#computer generation check

[pushing500]

Hey! I just wanna say I binged the whole Mechanitor’s Message saga last night, I just forgot to like the posts as I was going through :P I love the Jones boys so much, I wanna draw Kwahu with his nice braid sometime <3

I'm so happy you liked the story, and I hope you'll stick around to see where things go!! ❤️❤️

If you do end up drawing anything, I'd love to see it if you're up to sharing! 😁

[unproduciblesmackdown]

little shop images....

[the-nightmare-of-fabrication]

retro game randomizers annoy the fuck out of me because like, almost none of them modify the maps, which is what i really want. i know that thats like way more difficult and above the pay grade of a lot of randomizers, but youd totally expect it from the pokemon community or something.

like the first person to make a pokemon randomizer that adds the complete pokedex, and like, some really good highly customizable wave function collapse type route generation, like theyre fucking kings man. they get sloppy toppy for free at cons.

i totally expect it to happen at some point, i just want it to be now. like the most annoying part of like doing a nuzlocke, or playing a ranzomizer or whatever is that you have to play through hoenn or kanto AGAIN. like theyre cool dont get me wrong, but i want a totally unique region, the exploration is what gets me about pokemon.

[taamlok]

i love coming on here and finding out everyone lost their damn mind while i slept

[astarlightmonbebe]

switched over to firefox to test it out for the past week or two and i'm pretty sure it's a huge battery drain compared to chrome...

[griffinsboyfriend]

More things I forgot to say.

They weren’t cowards in ID2 and actually gave us poly. PB deserves the claps for that one I suppose.

[bredforloyalty]

i legit didn't think i was messing up at the register today this is LEGIT bothering me

[bumblebeerror]

Genuinely recommend just googling how to do shit when it comes to your computer. someone somewhere has an answer for you and honestly they're usually helpful. I cannot tell you how much of my generalized knowledge about computers comes from me encountering a problem and refusing completely to call windows tech support

[thetriangletattoo]

today my nephew asked me what an mp3 reader is I finally understand my elders

[smokedgastropod]

quick rant, i cannot believe the "the youth doesn't see The Difference between Internet and reality!" is still so common in media

because yes, we can differentiate between what's happening online and offline, it's easy to do so, but those worlds intertwine in our lives to the degree that there's little reason to do that. there's danger in that, absolutely, don't get me wrong. but even if the medium is totally different, the people are the same. and online is "reality", or at least affects our lives in a way that arguing otherwise would require bad faith.

they're correct the internet rots brains, but their work to that conclusion is paved with fear of being left behind and feelings of superiority, and not, you know, understanding of the topic

[light-wrath-paradise]

Guys please stop sharing this it's AI

Wounds of the Earth

— by xis.lanyx

[earlgreytea68]

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[qyriaha]

i feel like i should delete many apps from my phone but then i'd be out of the loop :( and then i open my tiktok and see dozens of adverts(?) for factories in china. im already out of the loop

[zed-the-buggy]

this is an LTSC version which is built for like. POS stations or servers or that display monitor in the mall or something. simple devices that dont need to change a lot and just need their one thing to work consistently for a long time.

so yes, very much real, and it really is basically what windows is without all the glam of consumer features and updates, but that comes at the cost of having to mentally treat windows like linux a lil. also the strictly security updates are way less frequent and not intended for someone who goes on the internet with it afaik.

worth the consideration for a lower end pc for sure (especially if the options are, cope with no updates on w10, or trash it and buy a new one because it can't meet the high bar of requirements for 11) but look into the purpose of LTSC versions first too for sure. idk that much about LTSC versions though, probably look more into it yourself and your use case if you plan on switching to one /shrug

The 2021 LTSC is available in the plain vanilla version, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, with end of mainstream support scheduled January 12, 2027, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, with an extended end date of January 13, 2032. They are not quite the same as the ordinary consumer editions of Windows 10. They don't include the Windows Store or any "modern" apps. Apart from the Edge browser, they have almost nothing else: no OneDrive, no Weather or Contacts apps, and no Windows Mail or whatever it's called this week.

