Discord is as much spyware as anything else. Its efficiency in using my computer’s resouces in order to log everything about me, build a dossier on me and sell me out at every opportunity is not a consideration, as I view it as something to be avoided like Meta, et al.
That said, Electron does suck.
I know Lemmy hates AI but it is incredibly useful for exactly this kind of thing (among other things). I had a very close friend who died recently who made an extremely niche but extremely deep/amazing website from 1999-2010. With the help of his family, I found archives of his database and web root files. These files were all legacy formats I wasn’t even familiar with and his coding style was wild, not just eccentric but showing an actual misunderstanding of some basic concepts that echoed through his code. This is a very extensive site, I couldn’t have hoped to resurrect it without months and months of work. Feeding it all to the AI, it took me about two weeks, and it works perfectly. Like my friend hadn’t even got it to work like he wanted back in 2010 and I managed to finish it for him with AI’s help - and it would not have happened otherwise, because I would not have had the time to dedicate to it.
The dream starts with me in dire straits, in need of a good chunk of money fast. There’s this guy, he seems to be my brother - even though I don’t have a brother - and he confidently tells me that if it’s money I want, he can hook me up. I follow him through the small town we are in, it’s very much like the town from Back to the Future. Past a cop car, right through to the most central part of the town, and it’s the middle of the day and people are milling about. We live here, but it’s like we don’t really know anybody. Right in front of everybody, my brother selects a woman with a particularly wealthy look about her and a not insignificant ring on her finger, and holds her up with a gun, demanding she fork over her ring. When she does, he tosses it to me. We begin to walk away. People start yelling “thief! thief!” and I’m starting to freak the FUCK out, but my brother says to me “relax, don’t worry about it. We know something they don’t know.” At that moment, and in front of an old abandoned-looking storefront painted black and white, he grabs me. A white light begins to envelop me and I feel a sensation of great forward motion. When it stops, abruptly, we are in what looks like a very old house, extremely large, a mansion. The house has wood floors, and ornate wood trim. Sitting very much out of place in this room is the modern, almost art-deco yellow hallway/portal that we emerged from. As I am standing there, dumbfounded, a woman who was one of my office co-workers comes shrieking through the portal. She yells at my brother: “what are you determined to do to Tackyway?” My brother responds “whatever. In a few days, everything will die down. We’ll stay here, and when it blows over, we can go back.” Looking at me, he says “people’s memories are short when you’re in Tackyway.” It appeared that this was the name given to this place. “Tackyway,” as it was referred to, was a gigantic mansion with no obvious exits but the yellow portal. It seemed to go on forever. It had many residents, some who had staked a permanent claim to one of it’s apparently endless rooms, others, like us, who just seemed to be refugees. It appeared to have been occupied by a wide variety of people, and these people decorated each room as they saw fit, so from room to room things were painted/decorated radically different to suit the tastes/whims of the people who either occupied them now, or had occupied them in the past. The difference when walking between the rooms could be very jarring because of this, and for this reason the name “Tackyway” felt appropriate, but I wasn’t sure if that was the real reason it was called that.
At this point I started losing the dream (I have a laptop next to my bed to write them as soon as I wake up from them) and I left these notes about what was left in my memory, but as usual they are disjointed and don’t make much sense:
It’s been pretty stable over at old.lemmy.zip!
Saved the Internet
Yeah… this appears to have been overblown.
I have Piefed and Mastodon accounts. I prefer the “old reddit” style and the Piefed instance I’m on doesn’t have it so I can’t really get into it. I hate all these supposedly “modern” UIs yells at clouds.
Mastodon is different, it’s fine, I guess. I check it out now and then. For many years I’ve tried to understand microblogging. I just fucking don’t. I never understood Twitter, I’ve always found it obnoxious and inscrutable, even before the Nazi takeover. Mastodon seems like a less fleshed-out version of Twitter, so, again, I just don’t get it. Lemmy? Upvote, downvote. Mastodon… favorite? bookmark? boost? Are replies threaded, I can’t really tell. Does anybody see my posts at all? I’m following like a hundred hashtags and yet my feed is all from one news blogger I’ve never heard of. I just don’t get it. So just every now and then I post a picture of a loaf of bread I baked or something and people seem to do things that cause my notifications to light up once or twice.
I’ve never paid a cent to stream anything. There’s all kinds of streaming everything that wants me to pay money to stream their shit. Guess what? No.
You can do it now. You’ll be able to do it in the future too. Movies, games, makes no difference. There are several lifetimes worth of games you can play without capitulating to the stupid late-stage capitalist bullshit that’s going on in this moment.
And it’s not always easy. I recently purchased a copy of Max Payne 3, a 14 year old game, because it was on sale for $7. After downloading, I discovered that it required me to register an account with Rockstar to play the single player campaign. I uninstalled it and got it refunded. I intend to pirate it now, out of spite.
Fuck these corporations. Don’t contribute to them. There’s plenty of other shit to do and there always will be.
Must be nice to live in a country that still believes in truths and falsehoods. In the US, unaccountable lies appear to be a feature, not a bug.
I did this, and you’re right - no ads. 👍 Thanks a bunch, I’ve saved your comment so if I run into one of these again I may hit you up!
Yeah, they’ve done this on this one particular site that I like to read, one old (hilarious) celebrity blogger who made a new home on [redacted]. [redacted] is pure shit. I dunno exactly what they’re doing but the ads they serve up are largely local rather than third party - and they’re served up so aggressively the site is all but unreadable on my phone. So ads are crazy in-your-face despite having adblock on the phone itself and a Pi-Hole! Just to keep reading the guy I like I had to set up a shortcut that loads it in reader view to bypass all the bullshit and fuck knows how long that will last before they somehow figure out how to block reader view.
Edit: I probably shouldn’t be giving them ideas, lol.
It’s why I prefer my email and texts to be pute text too, with no automation set to take action based on incoming unvetted content.
An excellent point, I disable loading email images in every client I use, even if for no other reason than not giving them a way to recognize that the email was read and subsequently list me as a live target.
Yes, well, my use for Ollama is solely as a plugin for Home Assistant. But you can wrap llama.cpp with whatever you want or use the half-dozen semi-popular competitors! My point is just that there are no tools that are exclusive to Windows, they’re all on Linux.
Now I have a leftover Windows micro-PC running a local LLM model, so I can be less dependent on GPT, as long as time isn’t a factor…
Might as well go all in. LM Studio, Stability Matrix, Comfy UI, Ollama - everything’s native on Linux.
Because realistically I can only scroll on Fedi for maybe 20-30 minutes in a day before I’ve seen everything and if I have more time to kill, Reddit is there. Although I don’t comment there at all anymore, it’s truly worthless for conversation.
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.
This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.
I use the cheap ones on Amazon that require no subscription and use an app called CloudEdge. They’re limited, but they take video and send notifications on motion quite reliably and you can get a live look through them anytime anywhere. They’re like $30 and I’ve already had two for over two years without issues. App bugs you to upgrade/AI, but is easy to ignore. Might be sending secret info to the Chinese government about how often the post arrives, but I only use them outside anyway.