I can imagine... I can imagine a better future... a future in which we had social media and didn't spend half of our time on it complaining about the other people who are also on it.
Do you have any apps that you intentionally bury as deep as possible on your phone because you feel self conscious about anyone seeing them on your phone? I'm not asking about anything NSFW, but something that most people wouldn't think anything of, but if someone saw it on your phone, you'd be like "OMG, I don't know who installed that."
Mine would be the Taco Bell and Burger King apps. You have to swipe all the way to the end and then dive into a group of icons to find them. Of course, going to these lengths to hide them makes it feel absolutely illicit in the rare times I do use them.
One of the only perfect use cases for #AI writing stuff for me that I can think of: Birthday Cards or Happy Special Occasion to people I've lost touch with and just want to say something generically upbeat.
Come to think of it, I actually had a program like this for my #AtariST computer in the late 80's. It was called Personal Poet. It let you choose an occasion and it would write generic flowery verse for you. It was of course, pretty bad as far as poetry goes, but was entertaining enough to make you weight its earnestness more than its lack of talent.
Normalizing online form results collected from people who aren't very digitally savvy is frustrating, but also kinda humorous.
Even though I've made the form as short and simple as possible, people aren't very attentive and just fill it out however they want.
I just want their full name and city they live in. People are putting their last name into the city field so I'm getting entries for John who lives in Gutierrez or Sandra from Jones.
This is funny until I need to look people up and I can't find them because now I'm hunting through a database and the only usable info I have is that their name is John.
Oh, and half the time they misspell their own names because they're tapping it in on their phone. So now instead of looking for Kevin, I've also got to check that weird entry from some guy named Kenin.
BTW, if you have a form that allows technically unsavvy users to submit photos directly from their phone, expect to get some unexpected photos.
What's the best ordinary retail gift you've ever received? No rare or one of a kind gifts. I'm just talking about the most mundane of gifts that surprisingly has had an outsized effect on your life.
I think mine would be Late July chips. I don't remember what the occasion was, but a friend of my wife's just randomly decided to gift us a couple of bags of chips one day.
She said, "hey, these are really tasty. I thought you guys might enjoy them."
And she was right. That was around 10 years ago. There's hardly been a day since in which we haven't had a bag of Late July chips lying around in the house.
Oh wow. I think we now have an AT&T that's nicer to sysadmins!
AT&T has long been one of the networks I've dreaded running afoul of when sending email newsletters. For years they've been opaque about their process for getting a false positive IP address de-listed from their block list. "Can neither confirm nor deny" is their MO in how they handle this. It has taken me over a month to get a false positive cleared before.
Most networks have a form you fill out, a list of things you have to fulfill to get automatically restored, and some automatically reinstate you with a delay if you even contact them.
I had some email delivery issues with Gmail and needed to make some DNS changes to make Gmail happy, which instantly landed me in AT&T hell. I was expecting a month of neglect. Instead, they replied back within a few days to let me know that my request will be carried out shortly.
I just published my first #Wix site today. I have limited experience with similar site builder services like Square Space and Weebly.
Is Wix typical of these kind of tools? I found it to be extremely difficult to use. On the plus side it almost gave me every ability I could produce as an actual developer... almost.
Less would have been more in the case of Wix. Just because you can stuff every possible feature into a Web based WYSIWYG builder doesn't mean you should.
It made it really hard to produce a simple and elegant site that is really what's needed by most people using such a service. If you truly have a need for the advanced features, trying to do those through multiple layers of nested menus is the worst way to do it. You might as well as hire a developer and do it the right way.
This site coulda been an email. Instead it was an insane toothpick tower that kept exploding on me b/c nothing played nicely with anything.
Today is a sucky day to have writer’s block because I have a site to finish.
It’s not even a complex site. It’s the first #Wix site I’ve ever done. I agreed to do this site so I could experience what Wix is like.
Wix is really hard to use, but the thing really holding me up is that I can’t string together enough coherent words to tie things together.
Just for fun I allowed Wix to #AI write my copy and it sounded like some meth-head who’s been freebasing exclamation points wrote it. I’m pretty sure whoever handled this site last used that feature because I’ve had to rewrite everything I came across.
I can push myself and produce code under the worst of circumstances, but can’t write unless I’m feeling it. Ugh.
@sysop408 I took a class on "Effective Presentations" over 30 years ago, the instructor mentioned the Mind Map technique.
On a blank, UNLINED sheet of paper, think of 1 word about your topic.
Circle it.
Repeat until you have enough to fill the paper.
Now draw lines connecting the circles.
From the circles create an outline.
For writing, fill in with content.
For speech, try giving a short speech to mirror.
I wish they taught it in 10th grade English. It helped me gather my thoughts for many papers and presentations, much more so than any writing class in college.
Writing code is left brain. Same with editing. It's why I like writing with paper and PEN. I want it on the page out of my brain. Then I edit it later. Circling topics makes it right brained and unorganized.
In the summer of 96, I was picked up by police in Greensboro, NC for being brown at the wrong place and wrong time. If things were legit, I knew I'd be cleared, but was terrified they'd search my house.
That's because I lived with a drug dealer, an ex-con, a gang member, a teen girl who worked as a stripper, and a gay guy dying of AIDS who lounged about with a large boa constrictor. It was literally the villain's hideout from a movie.
What the hell was I doing there, you ask? Good question. I badly needed a place to stay so I took the first affordable one I found. It was in a great neighborhood so I didn't ask questions.
PRO TIP: Ask questions.
We hung out and enjoyed cookouts as unlikely friends. I heard life stories I was glad to never live. I also got close to being in a shootout.
A voice raging at me over the phone was 20 minutes away from eating a bullet from the ex-con's Glock. Then a gang girl who didn't finish high school took the phone from me and defused the situation.
Holy mother of fuck, #Microsoft. Now I understand why everyone’s suddenly talking about Linux in my feed.
What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?
Even if Copilot Recall AI were 100% safe, complete recall is not what your average person needs. People are drowning in data. If anything people need to forget more of the garbage they're constantly accumulating. Having complete recall is almost as bad as having none at all.
Ask someone who's always taking smartphone photos to show you their most cherished photo from the past year. Few will be able to do it because they spend all their time taking ever more photos instead of editing their existing catalog to prune out things that don't really matter.