ugh this tiktok ban thing is so performative and unnecessary.
Is tiktok giving user data to an authoritarian government? Probably yes. Is Twitter, facebook, instagram, etc giving user data to an authoritarian government? Also yes.
@cobweb I really wish that more governments would focus on national data protection laws (like in the EU) instead of banning random foreign players that, for all intents and purposes, already collect the same amount of data that most other social media networks based the U.S. already do at the very least.
I made a grilled vegan burrito. Zucchini, onions, garlic, mushrooms, bell peppers, crumbles, and cashew cheese. It was super delicious and I’d share if I could.
Does anybody else ever think how messed up it is that unless you go out of your way (or live in a very rural area), you are bombarded with ads for the entire time you are awake.
Ads on your phone
Ads on your TV
Ads on every place they can buy outside
Ads on almost every website
It is honestly exhausting, and I wonder what a world with heavily limited ads would look like.
Incidentally, the lack of ads is one of the very nice things about self hosting things, and being on fedi.
@ainmosni LED screen-lit billboards along streets are by far the worst. They are way too bright at night, and they absolutely wreck your night vision while driving. I get that the screen has to be brighter during the day so you can see it in "direct sunlight", but if they could just tone down the brightness of the screen at night, then I probably wouldn't care so much.
I would prefer no massive billboards along streets however. They just take up a bunch of space and serve no useful purpose.
@ainmosni@mischievoustomato Interesting thought. I'm not exactly sure how you could study something like that in practice, but I would be intrigued to see some data on roughly how much energy we burn by not paying attention to ads we're served. My "educated guess" is that it's probably a lot, but who knows.
One of my relatives just unironically sent me this completely AI generated video. AI voice, only Ai generated visuals (non-existent Chinese & Arabic characters in a video about Chinese & Arabic), and a completely generic message that's impossible to fact check (3 hardest languages of the world, ranked by trust-me-bro logic). People are falling for this shit so hard and I hate where we are going 😭
@Techaltar AFAIK videos like these done in this sort of style (but not completely AI generated) had already been making the rounds on TikTok and such for some time prior to the AI craze. They pretty much only exist as a really cheap way to farm views and engagement on (factually worthless) content and not much else. The "information" they provide is almost (if not) always completely anecdotal and is unlikely to ever be super accurate person-to-person (especially in the case of languages).
@Techaltar But of course, people still fall for it, either because they don't realize the "information" they provide is completely factually worthless, or because they just don't care. That's modern social media for you. 🙄
@Techaltar That's even worse. I mean, at least "historically" the stuff these sort of channels posted was at least anecdotal, but this is complete nonsense garbage. I have to guess that the creator is either a) purely relying on the fact that the audience for this video doesn't know what actual Chinese or Arabic characters look like, or b) knows the different language characters displayed in the video are completely made-up nonsense, but just doesn't care; or perhaps both. Who knows.
i normally don't post stuff like this, but ... the dude who runs macintoshrepository.org sure is a piece of shit
i had noticed several years ago that he was scraping macintoshgarden.org mercilessly, then reposting the same files on his own site. as a user, it was just mildly irritating.
last year i spent a day extracting and converting the PixelJerk icon set by hand, so it could be used in OS X and System 7/8/9 again. it was a lot of work. https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/109854078857733955
I uploaded the packs to macintoshgarden.org. it's one of the best mac preservation communities there are.
@vga256 Man, that's bad. I probably wouldn't care so much about people doing this is if it was clearly done for "archival purposes" or something. But if you're going to start needlessly scraping content off of other websites and reposting them on your own site with no credit and/or a source to where you got the content from, then that's absolutely not helpful at all.
I wonder if whoever's running the site would care to remove the files or at least add credit to them if you were to reach out.
TIL AppleWorks - formerly ClarisWorks - survived into the PPC era, and died gracefully at Snow Leopard. i last used it as clarisworks on a junior high school computing lab LC II
i sure miss this era of apple's box art visual design.. late 90s and early 2000s... while not skeuomorphism, it shared the same foundations in a care for elegant textures and shapes found in real-world objects.
@vga256 I love these old Apple box designs (even though I wasn't alive when this version of AppleWorks came out in 2000).
Too bad boxed software went the way of the App Store and Internet downloads years ago. Boxed software visual design was the coolest back in the 90s and 2000s in my opinion!