The Windows Webcam camera settings, when I finally find them on Windows 11 to control pan and zoom, have been the same for 25 years, maybe 30. The thing is, it used to be easy to find the controls, but they keep making Windows slower & harder to use. It’s such a rat nest.
Everyone is too busy doomscrolling TikTok to notice.
I use FolderSync. Works well and I prefer one app synchronizing files than 6. I still use the Nextcloud app for files I don’t sync that I need access to, but overall it’s really bad. The camera upload erased a ton of my pictures on a vacation. I deleted the synced pictures on my phone storage and the Nextcloud app overwrote the images as the new photos had the same file name.
I use Linux, so encryption is easy with LUKS, and Free File Sync to drives that rotate to a safety deposit box at the bank for catastrophic event, such as a house fire. Usually anything from the last few months are still on my mobile devices.
I think OpenAI’s recent sycophant issue has cause a new spike in these stories. One thing I noticed was these observations from these models running on my PC saying it’s rare for a person to think and do things that I do.
The problem is that this is a model running on my GPU. It has never talked to another person. I hate insincere compliments let alone overt flattery, so I was annoyed, but it did make me think that this kind of talk would be crack for a conspiracy nut or mentally unwell people. It’s a whole risk area I hadn’t been aware of.
The new M365 Outlook is just webmail. Every upgrade is actually a reduction in functionality as they align to the web version. The good news is this eliminates the need for Windows.
It’s trolls, trolls are what Facebook stands on. But what do the trolls stand on? It’s trolls on trolls on trolls all the way down.
There is nothing trustworthy on Facebook. Shut it down.
My father is a prepper in his 70s and my brother has become a flat earther. Down with Facebook and YouTube, the two halves of the most evil and vile existence on this planet. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Thought this was an Onion article!
Hey plebs! I demand you work 50% more to develop AGI so that I can replace you with robots and fire all of you and make myself a double plus plutocrat! Also, I want to buy an island, small city, Bunker, Spaceship, And/Or something.
I’d be more forgiving, but what MS Copilot sucks at the worst is working with Office files: PowerPoint: completely useless
Excel: useful for some tasks if I reformat all my sheets into tables, so mostly useless
Word: can’t even answer why the formatting of the file from my coworker is a mess (which is every coworker), let alone try to fix it. But it will gladly take a succinct piece of information and make it into an insufferable 50 pages of fluff. It summarizes documents well and helps with reviews.
OneNote: creating content it’s ok, but useless at retrieving info.
Outlook: It tries to help, mostly confirms that my language is may be perceived as cold and offensive. Which is good, because that was my intention.
It is surprisingly helpful with PDFs and extracting data and cleaning up formatting.
Unsurprising, it does great with CSV and other open data formats. Maybe there is a lesson here?
Indeed. My Alienware doubles as a space heater in my north facing office.
Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won’t sell.
Energy conservation has been part of that messaging. Running appliances and low peak times etc. All of that is out the window for AI.
Energy conservation is the dumbest thing we have ever talked about. For prosperity and well being, electricity should be cheap and plentiful. It’s pollution and greenhouse gases that need to be curtailed. Another mixed up policy mess of messaging, and it is being unravelled by AI.
Clean electricity should be so cheap that every other option isnt feasible. Instead, it’s talk conservation, reducing wealth and quality of life.
Duolingo is a game for points and badges. it’s not actually useful for learning anything.
Here’s a thought: Before installing packages you don’t understand, go to the Firefox site and follow their instructions which work fine on Ubuntu and doesn’t install snap.
I’m not a fan of snap either, but with all software, people need to RTFM. Not do the dumb thing and then cry on the Internet seeking hive mind rage when the dumb thing happens.
Powering off a pile of switches is turning it off. Powering off a sentient being is killing it. Not to mention a million other issues it raises.
Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.
It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.
Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind
His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.
All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.
What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn’t know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It’s sickening really.
So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.
Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.
DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
They were just waiting for Microsoft to add advertisements to Windows so they can do the same. Now it can be a new revenue channel and will see the light of day.