No problem. :)

I also just feel like I’m not writing words for the fun of it. They’re chosen to convey information in a very intentional way to a given target group. Like, just now in that previous sentence, I changed “in a certain way” to “in a very intentional way”, because that’s more precisely what I wanted to say. I try to convey lots of nuances in relatively few words.

That’s my #1 criticism of LLMs, that they just blather on and on. And ultimately, precise nuance requires understanding the topic, the context and the target group, which, if you’d describe it to an LLM, would take longer than to write the actual text itself.

Nah, FOSS stands for “free and open-source software”. There was a time before paid software was a thing, so the “free” there stands for freedom.

In a lot of ways, it means the same as open-source (access to source code and allowed to modify+redistribute it), but it’s more idealistic and political, looking to prevent software from restricting what users can do.

This is a bit of me-thing, but yeah, I’m annoyed that YouTube is the way it is. It’s non-trivial to embed videos from there without violating the GDPR, so embedded videos are basically not a thing these days on general-purpose social media.

And personally, I also want to avoid the tracking from clicking through to a YouTube video and Google encourages long-ass videos, so I always hesitate before clicking through. Also, people without ad blockers go through a completely different circle of hell before a video starts.

Basically, I miss the days when memes could just be short videos. Where everyone could see on the embed that, oh, it’s a 30 second video, I can watch that. And then they’d just click play, without leaving the page.

I do understand that likely no one would care to provide the bandwidth for dumb meme videos on PeerTube either. But yeah, I just dream of that being a thing.

I’m not exactly fond of the space either, but man, the T is noisy. They could’ve gone with an underscore or something, so it actually looks like two different sections.

Well, typically, being married for 60 years would also involve not dying for the past 70+ years…

I don’t think, there’s currently any plans to introduce a non-JS API for accessing the DOM. It would just take an insane amount of implementation work + documentation.

But frameworks can generate access code for you, so you don’t actually need to write any JS yourself. Rust is quite far ahead in this regard, thanks to the wasm-bindgen library.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…

British people also have mashed peas as their guacamole-but-not.

Well, this isn’t a problem for smaller, less centralized services, so that might be an answer. Obviously not an answer big corporations will bring to the table, but ultimately, it might simply be among the reasons why users do still prefer smaller services.

I think, it’s only in the free version of Spotify. So, if you’re paying for Spotify Premium, you wouldn’t have that problem.

But I mean, I’m obviously completely out of the Spotify loop, so definitely take that one with a grain of salt…

Not sure, what kind of notification sounds you have that you’d need to skip to the end of them. A foghorn?

I was only vaguely aware of the algorithm on Spotify and that not being allowed to skip very often is a thing there, and man, this comment read like a completely deranged monologue from some sort of alternative, dystopian reality.

Ah, true. Thanks.

Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.

And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…

Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.

Yeah, I have watched videos of the guy before and would be down for 4 hours of it, but not if it’s about how FluffyMcWuffington stole the pixels from sbubby82…

I don’t even understand which part of the tree experience these tanks are supposed to replace. Are they really just there to pick up CO2? Because you can also plant a forest outside the city for that.

You’ll miss out on all the other tree benefits, but so you also will with these glass tanks.