ThePowerOfGeek

Great article! This kind of thing fascinates me. I’ve thought about this topic quite a lot over the past decade or two. Mostly in the context of my own personal digital data and the stuff created by people I love and care about. But also on a wider level.

I’ve been backing up what I consider my most important stuff (including writing, audio, and art work) on to MDISCs for several years. Each disc is supposed to last around 10,000 years. But realistically because of the organic elements in the disc they ‘only’ last for about 1,000 years.

That should be fine from a longevity perspective (assuming the discs themselves don’t get destroyed, obviously). But there’s still the question of whether future generations would have the ability to extract that data, even if it’s still there on physical media. Would they have the devices and the know-how to read and parse them back into a useable format?

I guess if we hit another dark age then there will probably be more pressing concerns anyway. But it makes me sad to think of all that lost content - not only mine but so many other people who have created interesting stuff. Especially when one realizes that, like the article says, a lot of the early Internet has already been lost. And quite a few of those creators are no longer alive.

To paraphrase Roy Batty: all those creations have been lost, like tears in rain.

Lucky Brazil!

Next time I have to get a new TV I think I’ll just get a large computer monitor and stream content via an old mini PC with Linux installed on it. Not an ideal solution, but I’m so tired of this invasive bullshit. At least that will cut out some of its vectors.

After the recent Roku TOS fiasco I’m done with them. If manufacturers won’t give us a viable situation we will make one ourselves.

Anyone know a good OS setup for reduced ad streaming? I know about Pi-Holes, but I’m talking about a way of actually streaming content (in addition to blocking ads at our near the router level).

Yeah, this is a concern. I know lots of people say “just don’t connect it to the Internet” and turn it back into a dumb TV. And that works great right now. But the way things are heading I could see manufacturers requiring an Internet connection for it to work.

The recent Roku scandal (where they required users to agree to TOS changes before they could use their device in any way) was a wakeup call for many.

I’m hoping that a viable open source streaming device will become popular soon. I know there are solutions out there like hooking up an old PC or a Raspberry Pi as a media server. But I’m thinking of more of an out of the box solution for a set-top box solution, with a large computer monitor in lieu of a TV.

So Leawo recommends Leawo. What a surprise!

I recommend MakeMKV personally.

How did the error occur?

As I mentioned, the outage is happening all over the globe. The post has been joined by users from Australia, India, the Czech Republic, and more. The reason behind the outage is a technical error in their main product, Falcon.

A question followed by a paragraph that doesn’t answer the question. That’s frustrating.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That’s a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.

I’m glad they’ve got themselves into a sticky situation.

Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):

One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

Oh there’s still far too much adulation. All those Tesla bros, for example. Given what an insufferable turd Musk is, and the crumby reputation Teslas have, I don’t understand it. And I don’t think I ever will.

Nope, he can’t manage that. Because he’s an attention-whoring malignant narcissist.

I can’t wait for the bubble of mystique to pop on this arsehole, if only so we don’t have to ever hear from or about him again. Sadly, there are still plenty of rubes in his cult of personality and greedy investors willing to ride his coattails. So I’m not holding my breath.

I only discovered Krita recently, but holy shit does it fill the Photoshop void very well. The UI isn’t the same as PS, obviously. But I find it much easier to navigate than Gimp’s UI. And Krita is surprisingly feature-rich.

Having the word ‘panic’ in there isn’t going to inspire the troops very well.

That’s one of the two reasons it would be a terrible name for a military commander.

Or a terrible name for a military commander.

I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

Hah, I was going to say, that means asking for programming advice from Chat GPT will now result either in a response of “Why are you even trying to do that? You are stupid!” or dismissively pointing to another (mostly unrelated) chat session that has already been closed without a suitable answer.

I don’t think the vast majority of American Christians are anywhere near ready to accept a Christian denomination founded by and led by women. Which is a shame. I think such a denomination would have some interesting and probably beneficial perspectives to share.

But given how Christianity has been male-led from the very beginning, how it stemmed from another male-led religion, and how engrained into American Christian society it is for women to be docile, obedient child production machines… Yeah, that ain’t happening for a looong time!

Yeah I was lumping them into that same category. But you’re right, they probably do deserve their own category.

So they are labeling a brand new (and obviously flawed) AI as a priest, but women (who are human beings) still can’t be priests?

Sorry ladies, you’ve now fallen further down the ladder.

• Regular straight Catholic men - acceptable priest
• Gay Catholic men - acceptable priest (as long as they don’t get caught)
• Male converted Anglican priests - acceptable priest (in some scenarios)
• Catholic men with gross sexual habits - acceptable priest
• Flawed AIs - acceptable priest
• Corporations - soon to be priests?
• Catholic women - ABSOLUTELY NOT!

If Arctic Blitz isn’t one of them, there will be a backlash that makes Vatican II look like a mild disagreement.

Every couple of years for the last 20 years I would download the most popular Linux distro of the day, install it, and play around with it. And it’s mind-blowing to me how far Linux has come with UIs, usability, troubleshooting and customizing stuff.

Back in the day I spent many hours compiling obscure and dependent code bases just to get my sound card working. Now it’s pretty rare for me to need to do even a fraction of that.

Also, if you want to play around with Linux you can just download a VM solution like VirtualBox on Windows and then spin up as many virtual machines as you like and install a different iso on each one. Not to mention tinkering with Docker containers via the Docker app.

In short, it’s a great time to play with and possibly adopt Linux.