gregly

gregly, 10 months ago to mastodon

#MorningThoughts

I’d love to see #Mastodon (and/or clients like #Ivory) provide the feature to… I’m not sure what you’d call it, actually. It would let you put a certain person under a persistent “content warning”, in the case where you might not want to block/mute them, but they have the tendency to post non-CWed stuff a lot.

Maybe you could call it “screening” or “blurring” — something like that.

gregly, 4 months ago to random

NONONONONONO

gregly, 5 months ago to iOS

You know, as much as I am vehemently for open computing, I realized that I used to be generally okay with Apple’s #iOS walled garden, when it was actually maintained. When you could go on the App Store and find quality software that didn’t require a hidden subscription or IAPs to unlock 99% of its functionality and/or disable the endless ad spam.

What benefit does the walled garden provide us now? It’s full of weeds that have choked out everything else. Practically useless.

gregly, 1 month ago to random

I got a new router to replace our aging one, which just can’t handle the amount of traffic we sometimes have these days… but god, I do not want to have to port my existing network setup over. 😫

gregly, 7 months ago to Youtube

Reminder: if ISPs didn’t artificially restrict our upstream bandwidth and cap our monthly traffic amounts, we could all host our own videos and stream to moderately-sized audiences, without the need for services like #YouTube and #Twitch injecting ads into every goddamned thing.

These things are done for a reason, and it isn’t a technical one. It is to exercise control over what and how you are allowed to share.

#enshittification

gregly, 7 months ago to random

Every time I get involved in a hobby project, I keep moving the goalpost further and further away as I progress, ensuring that I will never satisfactorily complete it and instead give up in frustration

gregly, 2 months ago to random

There is (probably) a big storm coming this way which may very well include hail.

We just bought a new car a few months ago.

Our garage is filled with crap. There is no way to fit a car in it.

…uh oh.

I put on a loop of the Tetris theme, and got to work, although what I did cannot be in any way described as “cleaning”. Luckily, if there’s one thing my dad taught me to do, it’s move piles of crap from one place to another!

Amazingly, I just barely got it to fit.

The back half of our new car in the garage, surrounded by junk. There is approximately six inches of clearance on each side except the driver’s, which has about two feet.

gregly, 7 months ago to random

Well, son of a bitch.
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

gregly, 7 months ago to random

I just searched for “is it okay to have coffee when you have covid” and I’m glad to say the answer is “yes, it’s okay”, and also “yes, it actually helps”, and additionally “no, it may not be safe”, plus “we don’t really know”

I’m truly grateful we have such a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips these days

gregly, 2 months ago to random

Yeah so we’re in the basement now. #chicagowx #chicagoweather #aurorail #auroraillinois

gregly, 1 month ago to mentalhealth

Okay. My Mastodon feed is, on the whole, way nicer than my old Twitter feed, but the ratio of horrifying/depressing news to interesting/happy news is still way too high.

I’m looking for suggestions for generally happy/upbeat stuff and people to follow, to try and balance things out a bit. Because I want to stay informed of the lousy stuff happening in the world, but I don’t want to be utterly deluged by it.

#mentalhealth

gregly, 3 months ago to gamedev

I was thinking recently about how, as shiny as PS5 games are, I find most PS4 and even PS3 games to still look fantastic and totally playable, and I think this is part of the reason for such a huge collapse in AAA game development. Each generational leap in tech has been smaller and smaller, to the point where a lot of folks are saying “why should I buy new games when there are so many great ones in my backlog?”

The consumption treadmill is grinding to a halt.

#gamedev #latestagecapitalism

gregly, 1 month ago to random

Okay, techbros. Look.

I don’t want an AI assistant. I don’t want self-driving cars. I don’t want a Mars colony. I don’t want robots that create art, or help with coding, or deliver food, or determine the most efficient way to maximize destruction when bombing civili—I mean “legitimate military targets”.

I just want a robot that CLEANS MY FUCKING BATHROOM FOR ME

gregly, 4 months ago to random

Drinking Crystal Light, watching MST3K’s classic “Manos: The Hands of Fate”, and wondering why I ever looked forward to becoming an adult. Basically, a typical Wednesday night.

gregly, 6 months ago to random

Totally random, but a while back I read Lucifer’s Hammer because (a) I like realistic post-apocalyptic fiction and (b) I remember my dad had a copy when I was young.

And HOLY SHIT is that book racist and sexist. It includes a man literally becoming the chieftain of a harem of Girl Scouts he had been chaperoning on a field trip. This is presented as a good thing for the character, who had been desperately lonely and saddled with debt before the disaster.

gregly, 9 months ago to random

I have an honest question here:

Are there such things as jobs where you deal mostly with “small” projects in #softwaredevelopment or #softwareengineering anymore?

I’m so sick of working with codebases so huge that any tiny change can result in some other totally different part of the system breaking unexpectedly three months later because I forgot to grep every single sub-repository for instances of a method I renamed to be less misleading.

God, I’m so disillusioned with computers.

gregly, 4 months ago to random

The true purpose of ContentID is to provide passive income for parasitic corporations who know it will take the average person too much time and effort (and possibly money) to dispute their millions of bogus copyright claims.

Everyone involved knows this, which is why they don’t bother to fix its overzealous claiming of stuff that is obviously fair use, or worse, that the claimants don’t own at all.

#morningthoughts #contentid #copyrightmafia

gregly, 28 days ago to random

OH MY GOD THE NEXT CONSOLE GENERATION IS GONNA HAVE A BUNCH OF LLM BULLSHIT IN THEM AREN’T THEY

gregly, 3 months ago to random

Re my boost of Krebs’ tweet: connect to free WiFi, and then immediately connect to a VPN. Period.

gregly, 4 months ago to random

I figured out recently that, if I just get a few adapters, I can hook up a total of seven monitors to my PC at once (I think)… and I might do it, simply because the idea of doing so is totally insane.

gregly, 1 month ago to iOS

I use FileBrowser on iOS, and it is an absolutely fabulous file management application. One of the few things it lacks is native playing of MKV files. (It plays MP4 files in-app, but others must be streamed to something like VLC.)

Anyways, if you’re looking for a great file management app that can connect to all sorts of network storage as well as local files, I can’t recommend it enough.

#ios #filebrowser

gregly, 1 month ago to random

I had really hoped to save enough money for retirement before the entire tech industry went down in flames screaming, but [gestures vaguely at everything going on for the past few years]

gregly, 4 months ago to random

what was I made for?

gregly, 4 months ago to random

Hey @ivory:

Please add support for rendering basic Markdown in posts. Don’t need any fancy crap like tables; bold/italics/strikethrough would be plenty. (Maybe bulleted lists, if you’re feeling generous.)

I would be so very happy if you did this.

gregly, 9 days ago to random

There are times I wish we could just start over with computers and the internet. Just reset to about 1987 or so, and try again from there. Back then computers sucked, but they sucked in a hopeful, “things are getting better all the time” sort of way — whereas now they suck in a “financialize, monetize, advertise, AI lies, software spies” sort of way.

We have more power than ever, and yet we have less power than ever. And the first warning was when “My Computer” became “This PC” in Windows.