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Blackmist

@Blackmist@feddit.uk

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Blackmist ,

I think it's more that it costs money to use the Twitter API now.

Blackmist ,

Is that the case though. You can buy a copy of Kaspersky anti virus right now if you live in the US. They have a US office. You can legally send them money.

Blackmist ,

That's the neat part, you don't.

The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.

It's a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we'll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.

Blackmist ,

There's an old expression: Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.

If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.

Blackmist ,

The battery doesn't have to fail for the car to be useless. One of those circuit boards that holds it all together goes and it's "whoops, we don't make that any more".

Blackmist ,

Indeed just like a regular car.

If cars lasted forever, they'd all go out of business within 20 years.

Blackmist ,

Surely it's opt in anyway, seeing as you need some special wanky laptop with a magical AI bollocks chip for it to work.

Blackmist ,

Did we not learn our lessons from Web 2.0?

Blackmist ,

And don't even get started with Danish.

This Hacker Tool Extracts All the Data Collected by Windows’ New Recall AI (www.wired.com)

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use, he said one of the “magical” things about it was that the data doesn’t leave your laptop; the Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five seconds and saves them...

Blackmist ,

It barely matters if the database is encrypted or not. If the user has access to it, they have the keys to it, and so would anybody else with access.

The real danger is that intruders will have access to your entire history from before they had access to your machine, and it's all in one place.

Blackmist ,

Every banking site I've been on jumps through all sorts of hoops to make sure the browser doesn't save the password, usually with some 2FA thrown into the mix.

But I'd imagine that a lot of older people have a helpful passwords.txt file sat smack bang in the middle of their desktop, or just use the same one for everything. I mean, we're in an age where you need a username and password to update your graphics drivers for some godforsaken reason. It's not going to be hard to find that The One True Password with access to this.

Blackmist ,

Backporting the ads?

Blackmist ,

SNES ROMs were actually around 4MB. People always spoke about them being 32 Meg or whatever, but they meant megabits.

I did like Animal Well, but gave up after looking at one of the bunny solutions and deciding I didn't have the patience for that.

I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.

Blackmist ,

Every video I've ever tried to watch on Twitter took ages to buffer, and then looked like something from RealPlayer for the duration of it.

At least porn sites actually manage video streaming successfully.

Blackmist ,

"What do you mean Coca-Cola doesn't want their ads next to a video of three men fisting each other?"

Blackmist ,

Resources are cheap and getting cheaper all the time.

Developers are expensive and getting more expensive all the time.

It's no wonder everything is a sprawling mess.

Blackmist ,

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/56328d40-5369-46e1-b075-30f6267b04a4.webp

Blackmist ,

Try and register something on Razer's website so you can get support for it. Until a few weeks back, PSN locked the browser up completely when signing in.

I use FF for day to day use, but prepare to swap to Chrome when things go wrong just because most sites aren't tested on it.

Blackmist ,

In retrospect maybe having the worlds most popular browser and the world's biggest advertiser be the same person, was a bad idea.

Blackmist ,

PayPal. All the authority of a bank. None of the responsibility.

Blackmist ,

I'll be more concerned when Visa and Mastercard get wind of this idea.

Blackmist ,

By showing you an annoying popup every time you use PayPal, and eventually you'll accidentally click OK and it will mysteriously remember this and never ask you again.

Blackmist , (edited )

For items or just the shop? Because I write EPOS systems for a living, and as far as I can tell, we pass no item data to the credit card merchants.

The shop is obviously passed to them. So maybe don't buy from Dave's Enormous Dildo Emporium.

Blackmist ,

Throw enough investor money at lawyers and anything is legal for an amount of time.

"Oh, I'm sowwy, did we bweak the law? Well here's 5,000 boxes of paper that say we didn't, see you in 18 months."

Blackmist ,

That's per store though, presumably when they sign up with a payment provider (because there's a lot of rules about e.g. using credit cards to gamble with).

If I buy sex toys from Tesco, it's still showing up as "groceries". If I buy from a sex shop, it's going to be more clear cut.

