The same people who regularly give us uninspiring and insipid candidates to run against demagogues and repeatedly act surprised when they lose ground expect to gain control of a White House where the current president is treating democracy as if it’s an optional hindrance – expect to take power?
If nothing else, I admire their optimism.
They’d threaten legal action for defamation and bury it before it was published.
I’m not sure. I suspect that TextSniper predates the feature on Mac.
On Mac (and iOS, too) recognized text is just treated as text. So on Mac, you just get a text selection/entry cursor (the “I-beam”), and you can select text for whatever action (copy, lookup, etc). On iOS it’s same, except no cursor on account of it being a touch interface. It’s sort of annoying on iOS with images that have a lot of text - double clicking an image to zoom has to be done with care, otherwise it selects text instead of zooming in.
I can also do that on my MacBook.
(This comment is not as facetious as it seems. I knew you could copy text from images, but I just tried to test some limitations, and it’s a weirdly comprehensive feature - I can copy text from photos and/or videos in the screenshots app, the Preview app, the Photos app, QuickTime, and even from YouTube videos in Safari (but not Firefox, interestingly enough) - assuming that means it’s an OS-level thing. Quick search says this rolled out in 2021.)
It’s not quite like that. My workplace is surprisingly good on the hours, they just aren’t great on responsibilities or scope.
It’s… a lot of work in very broad specialties, with little backup.
I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.
When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.
But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.
We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”
Right? It’s a darn fine marketing effort.
Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.
Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.
Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.
My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house?
I looked her dead in the eye and said, “the motherfucking decepticons”. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.
…. I don’t know. It’s just what came to mind when I thought of household appliances being hijacked.
I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip
So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!
So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.
Same. I went with them as a “good enough” option when I needed cameras because I have had a good experience with Anker products, but they’ve slowly enshitified to the point that I’d drop them in a heartbeat if the budget was there.
The focus on piracy is a smoke screen. It’s about capacity.
Build the capacity, and then just start growing that list of reasons things are blocked.
This is out of scope for this community, but the U.S. is amidst a coup.
I mean, literally, it’s being raided by a corporate stooge that is breaking all manner of laws to just reshape it in whatever image they see fit.
In a geopolitical sense, they’re trying to break relationships with close allies, and trying to isolate the country. We see that with the tariff threats, the withdrawal from WHO, the Paris Climate accords, and now with threats to withdraw/pull back from NATO.
Domestically, it’s clear that businesses are bowing to Trump or facing government punishment. That much is evidenced by social media companies filtering search results, by media companies tepid criticism of Trump and by the lack of national coverage over anti-trump sentiment. We also see it in terms of the investigations that Trump and his cronies are trying to bring against NPR, of all things.
This is a play in the move to control information access in the U.S. After the media, and social media, which are now yolked, the open web is the next biggest threat to their coup.
And now this is the legislation they’re pushing.
Oh, and as evidenced by the government losing control of the backdoors they implanted into telco companies, this data will be hacked. And having all of it in one place will make it a big target.
So it’s not just the U.S. government that will know about your business, but so will the U.S.’s foreign rivals.
Great fucking strategy. Let’s make sure all our health data is accessible, not improve the health system, and just hope that none of the people whose information you can freely and easily buy online due to lax privacy laws have expensive medical bills and a sensitive job.
Way improve national security. Dumbasses.
What an unexpectedly deep bit of research this threw me into.
In 2005 a company called Fortress Credit loaned the Trump Organization $130 million dollars for the construction of trump tower that it later ‘forgave.’ Fortress Credit is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which is owned by SoftBank.
Additionally, SoftBank tried to engage with Trump in 2017 under a similar scheme, where they offered to invest in the U.S.’ IT infrastructure as part of some deal they were cooking up with Trump.
Incidentally, in 2019, New Fortress Energy, also part of the constellation of companies, was granted a peculiar permit to transport LNG over rail lines within populated areas - something that is generally not done due to the danger involved.
So that’s just, you know, the corruption cherry on top of this shit cake.
So now, we have SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle - companies whose CEO’s ‘bent the knee’ announcing a half a trillion dollar investment into an all knowing AI medical black box that the government (and its corporate sponsors) intend to use to track all your medical information.
Yes. Centralized government tracking of your periods, ladies. If this system ever works, the government will know if you’ve ever told a medical professional that you use illicit drugs, even drugs that may be legal at the state level, but illegal federally. The government will know if you’re on antidepressants - something that JFK Jr. wants to send people to re-education/labor camps for being on. They will know if you’ve ever told a doctor that you’re not CIS or straight.
And we know that SoftBank can’t afford to invest that much. They took out a $4 billion loan 2 years ago, and then asked for another 1.1 billion shortly after. Even Elon Musk is saying they don’t have the money.
So they’re going to invest some money in something, get very overpriced government contracts for the operation of it, and use a fraction of the overages from that to ‘invest’ further until their obligation is fulfilled or forgiven – in much the same way that telcos fleeced the government to build out broadband and never did.
It’s a bad deal for all of us, and the very best outcome for anyone is that it will never work.
Because if it does work, we will lose our medical privacy, and we lose control of any data we’ve ever shared with medical professionals - one of the few areas in U.S. citizen’s lives where there are privacy laws to keep them safe.
Oof. That hurts to hear.
Yeah, I know. And I know there’s way more market demand for mirrorless, as well as simpler mechanicals, so they have less failure points, but do I ever love the sound and that subtle feeling of a mirror slapping up and the shutter flicking out of place.
The feedback that offers when you capture a photo feels like you’re doing something ‘real’ when you take a photo. Everyone knows that you captured that moment. Those photons are yours forever, trapped in your little art-making box.
It’s kind of romantic, in a way. I feel like modern tech is great, but tends to be inscrutable.
I have such fond memories of shooting on my old Canon DSLR.
It’s been 20 years since I bought my last DSLR (life, you know?) and I recently started thinking that maybe I should buy another before they close out the DSLR product line.
A huge disappointment to see this enshitification.
I’m sorry this is going to be such a shit comment, but I worked with a guy that had a fitness watch of some stripe.
He was a heavier guy and well, that plasticy band was pressed tight against his skin. One day he came in with this nasty looking ring of red and peeling skin around his wrist. Said he got a rash from the watch. (It’s very possible it was an allergic reaction to something in the band.)
This is a shit comment because I don’t know the brand, and I’m totally saying “trust me, bro.” But like, trust me, bro, it apparently happens?
The first time I ever experienced this was in a printshop with a bunch of older guys who were definitely not computer illiterate, but all gathered around the monitor for the server that ran our RIP/platemaker to watch commands appear in the terminal when I remoted in from my computer to do something or other. (They would go into the room and work directly on the machine, but it was loud in there and smelled funny, so I remoted in.)
They made jokes about me being a hacker, and although being distinctly boomer-ish, it was high praise coming from some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
(I’ve worked with more accomplished people, and more highly educated people, but not with folks who had built a successful business that dealt with a variety of complex tech from the ground up with their own knowledge and effort. It was a bit charming to have them wowed by such a simple thing.)