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umbraroze

@umbraroze@lemmy.world

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umbraroze ,

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn't like the way it worked back then, so I didn't really use it much. It didn't send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don't bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

umbraroze ,

I'd argue that Audacity (audio recording/editing/processing suite) is a little different niche than Reaper (full-fledged DAW). If your use case is "I'm doing a podcast and I need to do an audio recording from multiple mics and mix them down", Audacity is good enough that there's no point in paying extra for a DAW. If you're a musician and you need to mess nondestructively with recordings and MIDI and filters, then you know you need to go bigger.

umbraroze ,

The meme is from around 2000. Originally it was about downloading MP3s.

umbraroze ,

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn't even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

umbraroze , (edited )

A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:

People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?

So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: "Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff." (Transcribed as: "Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.") Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. ...OK, it's time to pause now, let's see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.

Problem: They're continuing to use "medical" and "painless" and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I'm not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.

A Ticketmaster hack spilled sensitive data for 560 million customers, hackers say (qz.com)

ShinyHunters posted on Tuesday night in a hacking forum that it obtained data from Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, including customers’ names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, and order details, Cyber Daily wrote. The group is reportedly attempting to sell the stolen data for $500 million....

umbraroze ,

Meanwhile, earlier this month, I had to literally disable quite a few bits of adblocks and other extensions just so that Ticketmaster's crappy CAPTCHA thing would allow me to even log in. Literally screamed "Why are you pestering me, I'm just trying to buy a ticket to a local car show, not a fucking Madonna concert"

umbraroze ,

Oh last year I paid the ticket in cash, 20€, no problem. This year? 20€, plus 1+bits euros of processing fees. To "deliver" my ticket to the platform of my choice. (...Mobile app.)

So I went to the car show. They still had the cash booth. Mild failure to communicate. I just dodged the field of view of the booth guys, out of shame, and entered like normal, glad the ticket guards were accommodating.

Oh I forgot the best part! When I was trying to log on and the security interfered with CAPTCHAs, Ticketmaster reset my password several times. That's how you know this company take security seriously. /s (Literally no site does this.)

umbraroze ,

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can't believe a lot more people don't know about it.

umbraroze ,

Uh huh. Interesting

(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) "In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts."

umbraroze ,

When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it's not very, you know, precise. So I'm well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.

But it is a potential scifi plot point.

However, I will concede that it's probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.

umbraroze ,

For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn't fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.

umbraroze ,

In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people's usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.

umbraroze ,

I was like, ooh, I didn't know there were newer Nikon tilt-shift lenses (Nikkor PC-E) for the F mount that are still available for purchase new... ...and the bloody things cost like 1900€. Even the older PC-Nikkor lenses cost a pretty penny in second hand market.

These lenses are firmly in "would be extremely neat to have, but are both on the very expensive side and also I don't know how much use I'd get from them in practice" category of photography gear. ...which doesn't narrow much down if we're talking photography gear, but hey.

umbraroze ,

Not really. Or maybe it depends.

Reminds me of the fact that a lot of the terminology for magic is extremely coloured by how it's used in fantasy fiction and it might not be consistent with other fictional works, let alone how the words were/are used by magic practitioners. Fantasy authors have the benefit of just making the rules up.

(Perhaps most notable example is the term "witch" - pop culture defines that as female magic practitioners, but historically it was more of a gender neutral term in a lot of places. You know, kind of like the word "witchcraft" doesn't have gender connotations as such.)

umbraroze ,

Don Rosa worked with the various comics publishers, not directly with Disney. This one was published by Egmont (in Denmark). As a result the comics writers actually have a pretty high degree of creative freedom, compared to people in other parts of the Disney empire.

Though he did decide to retire, partly for health reasons, partly because while everyone feted him like a rockstar when he was visiting Europe, he certainly wasn't paid like a rockstar by Disney. (...or, given how little money flows toward music artists these days too, maybe he was paid like a rockstar.)

umbraroze ,

Actually this reminds me, what is the deal with tar command recommendations to use or not use dash? I know GNU tar accepts both (e.g.) tar xvf file.tar and tar -xvf file.tar, but at some points people were like "NO! Don't use the dash! It's going to maybe cause issues somewhere, who knows!" and I was like "OK". Something to do with people up designing the Unix specs?

umbraroze ,

About 10 years ago I was like "FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn't enough to avoid swapping hell, I'll get 1 GB of extra memory." ...and that was that!

