bad_user

DEI has led to anything but viewpoint diversity, fostering ideological conformity via practices such as DEI statements, DEI metrics, mandatory trainings, or cancel culture leading to censorship.

That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.

I don't find that very funny. It's interesting to see what AI can do, but wait a month or two and watch it again.

Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.

This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.

I have yet to enjoy any of the "creative" slop coming out of LLMs.

Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.

Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.

I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".

The cookie banners aren't worthless. The websites presenting cookie banners either don't know the law, or are engaged in spyware shit. You don't need a cookie banner if you need it to provide a service that the user expects (e.g., saving settings, login).

As an EU citizen, I'm not concerned about your need to observe my behaviour or to prevent ad-click fraud. What I care about is websites sharing my navigation history with Google or the rest of the advertising industry, so yes, I'd like to be informed of it.

Personally, instead of having banners, I'd just ban the practices altogether (e.g., targeted advertising, 3rd party analytics), which would certainly simplify business.

Consider that we're living in a post-truth world, so you may not like the answer.

With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.

Please leave AI slop out of the comments section. Thanks.

Android is very usable without a Google account or even Play Services. It's not convenient, you may be missing some functionality, but it's usable and alternative app stores exist.

Huawei famously shipped devices without Google Play and many were fine with it. And Samsung's devices, AFAIK the most popular Androids, can have the Google account removed. Play stops working, but you can still use Samsung's own app store.

That may not last, of course, Android could become closed source, but in the meantime I dare say it's strictly more open than Windows. And I hope Microsoft gets slapped by EU's DMA.

GIMP takes some time getting used to, but it's reliable, it will stick around and having used it for the past 20 years, I have issues switching to something else.

Firefox's UI can be easily tweaked with CSS. It's trivial, for example, to get rid of all chrome. The real problem is their ideological stance against PWAs.

A frustrated user probably.

The complaint here is that Firefox won't do what Chromium does, and Chromium's extensions are active and reachable in installed PWAs.