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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.

    Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.



  • Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

    Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

    Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they’ve become the de-facto standard.

    A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don’t trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?




  • OneDrive is the devil. It symlinks the file structure on Windows and then moves all your photos and such into their chosen directory. If you uninstall it, it makes a half-hearted attempt to move them back, maybe, but will just do a random subset and give up.

    After removal, you have to edit registry keys (obscure ones) to break Windows’ connection to onedrive\pictures and such, or you end up with two pictures folders in your home dir.

    So much more fail I can’t even remember right now.








  • Yeah, apologies, I was being a bit glib there. Honestly, I kinda subscribe to the Star Trek: Insurrection Ba’ku people’s philosophy. “We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.”

    While it makes sense to replace some tasks like dangerous mining or assembly line work away from humans, interaction roles and decision making roles both seem like they should remain very human.

    In the same way that nuclear missile launches during the Cold War always had real humans as the last line before a missile would actually be fired.

    I see AI as being something that becomes specialized tools for each job. You are repairing a lawn mower, you have an AI multimeter type device that you connect to some test points and you converse with in some fashion to troubleshoot. All offline, and very limited in capabilities. The tech bros, meanwhile, think they created digital Jesus, and they are desperate to figure out what Bible to jam him into. Meanwhile, corps across the planet are in a rush to get rid of their customer service roles en masse. Can you imagine 911 dispatch being replaced with AI? The human component is 100% needed there. (Albeit, an extreme comparison.)