I remember the last time I got messaged by some misogynist dipshit, way back in Halo 5, blaming me for losing the game. …When he was the worst performing player in the team. I just stared at the post game report and wondered how the heck the dude even managed to get a ranking as low as he did.

That must have been frustrating when the user base responded “but I already got my Blåhaj”

Frankly they should have nuked “OneNote for Windows 10” long ago and quietly replaced it with the Office version. Or better yet, not launch a separate version to begin with under the same name. But this is Microsoft, having multiple apps with the same name is just the norm.

AI business is owned by a tiny group of technobros, who have no concern for what they have to do to get the results they want (“fuck the copyright, especially fuck the natural resources”) who want to be personally seen as the saviours of humanity (despite not being the ones who invented and implemented the actual tech) and, like all big wig biz boys, they want all the money.

I don’t have problems with AI tech in the principle, but I hate the current business direction and what the AI business encourages people to do and use the tech for.

I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”

Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?

GIMP (at least in v2) does have a vector path tool and stores the paths with the image! Thing is, they kind of work like selections and you have to explicitly stroke the paths on bitmap layers. It’s a bit more complicated than necessary and not easy to grasp at first.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.

Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”

Oh the term has rich history! First used in modern tech sector sense in 1975 about IBM.

[stern stare]

Forgotten the history, have we? I was referring to Microsoft’s tactics in the early 2000s.

Crypto bros have watered down the term and made it a laughing matter. They ruin everything they touch. Goddamn it.

I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)

Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.

Wait a second. You’re expecting Google to not FUD? Ha ha ha oh wow. I mean I didn’t actually expect them to do so, but yeah.

I run ad blockers. As a security measure. Ad companies collect insane amount of data and do a bunch of shady stuff whenever they can get away with it.

I want to support websites whenever I’m able, but the way ad companies operate just ain’t it.

If they clean up their act, maybe then I could stop using ad blockers, but it’s been decades and I don’t have high hopes.

Also using ad blockers for performance and usability reasons. For example, I used to use a bunch of Fandom wikis and couldn’t understand why people hated the UI. Then I saw how Fandom looks like without ad blockers and holy shit how can humans live like this

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.

Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now. It still seems to work for titles in AZW3/MOBI that didn’t get DRM update or didn’t have DRM in the first place.

Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.

For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.

Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.

Long ago, I used Debian on my main PC but decided to go with Ubuntu on the laptop because it was easy to set up.

Later I switched to Debian on the laptop, too, because ultimately I felt Ubuntu was just Debian with extra steps.

Well, duh, where else would a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad be?

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.

When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.

What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.

And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.