roseinshadows

[roseinshadows]

A whinge about getting older or something I dunno

Sorry for posting a big old lady whinge ramble about AI.

I promised I'd get back to the habit of blogging stuff. Can't do that without actually posting.

Late last month I had my birthday!

Not a huge deal. I'm 46 now, I don't expect much. (Went to have a pizza, started a few video games I had bought a week or two prior.)

Previous years, I got a nice popup from Google Assistant on my phone. Tap on it, and Google Assistant would sing me Happy Birthday, with its usual text-to-speech voice, complete with backing track.

This year? No popup. (Well, got one from calendar and such, but not Assistant.)

I don't really use Google Assistant. Hesitantly, I opened the thing.

"Oh! Hi! Google Assistant is being replaced with Google Gemini on your device. You can still choose to switch to Assistant."

I tried switching to Assistant. This locked up the assistant buttons completely. Luckily, it started working when I chose Gemini. Guess that's the only thing in town now.

I asked Google Gemini to sing me happy birthday, please.

It helpfully complied by reciting lyrics to Happy Birthday.

Not singing it. Reciting lyrics. To the song. Not addressed to me.

...This is what's wrong with the AI business.

Look, the whole idea that Google Assistant was singing Happy Birthday to me was ultimately a small thing, OK? A corporate thing. Not significant in any way.

But it was a corporate goofy thing that that they deliberately chose to add to the system.

"Hey", said Google, "we're no longer a whimsical small tech company. We're a big soulless corporation now. We know your expectations are through the floor, OK? But, look: we have this assistant thing. We know that you just want this to use voice commands to set appointments and such. But it uses our text-to-speech engine. It can even sing. So we thought, what the hell, we'll add this little thing in it where it sings happy birthday to you. You specifically. On your birthday. We hope this brings a little smile on your face. In face of it all. We're sorry, we have to return to our regular schedules blandness now."

And nowadays? Nowadays???

"This is Google Gemini. Our AI offering. ...oh, it's your birthday? Thanks for telling me, we had no way of telling. Now let's use an energy equivalent of boiling a kettle of water to generate text that tells us what you hu-mans like to do on 'birthdays'."

This is the replacement service.

Google Assistant singing happy birthday was a sign that humans built the system. They thought someone might be expecting the thing to happen. The least they could do was to make something like that to happen.

These people were facing the big blandness of a big system made by a big company, and realising that people depended on them, they had to do something, anything, to make people not disappointed.

They wanted to do a human thing.

Now, there will only be a system. One that guesses what people probably liked to do, or something. And the guesses aren't always good. It doesn't know. Because it's not able to.

And the users are, like, "remember when this system did that one cool thing? That was cool. This new thing sucks."

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I'm old now, I'll take a nap now or something.

[roseinshadows]

A small Nintendo story

I had bought my Game Boy Advance some time after it came out (late 2001 or probably early 2002, I can't remember).

And all was well.

June 3, 2015

I found that the batteries that came packed in with my Game Boy Advance were still in the original box, in plastic wrap. And had expiry date of May 2003.

Surely, surely they wouldn't work?

Well they did put out over 1.5 volts, so...

Well damn, it seems to work!

Time to hurry up and go post about this little miracle to r/girlgamers!

May 27, 2025

...I forgot to post this on r/girlgamers. (Reddit being the way it is, I'm not going to, either.) Oh shit, some time seems to have passed. Thanks, ADHD.

Anyway. I found my Game Boy Advance in a drawer.

Wait wait wait. These are the same batteries.

I guess I left them there because the battery door latch is broken so I had to tape the damn thing shut.

And oh damn, that one battery seems to have leaked. But before I remove them, let me just try to start it up...

Well damn, it works!

(Only one of the batteries had leaked! Needed a bit of swiss army knife persuasion to remove it, but the battery receptable is fine!)

Today, I also found my Nintendo DS Lite in the same drawer. Haven't touched that in at least 6-7 years. Guess what? Still had some battery charge on it. (Low battery light came on immediately, but hey, I got to the start screen. Hadn't even lost the date! Clock was an hour off, but hey, daylight savings and all that.)

Meanwhile, my Nintendo Switch can't be left on my desk for a week before it's whining about battery. Very disappointed. I expected quality.

[roseinshadows]

They're pulling my leg

I'm happy that my @blur-from-the-north photography blog has been a mild success over the past few years. The like ❤️ counts often go into the double digits and I can't be happier! Combine that with my Pixelfed account where I post most of the same stuff, some artwork (potentially) and other random nerd shots - I can say that my photos usually get seen quite a few times. Wow!

Anyway. With roaring success like this, I also get to experience the drawbacks.