These days I'm like "4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that's fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who's going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? ...oh I've done it a lot of times and it's... fine."

The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.

And that's basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can't do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn't work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.

umbraroze ,

Heh. I should try digging out the Nintendo DS browser and see how it works with Lemmy. That thing worked with barely any damn websites even when it was new. And it didn't help that DS only worked on open Wi-Fi (and WEP, but that was pretty much broken already by the time the browser came out)

umbraroze ,

It wasn't really Microsoft that killed Nokia's cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. "Oh, trust us, we're the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what's best for the market". They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they'll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)

umbraroze ,

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and "portal crud". ...and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google's results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

umbraroze ,

TERFs? Posting interesting and positive content? I don't think so, Elon - they're usually regurgitating same bullshit over and over, and being as miserable as possible. Just like the Twitter's usual far right user base, but somehow even more so.

umbraroze ,

Can we just say that Cybertruck is basically a sum of everything wrong with right wing wackos?

"Look at me, I'm a badass, driving around in a badass vehicle, unlike you filthy libruls. ... Aww shucks! There's road salt! And my accelerator pedal just fell off wtf. ...OH NO! A LITTLE WATER TOO! Anything but that!"

umbraroze ,

The ghost of dead Game Boy also came with ghosts of dead batteries. ...So many dead batteries. Many coming from tragic circumstances, such as almost reaching the last level of TMNT 2.

umbraroze ,

Me, I'm a real human. I would not fall to a silly trick like that.

Now excuse me, I'll just copypaste this cover letter text from the dozens of previous examples I used and edit it slightly based on buzzwords on the job description and company web page.

(Also, last year, I was in one of the events for the unemployed, organised by the municipal job services, and there was literally a short segment on the talk on using ChatGPT for cover letters. Well if the same authorities that mandate us to send a bunch of job applications every month tell us to use it, it can't be wrong, right?)

umbraroze ,

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

umbraroze ,

Yup. Got also added to the Jargon File, which was an influential collection of hacker slang.

If there's one thing that Elon is really good at, it's taking obscure beloved nerd tidbits and then pigeon-shitting all over them.

A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions (www.theregister.com)

Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions....

umbraroze ,

I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.

Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it's not. It's like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.

You can't just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That's nearly impossible. No no no.

umbraroze ,

Windows devs: "We need to ask the keyboard makers to add a special key for OS stuff. A Windows key. Yeah."

KDE devs: "There's something special about the K key, and none of us can put it to words."

umbraroze ,

"Oh I've been practising drawing. Lots of plans for comics I'll be making soon, I hope."

"Can I see your practice drawings?"

"...No."

umbraroze ,

This is one of the biggest all time classics generated by Inspirobot.It truly resonated with the common people.

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    umbraroze ,

    My take on computer science: Without transgender people, autistic people, and furries, Internet would probably have never been built

    umbraroze ,

    Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

    So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

    It's probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it's gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)

    Generative AI Is Coming To Your Home Appliances (www.forbes.com)

    Across all industries, organizations are rapidly embracing generative AI. Among them, makers of home appliances like fridges and ovens. Generative AI in your oven? Why not? Ater all, AI has been creeping into our homes for years (think smart lightbulbs and Alexa) – but thanks to generative AI, these interactions will become...

    umbraroze ,

    In the 1980s, 8-bit home computers were sold with slogans like "Kids can use these to play games! And use educational software! And the ladies can use them to keep track of the freezer contents!"

    ...One of three ain't bad.

    Decades later, we still open the fucking fridge to check what's in the fridge. Such is the nature of technological progress.