...no OneDrive, Copilot AI, or all of the other useless crapware cluttering up the Start menu? AND patches/support through 2032??

Don't threaten me with a good time, Microsoft.

[iam-the-wild]

AI images have such an uncanny feeling to it that I can't explain. There's nothing truly off with most of the images, they can look pretty fine and normal at times but there's still that feeling of it being off. It's like a whole body feeling to be alert because something's wrong, regardless of the context of the images. I have never had the experience of uncanny valley feeling before AI

[trainsinanime]

I've seen a number of people worried and concerned about this language on Ao3s current "agree to these terms of service" page. The short version is:

Don't worry. This isn't anything bad. Checking that box just means you forgive them for being US American.

Long version: This text makes perfect sense if you're familiar with the issues around GDPR and in particular the uncertainty about Privacy Shield and SCCs after Schrems II. But I suspect most people aren't, so let's get into it, with the caveat that this is a Eurocentric (and in particular EU centric) view of this.

The basic outline is that Europeans in the EU have a right to privacy under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU directive (let's simplify things and call it an EU law) that regulates how various entities, including companies and the government, may acquire, store and process data about you.

The list of what counts as data about you is enormous. It includes things like your name and birthday, but also your email address, your computers IP address, user names, whatever. If an advertiser could want it, it's on the list.

The general rule is that they can't, unless you give explicit permission, or it's for one of a number of enumerated reasons (not all of which are as clear as would be desirable, but that's another topic). You have a right to request a copy of the data, you have a right to force them to delete their data and so on. It's not quite on the level of constitutional rights, but it is a pretty big deal.

In contrast, the US, home of most of the world's internet companies, has no such right at a federal level. If someone has your data, it is fundamentally theirs. American police, FBI, CIA and so on also have far more rights to request your data than the ones in Europe.

So how can an American website provide services to persons in the EU? Well… Honestly, there's an argument to be made that they can't.

US websites can promise in their terms and conditions that they will keep your data as safe as a European site would. In fact, they have to, unless they start specifically excluding Europeans. The EU even provides Standard Contract Clauses (SCCs) that they can use for this.

However, e.g. Facebook's T&Cs can't bind the US government. Facebook can't promise that it'll keep your data as secure as it is in the EU even if they wanted to (which they absolutely don't), because the US government can get to it easily, and EU citizens can't even sue the US government over it.

Despite the importance that US companies have in Europe, this is not a theoretical concern at all. There have been two successive international agreements between the US and the EU about this, and both were struck down by the EU court as being in violation of EU law, in the Schrems I and Schrems II decisions (named after Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist who sued in both cases).

A third international agreement is currently being prepared, and in the meantime the previous agreement (known as "Privacy Shield") remains tentatively in place. The problem is that the US government does not want to offer EU citizens equivalent protection as they have under EU law; they don't even want to offer US citizens these protections. They just love spying on foreigners too much. The previous agreements tried to hide that under flowery language, but couldn't actually solve it. It's unclear and in my opinion unlikely that they'll manage to get a version that survives judicial review this time. Max Schrems is waiting.

So what is a site like Ao3 to do? They're arguably not part of the problem, Max Schrems keeps suing Meta, not the OTW, but they are subject to the rules because they process stuff like your email address.

Their solution is this checkbox. You agree that they can process your data even though they're in the US, and they can't guarantee you that the US government won't spy on you in ways that would be illegal for the government of e.g. Belgium. Is that legal under EU law? …probably as legal as fan fiction in general, I suppose, which is to say let's hope nobody sues to try and find out.

But what's important is that nothing changed, just the language. Ao3 has always stored your user name and email address on servers in the US, subject to whatever the FBI, CIA, NSA and FRA may want to do it. They're just making it more clear now.