• 4 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?

    I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.

    Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.



  • Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

    This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.


  • I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”




  • Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

    Because this set a dangerous precedent.

    Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

    It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.





  • Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

    I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn’t exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.



  • Not exactly boned but it probably doesn’t make practical difference to store “local time + tzinfo timezone” than just UTC time.

    • You record an event occurring at local time
    • You store it as UTC
    • Local time zone definition changes
    • Well whoop de loo, now you need to go through tzinfo to make sense of the past data anyway rather than relying on a known offset

    Even if you store everything in UTC, you may be safe… but figuring out the local time is still convoluted and involves a trip through tzinfo.


  • DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.

    Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”

    Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…