This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Half the Boomers didn’t, either. It was they who got everyone started talking about the environment. They also built this fucking thing we’re typing on. Shit, the ability to divorce people if you need to was one of their biggest breakthroughs. I have no business kissing their butts, but you millennials? are fascist about this stuff and it has to end, now. Nobody has the luxury of your bullshit.

Millennials are what, 40 now? Some freelancers writing sniveling articles about avocado toast 20 years ago does not allow you to desperately look for scapegoats to blame for everything that happens to you. Nobody cares if your parents are bad people, everyone else alive does not pay for that.

Don’t fucking talk about voting until every last one of you is doing it. Fuck you for refusing to show for Clinton, THAT is on your head, so worry about your own crimes, you killed a lot of people by letting Trump through at the worst possible time, plus slacking off on all the other elections you didn’t even know existed, and if you don’t like that framing of responsibility, then fuck OFF about the baby boomers.

How many times now have I seen you little bitches no-show? How many chuds have you made wealthy? Rogan and a bunch of these other right-wing fucks becoming wealthy for stupid podcasts is on your generation for listening to them. How many times have you stepped up for anything but self-pity? How many more excuses? I don’t care if you never get to buy a house, shut the FUCK up about it. Welcome to reality for, like, 99% of the global population.

It ends. The next time I catch one of you talking about your “struggle” making 140k a year in stupid fucking Frisco, I swear to fuckin god. Everyone understands your living expenses just fine, you NEVER shut up about it, across what? 7 platforms? Somebody is making 25k in the same fuckin town, in a restaurant you’re too special to eat at, fuck your whining.

Scapegoating is a bad, bad, bad habit that your entire generation seems to share, I think it’s a trauma thing. Don’t care. I just got done hoping that COVID didn’t kill me and my whole family over some trash job that exists so you and your family can bang the order button from safety. Fuuuuck you and your victimhood, you expected us to be all cool about that while you decided to have yourself a worker’s rights movement that we weren’t invited to unless we stayed obedient to your ideas for FUCK sake. It’s your responsibility to process your trauma, it’s nobody else’s responsibility to put up with your failure to do so.

If you expect the millions of people who went under the bus for your convenience to just “get over it” and be all cool, then you will get the fuck over whatever is your problem and STOP trying to build solidarity with each other through scapegoating one group after the other. Who’s next after enough Boomers are dead? We know you won’t just drop that shit, it’s how you are, so who has to be your scapegoat next?

None of us, globally, are ever going to be free of the conservatism that seems to be baked into roughly half of humanity, that causes all this grief.

You think Boomers are bad? Some of the people on this Earth, we can’t discuss their evil without getting called xenophobic, good thing they’re all moving to live closer to you, so rise the fuck above, get over yourselves, and prepare your souls for that situation.

Maybe, with some sort of coherent political will, we might be able to get a fucking leash on the wealthy, who are always at the root of our suffering, but not so long as you and your kind get played like a fucking harp, constantly spewing casual hatred on a generation of people who ultimately had no more control than yours does, and who aren’t anymore or less fashy than you fucks clearly are. THEY show up to vote, YOU bitch and do nothing.

You’re 40! Fuck sake! This is teenage bullshit. You should have figured this out on your own by now. Enough.

Get the fuck over it, now. Tell your fucking friends. People are holding YOU personally responsible for the Palestinian genocide because you aren’t doing enough about it, so see how you feel about being in the hot seat over shit you can’t control. Motherfuckers, goddamn.

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

It’s a video loop of cartoon Spiderman grasping at a disappearing mist. I guess it’s a gif but it also has a play/pause function so who knows what format it is.

It’s hard to tell what will actually function on Lemmy. I think WebP files that aren’t jpegs have been causing grief too, I see a lot of blank posts that are probably that format. A ton of pictures are WebP now even though you’d expect an older format.

Also I’m on desktop, so if you’re mobile that might explain things.

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.

Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?

Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn’t doing half bad, financially, maybe they’ll bring tapes back.

It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old “sign the EULA or lose everything” bullshit and it’s just not working for them. Too bad we can’t kick them in the dick like other nations can.

They’re expecting you to have a mount for your wall, already installed, even, from the last TV. So the legs are an afterthought, they’re cheap, easy to remove and you’ll probably toss them, they know. So they’re enough to use for store display, no more.

Uh oh how was I to know that Thor High Heels was a minority opinion he said ironically

Well we know that, but anybody who does anything less than clap and sing about it gets treated like trash by the huge wave of people who immediately trusted the crazy thing with their lives. It’s the fucking iPhone all over again. So hooray for AI.

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

“I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.

Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.

The thing I am now curious about is if this is, quite predictably, Lemmy’s existing culture, OR if they were having a perfectly good time in their clubhouse until all the most insufferable Redditors came charging in here.

Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.

The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.

Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.

They definitely think Bill Gates is Jewish.

He’s not. No Jewish ancestry and his current practice is a sort of casual Catholic thing, but he also thinks Dawkins is cool, so about what you’d expect. That’s from a quick Wiki check, but still.

Because if he’s on their poster…

The thing I’m seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it’s very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want “evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.

Now that it’s in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it’s sort of “washed” in the money laundering sense, and I don’t see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don’t see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you’re in violation of copyright, and we’re on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.

So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.

Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]

My quote is a bit messy there (i’m quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.

The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.

So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.