    (Random old person memory: when I was a kid I actually had some "home economy" software for Spectravideo SV-318, found in some random pile of tapes. I only used it once because it was boring, obviously. My father used the recipe book and added "Poop Cake". That was enough recipes thank you very much.)

    umbraroze ,

    What's the latest on Forgejo's Windows builds? Last I checked there was no Windows build due to no volunteers for build/test - Gitea's old build stuff should still be good.

    Which is a mild shame because Gitea's Windows version was an insanely simple way to run it if you are a solo dev on Windows and need a private Git site. Drop the binary on an USB hard drive, run it on terminal, boom, done.

    (Currently contemplating just setting up a Raspberry Pi server.)

    umbraroze ,

    Heh, your comment actually made me finally go and resolve a problem I've had since I got this laptop in 2020. I didn't have SVM virtualisation acceleration enabled because that made Windows unable to boot somehow. A bit of twiddling after, it finally did! VirtualBox runs! Docker runs!

    ...but why would I use Docker for something like this. Might as well blow the dust off of my FreeBSD virtual machine and run Forgejo there!

    umbraroze ,

    Yeah, I just tried upgrading my Gitea Windows instance to Forgejo via Docker, and it actually works pretty much as easily as it did before. Fantastic! Might just leave it here instead of shoving it all in the VM - I can always do that later if it's necessary. Having a full VM does have upsides, but in this particular instance this is definitely good enough.

    umbraroze ,

    I heard about it from television news. I normally only watch TV broadcasts between the time when I turn the TV on and launching an app / turning a HDMI device on. Which is not very long. Does Elon have any idea how unlikely it is for me to pick major news this way?

    umbraroze ,

    Usually, when various Christian denominations call some writings (which other denominations consider canonical) apocryphal, they at least recognise that those writings are roughly as old as the canonical writings and the subject matter concerns the same topics (i.e. accounts on lives of Biblical figures, and doctrinal material). Just that they don't agree it's valid teaching or doctrine. Apocryphal, as said.

    I mean, American Evangelicals wouldn't just randomly slap demonstrably modern material that is explicitly not religious doctrine, not even worded as such, in the book and call it Biblical canon, right? ...right? ...that'd be patently stupid, right? ...nobody would do that? ...people would have at least some problem with that?

    (Me, I'm not American, and an ex-Christian. I actually liked the Deck of Cards better. These days, I just do the same thing with Tarot deck I guess. ...confuse myself endlessly with esoteric imagery.)

    umbraroze ,

    My father had a Brother laser printer. It outlived him. (...Anyway. Have you ever had to do Windows tech support for family? Not always nice. Ever had to do Windows printer tech support? Hoo boy. Ever had to do Windows printer tech support when the printer is hooked through a Centronics-to-USB adapter? Uggh. ...though I was kind of surprised that Windows 10 still had built in drivers for the damn thing.)

    Me, I bought a Canon laser which technically has Linux drivers but damn me if I ever got it to print more than the CUPS test page. ...actually I'd rather not talk about CUPS. I have too many bad memories about it. (You can't escape the Printer Madness just by using Linux, oh no.)

    umbraroze ,

    Wolves have a peculiar view of the passage of time and their relationship with other wolves of the pack. They think of were-wolves, are-wolves and will-be-wolves.

    umbraroze ,

    Slackware 3.0 in 1996

    Then this new promising distro called Debian

    Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason

    Debian again and that's where I've stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too

    umbraroze ,

    I'm going to just say that I'm exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.

    Now - Wikipedia isn't exactly an entity that doesn't have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I'm just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.

    There's exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it's much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.

    I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the "sorry dude I don't think this is going to work" ticked, but Google is shit and I can't find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.

    umbraroze ,

    I swear none of the American technobros went "paywalling a wheelchair with Bluetooth bullshit and doing screwy insurance shenanigans? damn, that's a little bit too fucked up, even for us". Instead, they went "that's ingenious, why didn't we think of it first?"

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    umbraroze ,

    :3 ?
    :3 !

    umbraroze ,

    I bought a Canon laser printer 10 years ago. The only thing I've needed since then was a single new set of toner. (And a bunch of paper, obviously.)

    Even back then it was pretty obvious that ink jets are waste of money and everyone that I knew who had ink jets were just constantly complaining about them.

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