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Rose

@ umbraroze @slrpnk.net

Posts
4
Comments
337
Joined
3 yr. ago

I'm just one random nerdy trans girl. ...Oh come on, you've been around fediverse, surely you've seen us around?

Mastodon: @umbraroze@tech.lgbt

  • VLC got to the moon before bitcoin or gamestop

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  • In this day, I'm a proud Debian user. (...STS-83 and STS-94 took Debian Linux to the orbit in 1997.) Open Source can into space!

  • YouTube's ad problem just got worse: Users now seeing 90-second unskippable ads!

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  • I use the YouTube TV app.

    If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I'm just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I'll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

    Protip: Number may go bigger, but I'm not changing this behaviour.

    I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

    Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn't like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

  • Firm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 million — backbone codec of the internet gets meteoric increase, AVC hikes follow disastrous H.265 licensing increa

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  • Well, we're barely in the era where people can safely say "MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we're pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too". Patents expire on the day they'll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don't expire that easily.

  • 🥹

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  • The only problem I see with it is the usual pitfall of LLMs.

    "We're not stupid", the AI fans say. "Of course we look through the output carefully, and will meticulously make sure it makes sense." And then they don't actually do that.

    "It's only one of the tools at our disposal, don't worry!" ...so what other tools did these giant AI fans use, again? Oh.

    I mean, if people genuinely actually use LLMs just as one tool among many, and actually genuinely find a way to use them to improve their own output, it's great! (For example, I'm using AI for image captioning and it cuts down a lot of work.)

    I'm just saying that I often need to take claims that people are using these tools responsibly with some grains of salt, though.

  • What do you carry in your pockets or with you daily?

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  • I'm a photo nerd. Uhhh... keys, flashlight, swiss army knife, phone, pocket camera (Ricoh GR III), wallet. If I go anywhere I usually pick up a bigger camera (Nikon Z fc, or if I get serious, the D780, with 50mm / 24-120mm / 70-300mm lenses). There's also a whole lot of random mystery stuff in my bags. I don't want to think about that stuff too much, I'll just get a headache

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  • By the way, speaking of changed colours of planets: if you haven't been keeping up with the latest news in space imagery and want a real mindbender, check out what has recently happened to Neptune. You may have been thinking, ooooh, what an enthralling blue planet! - bzzzzzt, turns out it's a pretty bland and boring gas giant, the colours were exaggerated on purpose because otherwise you can't see shit.

  • Microsoft wants Edge to automatically open by default every time you turn on your Windows 11 PC

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  • My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

  • Ubuntu Linux raises minimum system memory requirements by 50% — requirements bumped to 6GB of RAM, previously raised from 1GB to 4GB in 2018

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  • Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

    Now, I obviously didn't connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it's missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it's a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I'm pretty sure that's not supported by... any driver any more.)

  • ONLYOFFICE accuses "Euro-Office" maker Nextcloud and IONOS of License Violation

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  • Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

    ...I'm not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

  • Can we see a photo you took recently?

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  • To be perfectly honest I've sadly had little means to go around the town, bus tickets add up. But snow is melting, life is good, spring is coming.

    If you want more riveting photography like this, check out my Pixelfed! Features both new and old photos.

  • Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

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  • There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

  • Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

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  • I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

    I thought that was a very interesting read, because it's so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can't detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It's a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to "well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it".

  • Jensen Huang says Nvidia engineers should use AI tokens worth half their annual salary every year to be fully productive

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  • It's moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

    For example, it's an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they're obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

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  • Another fun reptile fact!

    Tortoises are mostly herbivorous. However, many species of tortoises will not stop munching on leaves where snails are sitting. They are happy to eat snails for the protein. And also to demonstrate the snails that turtles are significantly faster!

    (Also I wish I had one particular video at hand, of Galapagos tortoises eating pumpkins)

  • Working outside

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  • I have a fucking awesome gaming laptop. It has like 2 hours of battery life tops. (the very highly operative word being "tops") Just today I was anxious about pulling it out of my backpack due to the fact it's being spingtime and literally all of the winter walkway gravel is in the wind. I'm a Nikon fangirl and I very much hesitated to uncap my lens.

  • Seriously, just stop (or use Linux)

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  • GNU EMACS is RIGHT THERE in WINDOWSYou can INSTALL IT(Well you can't install it, you kinda just dump it in Program Files)PEOPLE have been EXTENDING it for DECADES SAFELYWHAT are you WAITING FOR

  • Presenting: SUDO for DOS

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  • I actually first thought that was weird and wasteful. Then I remembered that, uh, Commodore 64 often uses a similar thing. Basically, a lot of assembly and compiled languages just put the machine code into the BASIC memory, preceded by a stub BASIC program that's basically just "10 SYS addr" with that address pointing just past the end of the stub program itself. BASIC's LOAD command handles it just fine because program files don't have any header information besides load address. BASIC handles the loaded program just normally because the program has the end token, so as long as you don't modify the BASIC program, it'll be fine.

  • Presenting: SUDO for DOS

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  • Real joke: Being advertised as .com file, actually compiles to .exe format (which is funnier because by later DOS versions a lot of the .com files that came with DOS were actually .exe files)

  • YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable - Dexerto

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  • I'd be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they're bundling it with YouTube Music and I'm not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

    They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn't actually access.

    Also I don't want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It's pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!