.
- Comment on Train your brain 3 months ago:
Courts will say “no, that’s not what we meant by that” and will slap you silly.
AI companies aren’t on the side of copyright reform or abolition, they just want an exception for themselves so they can keep doing whatever they’re doing now. (And they also want more IP laws to cover the current grey areas, so they can stop pretending to give a damn about releasing publicly available data/weights)
- Comment on Everyone wants a turn 3 months ago:
Sure, there aren’t wild turtles in the Netherlands. But this call was aimed at the turtles in general, worldwide! Turtles will be able to get to the Netherlands from the nearest location. Eventually. We believe in them!
- Comment on Everyone wants a turn 3 months ago:
Aww, no turtles? Come on, turtles, you’re so much faster than snails, go have a walk and demolish that snail distance figure! 🐢
- Comment on leading ai company 3 months ago:
Oh wow, Elon figured out how we’ll finally get AGI. The key thing is to publish an automatic mobile client update every single hour of the day! That was the secret productivity metric that every single other company was missing. Thanks, big brain business boy!
