Jeffool

The Google Maps app already shows what it wants instead of what’s nearby. Now the Gmail app shows you what they want you to see instead of ordering by date. I imagine the goal is just to replace everything with a “Google” button. You just type in words and hug “Google”, and it serves up its own info instead of anyone else’s pages. Sigh.

I joined Google Plus with a group of a couple dozen friends from a long-time online community, and many of us loved it! As i recall the biggest issue at launch was that you couldn’t push a pay to a circle and still leave it discoverable on your timeline, without pushing it to everyone. That kinda made it more insular than it should’ve been. Slowly we all stopped because no one else (family, friends,) was joining.

Yeah really. It’s been years since I saw a 90m movie.

Imagine investing in another company being led by Elon Musk these days.

When I get another job lined up that’s my goal. A job and these bills. And that car loan. And maybe a house… Man. Maybe two jobs.

I know I’m old. I see things like this and always think of leaving Digg because they didn’t want us to share a way to pirate Blu Rays and HD-DVDs, which none of us would ever use.

I don’t know the value of echolocation in this case, as I’m generally ignorant here, but it’s straight wild to me that they went purely on visuals.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t for shitty cars causing deaths.

That said, I always wondered why we don’t find a system like RFID that could penetrate concrete and asphalt, and plant passive receivers in roads? We re-pave roads so damn often in this country (the U.S.) it seems like we could’ve knocked it out in the past couple of decades, minus our most rural areas.

I know RFID itself isn’t strong enough, but I imagine that would’ve been an easier problem than figuring our complete self driving. Not to mention making GPS a secondary system for U.S. road travel in most cases.

Maybe it’s just a dumb shower thought?

I have used voice commands. “Hey Google, show me the way to X,” on the way to my car, or “Hey Google, call X” when I have to call a place I don’t know the number to. But I rarely do anymore, as Gemini takes longer to execute than it previously did. And the idea that a five second series of “speak command, register, and execute” will go even further and replace a tap to start an app or something, is hilariously bad. It’s like they never used the AI they were shoving into everything.

I sometimes think of “who bought these?” I mean, I’m a little bit of a data hoarder. I never want to lose those Google chats and emails I’ll never look back on. I downloaded my Twitter data (that I’ll never reference) before deleting my account. But what nerd mother fucker like me, has the money to pay hundreds of dollars on this, and a subscription fee, for a service to take data I’ll never own?

If I had that kind of money to waste, I’d just use that extra monthly subscription money to buy media to fill up servers (that I bought with the cost of the Pin,) on my home network.

And I don’t even have a home network or a house, but bet your ass I’d have those and a million other things before this became a remotely attractive option.

This is like Quibi. You see it and you can easily understand it on one, far-off, level… But here in reality I’m just left confused. “What were they thinking?”

Hence the power of the shout “sudo rm -rf*”!

When it was new to me I tried ChatGPT out of curiosity, like with any tech, and I just kept getting really annoyed at the expansive bullshit it gave to the simplest of input. “Give me a list of 3 X” lead to fluff-filled paragraphs for each. The bastard children of a bad encyclopedia and the annoying kid in school.

I realized I was understanding it wrong, and it was supposed to be understood not as a useful tool, but as close to interacting with a human, pointless prose and all. That just made me more annoyed. It still blows my mind people say they use it when writing.

FYI “darling” can also be used with a spouse or romantic partner. Your husband or girlfriend can be your “darling” just like “honey” or “baby”. It has a similar meaning in this case, where “darling of the group” means everyone really likes them, even if not sexual/romantic.

And this use, “darling of the ____”, is a slightly older, but relatively common, saying.

Just remember this when you see people complain about having to pick a server when joining Mastodon. It’s not that, maybe it’s just not easy/intuitive lile PixelFed is making it? I don’t know.

And then when people were joining, I just saw them complaining about all the anger/aggression on Mastodon. It may’ve missed a big jump on point with Bluesky’s rise, but there will invariably be more. People just have to be ready and willing.

hah thanks for your line of questioning. I too initially thought they were saying LW was blocking PixelFed.

It’s basically video all over again.

Wasn’t adding engagement numbers to each tweet one of the first things he added? I remember thinking “who the fuck wants to see that?” But I guess to people like him that was important at the time? Huh.

And all the actors who act in yhe prime shows? They get signed into bluesky exclusive interaction contracts. Where they only interact with fans on bluesky.

I’m honestly surprised they haven’t tried something like this via partnering with some platform. I think the unions would kill them… But I’m still surprised they haven’t tried it. Sports teams/leagues too.

I will give respect where due: I like the sweep button. It’s handy for me personally, as someone who is on several email lists that are public-facing. That’s about it.

Every attempt to help me automatically is a pain. Like most things in this vein it never learns what you’re trying to do, only what they would do in a given scenario that’s vaguely like ours.

I remember reading columns saying soon, when multiple cores become common, compilers will thread your program for you…