/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Yeah, the biggest tragedy of technobros pushing generative AI everywhere is that as a result of that, everyone just had to adopt the stance that you can’t trust a damn thing these days.

At least previously, this kind of disruption led to nuance. Photo manipulation has been around pretty much since the dawn of photography, so now we as a society have developed nuanced view of it over the past couple of centuries. Now, photographs used as evidence in criminal cases have different standards than photographs used in advertising - former has strict standards because it’s a serious inquiry requiring hard evidence, the latter has lax standards because the viewers understand that the photos offer an “enhanced” truth. But generative AI? It just got dropped on our lap all of sudden. We as a society can’t deal with it yet. We’re not ready.

Sorry I just had coffee

I’ll get YouTube premium once they fix their damn TV app.

• If I resume playing a video from history, it often plays the ads, then re-plays them shortly after. (You know, at the point when it hit me with a fucking 55 second ad and I backed out and said fuck no, are you shitting me. Double points if the ad it tries to play again is also ridiculously long. I just keep refreshing it until it gives me 5 seconds to skip. I’m not much of a gambler, but this much I can gamble.)

Admittedly, this bug is not applicable to Premium. Being ad-skippy and all. But it’s indicative of the overall quality of the app. For example:

• When long-holding a video in all circumstances, I it should give me a full menu. Like, with the “go to the channel” option? …doesn’t give that to me in Subscriptions view. This might come as a surprise to YouTube, but I don’t always like watching Whatever The Algorithm Feeds Me. I might, you know, choose to watch the 10 episodes I missed. To do that, I need to actually like to go to the channel in question.
• …Or any of the channels I like or are particularly interested at the moment. There’s no way to pin this shit either.
• Speaking of which, the fucking way to browse my subscriptions is fucking atrocious holy shit. It’s useless. This is Google. They don’t do user experience research. They half-ass everything.
• On my smart TV, sometimes the buttons just fuck up. Sometimes I can’t control this shit. Because my TV operating system was designed by particularly deranged people, they thought “closing” or “restarting” any given app was space technology that no average consumer can understand, so they reduced that to bare minimums: the only way to restart the app is to pull the plug. This is just fucking demeaning.

A collaboration between Google and Samsung, people! Two giant corps serving millions of users! And they expect us to pay monthly fee for this holy shit

…sorry for the rant.

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn’t even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn’t fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.

When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it’s not very, you know, precise. So I’m well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.

But it is a potential scifi plot point.

However, I will concede that it’s probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.

Uh huh. Interesting

(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) “In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts.”

In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people’s usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.

The ghost of dead Game Boy also came with ghosts of dead batteries. …So many dead batteries. Many coming from tragic circumstances, such as almost reaching the last level of TMNT 2.

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

Yeah, I just tried upgrading my Gitea Windows instance to Forgejo via Docker, and it actually works pretty much as easily as it did before. Fantastic! Might just leave it here instead of shoving it all in the VM - I can always do that later if it’s necessary. Having a full VM does have upsides, but in this particular instance this is definitely good enough.

Heh, your comment actually made me finally go and resolve a problem I’ve had since I got this laptop in 2020. I didn’t have SVM virtualisation acceleration enabled because that made Windows unable to boot somehow. A bit of twiddling after, it finally did! VirtualBox runs! Docker runs!

…but why would I use Docker for something like this. Might as well blow the dust off of my FreeBSD virtual machine and run Forgejo there!

What’s the latest on Forgejo’s Windows builds? Last I checked there was no Windows build due to no volunteers for build/test - Gitea’s old build stuff should still be good.

Which is a mild shame because Gitea’s Windows version was an insanely simple way to run it if you are a solo dev on Windows and need a private Git site. Drop the binary on an USB hard drive, run it on terminal, boom, done.

(Currently contemplating just setting up a Raspberry Pi server.)

Wolves have a peculiar view of the passage of time and their relationship with other wolves of the pack. They think of were-wolves, are-wolves and will-be-wolves.

(Webmail provider releases a bespoke desktop app)
(me, old fart, bumbles out from behind the cables and servers and muck)

You fools! Have any of you whippersnappers ever heard of IMAP? No? Thought so.

[I’m not that familiar with ProtonMail. Chances are they already support IMAP. In which case: … …why? Why this? Why in this day and age?]

I hope Firefox implements a great and robust tab grouping feature. Because they used to have one that worked beautifully.

Firefox used to have Panorama view, which was a way to group tabs with a nice visual interface. …and they removed it because not enough people were using it.

…Well if you stopped removing useful and perfectly functional features, maybe you wouldn’t need to rebuild them later when it turns out people do want that feature, huh, Mozilla?

There’s an extension that reimplements Panorama and it kinda sorta works like it used to.