Two or three times, I've been approached by people who wanted to buy the photos.

Now, I'm highly suspicious of these offers.

First off, have you seen my photos? who would buy this stuff. wtf. (I'm deliberately choosing to often share some of my not so best work that I deem nevertheless interesting enough to be shared. This stuff isn't museum quality. That's the point.)

Second of all, these offers came out of nowhere and at least in one case there was no information at all on the blog. Not giving me much to ascertain legitimacy.

Third, they seemed pretty spammy. One offer had "helpful" tip to put locations on the photos, as they said that's the sort of information stock photo buyers are looking for. ...I label every photo on the blog with the location information. (Let me reiterate: have you seen my photos? Clearly you didn't see the captions either.)

Also I got a few crypto offers. *looks at the calendar and sees it's 2025* oh fuck right off.

Stay safe out there. Unsolicited commercial offers on small-beans blogs usually don't bode well.

[roseinshadows]

Mild dev story: Battlepass Tiers

This is from the latest Jimquisition.

It kind of reminded me of a thing.

This was in late 2000s when I was doing a university "project" course interning at a company. (The company seemed to exist at least at some level a couple of years ago, but now appears to have been bought by a bigger internet-of-things company. I haven't seen the "product" they made in a while, so whatever code I wrote back then is so deep in the vault that nobody is ever going to see it again. I take honour in knowing my code is deeply appreciated by the top men.)

"programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more." - _why

Anyway. I was tasked to write a shop interface for a future "access tier" functionality. Mainly, at the time, it was about integrating the third party electronic payment library, and to add ability to initiate and accept/reject purchases through electronic banks and payment providers. Simple stuff. At this time the shop frontend was supposed to just be nonsense that wasn't actually visible to production users, so I could come up with nonsense access tier "products".

So I came up with some access tiers!

"Bronze!"

"Silver!"

"Gold!"

...Okay so far!

"Platinum!" Why not! ...

Then my ideas started running dry. "Titanium!" ... uh, why not...? "Neutronium!"...

I tried to stretch my creative writing skills so that the first tier levels would look sensible based on the boss's instructions.

I don't know what ungodly riches I promised to the buyers of the higher tiers. "Oh if you buy the Neutronium package you get all of the stuff from the previous tiers plus a private 24H lounge and spa". (You know. For a subscription to a boring web service.) Stuff along those lines.

It was a joke anyway. Nothing of the sort was supposed to make it to the production.

Anyway, my boss was like "good job, nicely done."

I expected literally no acknowledgement, and I got literally no acknowledgment. ...Fair is fair.

The product may have actually had some use for some years after the course was finished... maybe? I rightly can't tell. This product was basically known by a codename and I have no idea if it actually got to production stage. (It was also supposed to be offered to the university students enventually, and I literally heard nothing about it during the rest of my studies.)

So why am I talking about this after a random Jimquisition screenshot?

Well.

Thanks to this little internship, I can legitimately say I have professional experience about TIER NAMING.

(Point the first: I literally have no marketing experience except that. Point the second: I'm not going to put this in my LinkedIn, don't worry.)

So, a professional opinion:

If you name your tier "Ultimate", you fucking don't do "Ultimate+".

You can only go beyond "Ultimate" if you do "Ultimate Motherfucking Super Badass Double Diamond Motherfucker!"��. Which doesn't fly well in a dry corporate setting.

Stick with a series of more and more implausible elements.

Even if you are stretching it.

¹ (...I was inspired by a video lampooning crypto scams, unfortunately it has no English subs)

Oh yeah! EDIT: BONUS RESEARCH SHENANIGANS

I tried to look for the battle pass details on official EA site. It only showed me "Free", "Premium" and "Premium+" tiers.

I noticed the URL had ?isLocalized=true in the URL.

Ha HA! Being a web software develper, I have [level 0] at hax0r skills. What happens if I change that shit to true?

What. Let's try again.

"I have not the strength, nor the wisdom to master such power… …But one day I shall!" (Ultima VIII: Pagan)

[roseinshadows]

This is a screenshot apparently taken in January 22, 2000. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but the fragments of stuff I found allege this could be running WebWasher (rudimentary ad blocker from the era). So the actual AltaVista page could have had even further banner ads.

Look, I'm a software developer. Been writing web software for a long time. And THIS shit is why I'm eager to work on the field - so that this never happens on my watch. (...well, at least I'll log my strong objection if the Marketing wants this shit.)

When I look at this stuff I'm still discombobulated. What the hell am I even looking at. Dude.

Oh yeah. There's that tiny tiny text saying "AltaVista found no document matching your query." That sounds like an important bit of information.