I can see from my emails that PayPal send out itemised receipts on behalf of their customers, so they're definitely collecting more data than the big two.

Blackmist ,

Even if we believe them and all the data stays local to your machine, what's to stop your average bit of malware accessing it?

So now not only is any data compromised going forward, but all your data going back as well.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

Blackmist ,

Whichever brings in the most shareholder value.

Blackmist ,

I don't think that's how most programmers expect it to work at all.

However most people would also expect 0.1+0.2==0.3 to return true, so what do I know.

Floating point is something most of us ignore until it bites us in the ass. And then we never trust it again.

Blackmist ,

I'm not sure where the 17 comes from. It's 15.

Blackmist ,

The issue is a lot of people use floating point numbers, but don't even know it.

How many programmers right now are using JS, the most popular language in the world? How many of them do you think understand floating point numbers and their theoretical levels of accuracy? How many of them are unknowingly using floating points to store currency values?

How many of them could accurately predict the result of the following?

  • 2.99+1.52==4.51
  • 2.99+1.53==4.52
  • 2.99+1.54==4.53

Now imagine that as code to make sure you've paid the right amount in an online store. I guarantee you there is code out there right now that won't let you finish a sale if the total of the basket adds up a certain way.

Blackmist ,

TIL ICQ was still going.

Blackmist ,

I must have used all of them over the years. Can't remember why, they were all pretty much the same.

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT....

Blackmist ,

I actually had the opposite the other day where the code only broke on my machine...

In the end I just commented it out. I don't see why everybody else should have working code and not me.

Blackmist ,

Oh, I'm way ahead of them there, with 44 years of shitty diet and lifestyle choices.

Blackmist ,

I could never get on with either of them. I was always a Paint Shop Pro man.

Have to use Paint.NET these days.

Blackmist ,

I'd temper those expectations tbh. I've still got customers on Windows XP.

Out of support does not mean "can't be used".

Blackmist ,

  1. The browser is the failure point and they get updated for a long time after the OS falls out of support. Chrome was supported for 8 years after Windows 7 stopped being officially supported.

  2. All their Windows software they need to run their business isn't going to run reliably enough on any version of Linux. They don't want to touch anything that's working or pay for anything. You have to understand the world is not filled with OS enthusiasts. It's just a platform to run other things. If it's working and it's making you money, you do not touch it, unless you really want to find out what OS they use at the Job Centre.

Blackmist ,

If they really wanted people to upgrade to Windows 11, they'd take out the TPM and SecureBoot requirements.

Truly the Kinect of Windows 11.

Blackmist ,

I actually bought an Xbox 360 Kinect for a grand total of £6 the other month.

Turns out you can use software called Amethyst for cheap full body tracking in PC VR games.

Blackmist ,

The ones from CEX came with it, it's an odd adapter that needs power as well.

The adapter is worth more than the camera...

Blackmist ,

One of these things is not like the other

Blackmist ,

I honestly do not understand why anyone would want to watch TV on their fridge.

I was sat in the optician's waiting room the other day, and there was some cheap gameshow on the TV, where people would win like £20.

I couldn't believe that people would even film it, let alone broadcast it.

Watching broadcast TV is the equivalent of going to a restaurant, not wanting to choose and just asking the waiter to pour any old slop down your gob.

Blackmist ,

Watch the existing one become even more insufferable to push you into paying for the upgrade.

Blackmist ,

No, it's only theft when it's poor people doing it.

When it's rich people, it's fair use of a publicly available resource.

Blackmist ,

You just have to fold it really small to poke it down the wires.

Blackmist ,

The issue isn't that people want dumb phones, like a Nokia 3310.

They want a smartphone that prevents all the the things they don't like, while still letting them do all the things they do still need their smart phone to do. And in 2024, that's quite a lot. Some places you can't even park your car without a phone.

Apparently they just don't have the willpower to not install the things they don't like.

Blackmist ,

And email. And whatsapp. And banking. And NFC payments. And...

Blackmist ,

They've still got things that haven't changed since about Windows 3.1, like that ODBC dialog window.

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