FWIW L’Orient Le Jour has always been very pro-Western on foreign policy, the fact that they are even framing it this way is a sign in itself. A good chunk of its readers believe Iran invented homosexuality to make their kids go to hell and pissed in their cereal.
They used to be a paper of record back in the day though, not as much since the 2019 financial meltdown. They also mainly publish in French with a fraction of their work translated to English.
I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.
The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.
Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.
I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.
AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.
All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.
I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.
Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.
It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it
Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.
I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.
Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.
I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.
I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.
I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?
Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.
I have to get the fuck out of corporate.
There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon
It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.
None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.
Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.
I’m almost certain someone asked a chatbot to list devices “Like a Flipper Zero” and now you’re asked not to bring a specific general purpose computer from an event. I don’t think it’s sinister. I think it’s just stupidity. Now enhanced with a machine that lets you think even less.
Errands, dishes, cleaning the house, illegally unpaid overtime, Sisyphean traffic, overeating, illegally unpaid overtime, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, researching projects I don’t start, near-catatonic day sleeping, opening and closing my kitchen cabinets to look inside, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, staring at the ceiling listening to weird internet music, programming 0.04% of a new personal project, Sisyphean traffic, errands, staring at the ceiling listening to podcasts about the terrible football team I follow, researching projects I don’t start, overeating, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, cleaning the house, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, near-catatonic day sleeping, researching projects I don’t start, staring at the ceiling listening to nothing, illegally unpaid overtime, dishes, traffic, ceiling, dishes, unpaid overtime, podcasts, sleep,
The game I’m currently playing is great! I haven’t been able to play this last weekend though. Please ignore that Steam says I haven’t launched it since November 4.
I’ve hit procrastinating games that I want to play. Do you understand where that leaves other things that could be more important?
Huh. Reddit used to allow VPN users to access images they host even if they didn’t let them browse the platform anonymously. Guess they “fixed” that.
TIL that Anthony Kiedis of The Red Hot Chili Peppers is a self-confessed child molester, according to his autobiography 'Scar Tissue'
I remember reading about Led Zeppelin when I was getting into them, I must have been about 14 or 15. I didn’t really understand why but that stuff made me uncomfortable, even if I was at an age where I thought of myself (and others my age) as fully understanding adults. I definitely knew it was wrong at the time but I didn’t really understand why, not at that age. Didn’t know about Bowie, that sucks. Crazy how that could be known about someone and it’s not even the first or second concern, it’s a yucky little quirk of history that we ignore.
Even taking a step back, putting the revulsion in a box for a second to take a holistic look at the situation: the way it was written about as normal, and casually known, and practically glorified in the case that OP is referring to, and all of that… I don’t know. Good old days my ass
It sometimes feels like one of the few good constants is how child abuse is considered a grave crime in pretty much every society, but I still feel like there’s a disgusting undercurrent of acceptance for older men leering at and being creepy with young women in particular. I don’t know
EDIT: a quick trip to Wikipedia is showing me a very different tone of writing than I remember. That’s good, but that’s the bare minimum
For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.
You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.
I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.
For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.
For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.
I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.
That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.
I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.
I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.
For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.
I think I’m subconsciously holding back going back into Skyrim until Inigo V3 is released.
I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I'm asking about. I'm somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.
Doesn't help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the "trick" that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it's machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I'm looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.
Maybe this is already a thing and I just don't know the jargon for it. I'm pretty sure I'm more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.
I feel like the dialogue in the last panel is unnecessary.
Permanently Deleted
I really do think there’s a very definite before and after. At one point, he seemed to figure out exactly the cadence and wording that young men especially wanted out of a wisdom-dispensing fatherly figure. He got a lot of mileage out of whining about that one Canadian law proposal, at a time when transgendery things were (for better or for worse) less understood by most people. So even if you were sympathetic to them, there was a chance that what he was describing would raise your eyebrow. In my case I didn’t think I had anything against them, but he painted this picture of a law that could be easily abused, even if it was ostensibly in good faith. And he was careful not to comment on whether or not he thought it was one. Didn’t matter that the narrative he was peddling was pretty much fiction in the first place.
And then COVID broke his brain, and he very suddenly became terrible at hiding his power level. Part of his audience just knew him as that guy who wrote that book, but after selling increasingly political books titled “All you need to do to live (part 4, last one)” and “All you need to do to live (part 5, okay no this is the last one I promise.final)” that illusion also fell apart.
Right now most of the people who looked up to him at the time, even those who both still are (and even those who acknowledge) that they are right wing, think he’s lost the plot.
It’s not a great reassurance that those who let go of him may still have probably been swayed net-rightward by his stuff. But his spiral and widespread perception as a laughing stock, and as a clear example of lack of moral integrity on the right, is also a major piece of what he represents now. His red crying mug in his messy room has become a meme with a life of own. This is what he really is: a pompous, pontificating, fragile prick who can’t even use the good parts of his advice for his own sake. Even if it’s as simple as touching grass and cleaning up your shit.
At one point in my life, during his rise, I had a vaguely positive view of him, after he was presented as a guest on what was definitely not a conservative podcast (great moves Ethan, proud of you!). I even bought his book. I viewed myself squarely as an open minded liberal person, and saw him as just a moderate. Coming from a socially conservative part of the world, no alarm bells rang for me. But after continued learning, and meeting new people, I was able to rebuild a much more robust and morally sound view of the world and how it works. I recognized how caustic a lot of my beliefs, many that he confirmed/reinforced, actually are.
One of the few things I miss from the old site is /r/ExLobster, it was so enlightening to see how many others went through the same process I did with this guy. It also took the edge off the embarrassment I felt about falling into his world in the first place. I was just vulnerable to his shit at that point in my life, it was literally designed for people in my situation, and there’s no shame in picking yourself up and moving forward. And then COVID happened, in parallel with a multidimensional meltdown in my country, and while he put himself in a coma and cooked his brain, I was out there, supporting the medical system, doing charitable work and then mutual aid work, and I came out the other side with a radically new and solid foundation for my beliefs. A model of how society should run that ran counter to a lot of what he preached as common sense.
But you know what was the tipping point for me? It’s a very silly little thing I saw, and I don’t recall particularly when. Probably while I was still a bit in it. I always used to intentionally avoid his subreddit because I thought I was an enlightened centrist (finding the good in his work but not uncritically engaging with it) who was above those weird right wingers who dominated that community. But I opened it on a whim once. And someone was asking about “Jordan-Peterson ideology compatible Anime”. Not sure what the exact words were. But there you go. Sometimes you need to see a word salad like that to see how ridiculous the company you’re keeping actually is.
I think he’s a fascinating case study of the grift economy. I genuinely think that if he was truly the conservalib old-soul psychology professor with an interest in the way Christian theology and vague folktale cosmology influence modern worldviews and narratives, he would definitely be someone I’d pay attention to. At least for his areas of expertise. I still yearn for someone like that to exist. Shitheads should not monopolize any topic.
But we know now that he was always mad as a hatter, that he was trying to get famous a decade before he actually did, and that his actual beliefs don’t deserve an iota of public recognition. That the ways he couched them are the sum total of what he was bringing to the table.
The mythological Jordan Peterson isn’t necessarily a bad guy, the original character, as played in like 2016. The actual one is a pathetic, and now failed cult of personality grifter, an enabler of great evil.
I hope he feels a fraction of the pain he has caused before he kicks it.
Edit: changed some things to be less winding.
The first time I discovered them they reminded me of people I did theater with back in the day and it threw me into a little existential crisis.
They’re great!