Reasons unbeknownst to the AltaVista marketing people and knownst to us, people soon migrated to this new "Google" thing that didn't do any of this portal crap. And had a search index that was actually updated every once in a while.

[roseinshadows]

Weird dream

Weird dream last night:

I was reading 1980s issues of MikroBitti, A Finnish computer magazine.

These 1980s issues had type-in programs for various 8-bit computers of the era.

So this particular issue had a mortgage/loan calculation software code listing. I remember looking at the listing and it had real financial terms in it that I had never understood so I knew it was legit.

Now, the weird thing was, the description text stated this was specifically a loan calculator app specifically for the needs of gay households.

It even had a 1970s style whimsical, tasteful illustration of gay dude couples doing random householdy things together.

(So how much of this dream is based on reality? I have been reading MikroBitti archives for nostalgia - they're available on web for subscribers - and they did have some listings back in the day for financial stuff (or maybe some game related to finances or something). And publishing this kind of program could have made sense, because no one had spreadsheet software in the era. ...just can't imagine what kind of features they might have had specifically for gay couples, but hey, I'm no finance person, don't ask me!)

[roseinshadows]

From Radio is my Bomb, a very awesome historical document on radical self-publishing.

[roseinshadows]

Ohhhh...?

I mean tacking a random online service on another online service didn't work out? WELL COLOUR ME SURPRISED.

[roseinshadows]

Weird dream:

Last night had some weird dream about a space western guy on a space western desert planet.

His little daughter had a 16 KB 8-bit computer. He had problems resetting it, which was a huge problem, because the space outlaws on that planet had hidden some information on the computer, and they were all in danger because of that.

He had tried typing SYS 64738 but after talking to the local tech nerd, they figured out he needed to type SYS 16738 instead because it was a 16 KB computer and not a 64 KB computer.

[Probably some early-autumn-flu-induced dream somehow inspired by Starfield (Sam&Cora Coe) and random Commodore 64 stuff.]

[roseinshadows]

I'm extremely high on caffeine so I decided to write a blogpost. (Probably the worst idea ever.)

Anyway. Language. Once again, upon visiting YouTube, I heard from various sources that somewhere, somehow, the right-wing people are screaming about Pronouns again. ...yadda yadda, if they knew Adverbs were a thing, their minds would blow, old joke, old joke. ...Joking aside, I' m quite worried that after this particular attack on Pronouns fails once again, they'll launch and all-out attack on Numerals eventually. They are anti-science, after all.

But I digress. This got me thinking of politically correct language in general. The right-wing folks keep saying that all this pronoun stuff and other PC language leads to weakening of expression.

Allow me to offer one counter-example.

Now, in Finnish language, we don't actually have gendered pronouns. There's no grammatical gender as such. Any notion gender exists only in purely descriptive nouns and adjectives.

One thing the people striving for politically correct language are trying to fix are gendered job titles. Which actually hasn't really been a huge problem in ages; even if there are job titles that end in -mies 'man' such as puhemies 'speaker of the Parliament' or postimies 'mailman' or lakimies 'lawyer', that's understood to be gender-neutral and nobody wants to bring back postinainen. It'd just make everyday life more complicated, no?

But the job titles are being phased out and there are plenty of good alternatives for them. Postimies already sounds mildly old-fashioned, too, as the term postinjakaja 'mail deliverer' became commonplace.

In fact, this dang soy-drinkin' commie PC term is actually a good example of flexibility of Finnish language. Ok, so posti doesn't change, but jakaja is an interesting word - derived from jakaa 'to split, share, deal, distribute', with the -ja suffix turning that into a description of a person. So jakaja is '(generally) delivery person, (in card games) dealer'.

See? This is a rich form of expression, contrary to the claims.

It can even be made epic. As said, lakimies (lit. "law-man") is still in use, but there are better words, like asianajaja 'advocate'. This can be broken down to asia 'matter, cause, case' and ajaja 'driver, handler' - which is derived from ajaa 'to drive, to steer'. I picked 'advocate' as the translation earlier because it's closest to The One Who Speaks For Your Case.

See, even boring everyday terms can have really complicated shit behind them. And I'm not even a pro linguist, they'll probably babble more about this shit.

Holy shit I wish I could afford something else to drink than instant coffee because this shit is making me trip balls creatively speaking aaaaaaaargh

[roseinshadows]

The Long Shadow of Adobe

Posting some photos to the blur-from-the-north queue again. Decided to peek into the image metadata before I wipe it for publication. (I don't know if Tumblr does it automatically.)

Ah, we live in a civilized age. The metadata doesn't loudly say that the photo was made with Affinity Photo. There's a relatively inconspicuous entry in XMP metadata that says the file was produced by AP2. It's all very elegant.

