/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.

Computer terminal is literally called a terminal because it’s the thing on the user side end of the long long wire that starts from the big big computer.

One of those things that make a lot more sense if you think hard of the history.

Speaking of aviation, I have no idea why Americans use such a boring term as “airport”. I mean, the guys invented half of the aviation technology and then they just use the term “airport”. Such a waste of potential.

The international standard term is “aerodrome”. Say it like you mean it. It’s a term with gravitas.

Apropos of nothing - a few months ago I was looking at one of the sites that curated Fediverse block lists. (Can’t remember which one.)

Now some of the blocks were quite reasonable. If a hundred site admins look at your site and go “wait a second, these guys are Nazis” and block the site, that’s not so controversial, OK?

But some of the blocks were, uh, how do I put this…?

Individual drama between site admins and their cliques.

Beef.
So much beef.
So much beef that I immediately thought “gee, how can c/vegan even safely exist in Lemmy? There’s so much beef everywhere.”

I had taken a photo of the pile of junk in my home.

AI facial recognition in ACDSee swore it could pick up my father’s face in the jumble.

I feel like I was visited by a ghost.

Rest in peace, dad. (sigh) No, I know you would not approve of this mess and would tell me to hurry up and clean the thing up.

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.

Did someone say… cookies?

I can just tell that whenever Twitter’s user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.

Like when you delete your account the final message says “#Goodbye”, I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?

Other generated pictures similar to this, even more questionable:

Cyber-Teacher: “All right, children. This here is a Turtle. An Ancient Shellmaster.”

(Pay no attention to the milling people and the certainly not turtle like freaks of nature in the background)

The song that made me a metalhead. Didn’t know SID could do that much epicness. 🎸⚡

My fave remix is by Lukhash - though there’s one pretty damn radical remix that I need to hunt for later because it predates YouTube. Also, Matt Gray’s own remix of the song is pretty epic and trippy!

Glory days of Halo Reach / (hot take) Halo 4 / (even hotter take) maybe even a little bit of Halo 5 (but we don’t speak of the early days of Master Chief Collection) were my favourite era of Xbox multiplayer.

Halo Infinite is pretty good as far as mechanics go, but the community aspects are a shadow of its former self, and I’m not sure 343i ever completely understood this.

(I’d probably say “I wish we had Bungie back” but as a Destiny player I’m pretty sure Bungie is slipping too.)

Hey, comparing Debian to a snail and its shell is unfair.

It’s more like a turtle and its shell.

Turtles can actually be surprisingly fast sometimes!

Technically, emoji doesn’t even have specific flags, they just have country codes, conforming to the ISO list - actually choosing which flags will be included is up to the individual implemeters. Regional flags got a little bit complicated because they need to establish the conventions first.

Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

Because this set a dangerous precedent.

Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

Meanwhile, me aboard a train: “Oh you can get whole massive meals on restaurant cars these days? No thank you, I’ll get a coffee and one of those overpriced naff sandwiches.” (Well, the Finnish train sandwiches are pretty good, but they are hella overpriced. Like 7€. WTF.)

The Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness”

Wikipedia: “Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome”

Oh I have a Forever Mouse. Bought a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical in 2001 or so. Still works. Use it with my Raspberry Pi sometimes. Also bought another Microsoft wireless laptop mouse like a decade ago. Still works just fine.

…The Logitech mouse that I bought against my better judgement in 2020 is starting to show signs of fatigue.

Also how the everliving hell do you add AI to input devices? Are they just going to guess what I’m pointing at?

No, can’t have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.

This is a clown car. That’s the most reasonable explanation.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (the Netflix anime) is pretty damn great and well worth the watch.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty decent game too. Not a masterpiece it was originally hyped up to be, and a lot of things in the game just painfully remind me of things that other games do better, but it’s still a pretty damn gripping game with pretty incredible atmosphere and style. Probably pretty high in my best games of the decade list.

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.