He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.

That’s almost the exact opposite experience for me. Maybe there’s been a more recent update, but I remember searching for specific phrases in decade old messages and the gmail (web site) search would just flat out refuse to show things but I could find them from my phone. I’ll try again, but to be honest, I’ve somewhat given up on google search in general for results that aren’t recent.

The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.

Similarly, in the midst of historic layoffs in the tech industry, no one blames the CEO for horrible management leading to the over hiring or bad management that led to this. O one blames Zuckerberg for renaming his company and betting an an absurdity that is already being scraped off of PR releases. All because some growth number goes up. It’s insanity.

I have an lg tv that I route through a pihole that blocks most stuff. I wasn’t going to connect it to the internet, but it had airplay support. I think I’m using this list: https://github.com/TheShawnMiranda/LG-TV-Ad-Block

I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.

This has been my main observation with Amazon over the past few years. It’s just cheap knockoffs that have gamed the system. It’s frustrating to shop there and a dice roll whenever you order something.

I was also reading an article about nutritional quality of food itself has been declining over the last 50 years. So to get the same nutritional amount, you need to eat more food period.

There’s also bigger systemic issues about food access that is driving people to “choose” it. Lack of time, cost, availability, transportation all factor in that are beyond a simple idea if a person having a pure choice between two equal (or even somewhat equal) options.

There are also Mario videos and Suika. It’s not just nips or Bloodbath the Incinerator HD.

It’s hard parenting because the platforms change quickly and navigating when and how to have impactful conversations with kids is hard.

It’s been so much better…but I’m steeling myself to track down a WiFi direct bug that keeps disconnecting due to a timeout after 10 seconds. Linus give me strength!

Yeah, it is a bit strange. That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That’s mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore. I’m old so I don’t keep up with the latest games, but that feels all over the place—too many games, too many communities. Streaming/TV stuff—very few people I know watch the same things I do, and I miss the joy of watching something new and then talking about it the next day moments. Worse now is that most people can’t even access the same content since there are too many services. Music is strange now too. Partly, I’m just not connected to pop culture, but also everyone is listening to VERY different stuff (referring to college-age folks—most other millennials I know just listen to NPR, podcasts and 90s mixes). There doesn’t seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists. I know a big part is just millennial aging, but also reddit kept me connected to broader things, and now its just like everything else and enshittified and disappearing. sigh … get off my lawn I guess :(

Oh wow Usenet is still a good spot? That brings back good memories of sailing the seas.

It’s shwetek patels group at Univ. Washington. They’ve had some interesting stuff in the past, and are good at the PR part of things.

For me it depends on the mood. New stuff is fun, but stuff I know can be instantly trabsportative to moods or mental spaces and it feels good. New stuff can be too mentally engaging if I’m trying to do focus work or zone out. I think I listen to less new stuff now because I’m usually wanting to zone out with music more than actively engage with it.

I pointed out how that happens already though. Firefox uses middle-click to direct a widgety thing to move the viewport. Other documents use middle click and drag to move the document. The same hand motion will move in two entirely opposite directions. I know some people get really (like REALLY) hung up on this though, and understand that. I just view it as another abstraction I get to move through.

(Also, for me its two entirely different physical movements of grabbing the scrollbar vs scrolling with two fingers, so I don’t even notice. In one, I use middle and ring to move a document around. Another, I’m moving the mouse with a single finger, and then pressing down directly or using my thumb to click and then moving the finger.)

It just depends on your abstraction you’re mentally using. If you think of a sliding moving visual window on a document, then you like the scroll bar mental model. If you think of moving the content itself, then you like the phone scroll model. I have no idea which one “natural” or “inverted” is and don’t really care what the default is.

For touchpads, give me the phone style scroll. For a mouse wheel, give me scroll bar scroll.

It does feel weird that middle click and then move the mouse (I think Firefox does that kind?) will move the view such that down motion movies content up. But instead click and drag (okukar browse function) upward motion moves content up. Again, just depends on your abstraction in that moment.

Ooh now do emacs/vim!

Out of the box, maybe, but kde is super customizable to be how you want it. I think gnome can do that too, but it feels much more opinionated and all I ready about is install scripts that break. (I haven’t tried gnome in years though)

Not the op, but syntactly they are ver similar. And so for minor things like looping over a matrix or making a plot or some calculations, It’ll be the same. Your intro numerical course will not really know the difference. It’s when you get to the packages that there’s massive divergence. Matlab really sells packages that have all sorts of libraries and gui things built in to do some advanced calculations or pre-Canned tool. They also change the package syntax from time to time. For things like signal processing or filter design, the tools reign and most scripts depend on them. Octave has a totally difference package ecosystem and syntax for loading packages.

So for basic things, you can go between the two fairly easily. For anything advanced or for 90% of scripts you download from papers, octave will not work.

I use hckrnews.com as my interface for it and usually just look at the top 10 of the day.