ACDSee doesn't even bother to announce its presence. It's an asset manager, you see. Asset managers need to mess with the metadata frequently. If it announced every single modification to the metadata, that would render the whole history feature useless. (It only bothers to announce its presence when I use the image editing features.)

What does the legacy EXIF metadata say?

"THIS FILE WAS SOFTWARED BY ELEMENTS ORGANIZER 14.0. VERILY, CREATOR-TOOLED BY ELEMENTS ORGANIZER 14.0. THAT WAS WHAT DID IT. THAT WAS WHAT DOES IT FOREVER NOW."

...You may move away from Adobe software, but the tools cast a long shadow over you.

As you might have guessed, I haven't used Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer for… a while now.

For film/positive scans, it'd be appropriate if the app that produced it would generate XMP history entries. Weirdly enough, Epson Scan doesn't add its name to metadata. SilverFast only uses legacy EXIF tags, which is weird.

[roseinshadows]

Thank you to everyone who got me to 100 likes!

[roseinshadows]

Weird dreams

From a few days ago:

Saw a TV broadcast about a man and a woman who had been released from prison after 20 years. I realised they still had the key to my front door, and when I saw them boasting in TV I knew they were going to come to my place. (I don't know what their actual deal was and what they wanted with me specifically, they didn't strike me as criminals.)

When I realised they had come to my door and were trying to open it, I just opened the door, and they were flabbergasted and trying to hide the fact that they were trying to come in.

I grabbed the key from the woman's hand, slammed the door shut and held it closed with my weight. I swallowed the key for good measure. I then tried to keep the door shut and I called the police.

Soon I heard from the police radio that they weren't coming after all, because they had more important things to attend to. Apparently I didn't make the thing sound urgent enough.

Then the TV reporters showed up to talk to the man and woman again. They realised that they were trying to break in and called the police too. It was very awkward for the police.

Another dream from last night:

I dug out my old Nikon D3200 and were taking photos of roses in a vase. However, they were older flowers, so I decided to go to a flower shop by bus and bought three new roses. (I know where the flower shop is, but I've never actually visited it.)

Back home, I had problems arranging the flowers in a nice manner because the new flowers kept slipping in the vase and going deep under water.

Eventually I did succeed getting them arranged properly and did get some good photos, I guess. I kept thinking that I need more flowers in my home.

[roseinshadows]

A random attempt at art, I guess?

Basically, long time ago, I had this hazy dream about a weird cult that believed that it was the destiny of humankind to dive into Sagittarius A*.

I filed that in the "cool sci-fi ideas" folder. Didn't actually use that in worldbuilding/writing, but I sorta kinda roleplayed as a member of the cult in Elite Dangerous.

Lately I managed to claw my way back to the creative projects (the reason why I've been in such a massive slump is a tale for another time) but I decided to basically do this to get my feet wet with Affinity Designer. Tried to post this elsewhere on the net but it got removed by mods. Social media was a mistake, blogs ftw.

[roseinshadows]

Copy paste of basically the emoji I'm feeling right now, even though my hardware doesn't show this thing up right now.

Why doesn't #Samsung still do this damn thing. I switched to #Nokia for god's sake, just because of the fact they had the stock turtle emoji And they had a Finnish team, so, eh.

[roseinshadows]

My first ever attempt at using ChatGPT to solve a programming problem

A wise… random person… on the side of the Internet once told me: “Don’t be afraid of ChatGPT. It’s just a spicy autocomplete.”

Now, I’m a Ruby person. Ruby usually Just Works.™ However, Python is, like, it usually works. But sometimes. Sometimes. NO. It just tells you to go deal wif’ it. Fuck.

“Hey, can you parse a "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS” timestamp, please?“ "FUCK YOU.” “ChatGPT, can you help?” “Well, the date stamp should be in the ‘YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS’ format, maybe.” “…it IS, but thanks anyway.”

SIDE NOTE: exiv2 is just a fucking epitome of “Python library sitting atop of C++ library, dammit”. Oh, you’re looking for the Python documentation? Just look at the C++ docs, dammit, you’re a programmer, I’m sure you can wade through the docs! And enjoy str(image.data[“whatever”].getValue()).prettyPlease(). I HOPE that if I check out the exiv2 Ruby Gem, it at least has the courtesy of returning DateTime objects when the underlying data has date and time shit and doesn't require things to be parsed separately.

Or will they???

Oh shit. Well.

[roseinshadows]

A completely non-profit performance of Rush E, by Sheet Music Boss, performed somewhat muddily by Pripyat Pianos. I subdivided the MIDI as far as I could. I could not subdivide it far enough. Sorry. Obviously, the piano is on fire.