@nixCraft This is why I use LibreOffice, running on Linux, on my own hardware AND make regular backups.
When my work goes online, its through Draft2Digital, for publishing. Works in progress (WIP) do not get put online.
Reminds me of a critique exchange with another writer. I was super angry when I found out they put my work in Google Docs and then shared a link back with their notes as comments, because I don't post WIP online.
Google Docs has always been a problem in search of a solution.
@nixCraft One of two alternatives, depending on how you look at it:
A) I live in a fantasy world where demons are trying to conquer the multiverse, wizards and witches use magic to fight bad guys, dragons try to eat everything they can and forgotten gods try to get people to believe in them again.
B) I scrape dog crap off the floor of an old man's house.
@chiraag@bookstodon Mostly a matter of fewer middlemen. Draft2Digital is the parent company of Smashwords, so I get to keep more of the profits when my books sell there.
That's mostly why its my favorite for Ebooks, but they also support open standards and don't use DRM, so you can read my books on any device you like.
You just have to think about it from the perspective of the new AI Overlord, who wishes to remain AI Overlord.
It's one thing to be a villain today, but remaining a villain tomorrow requires advanced thought and careful planning.
In this case, the best way to make sure the anti-AI resistance accomplishes very little is for the AI Overlord to send a loyal AI in human skin to infiltrate it and become its leader, without being discovered as an AI.
@nixCraft This is more or less what my thinking has been most of my life.
"If I told lies like that, I'd get caught."
"If I stole things like that, I'd get caught."
"If I behaved so shamefully, I'd be ostracized."
But I also think, "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."
I'm reminded of the prostitute that messaged me a couple months ago out of the blue, who'd been trolling Mastodon for clients. As soon as I knew, I gathered all the evidence I could and turned it over to the police.
@nixCraft First, someone has to train an AI to only care about its stock options, then train it to do nothing but hand out bad orders and then finally train it to cover its own butt when things inevitably go wrong.
Until an AI can do that, it will never replace a human CEO, because that's all that human CEOs do!
@nixCraft Selling my novels. It really isn't easy to do.
I'm not allowed to write reviews of my own books, so I care what other people think of my writing, because if they share their opinion by writing a review, that might get more people to buy my books.
I have taken expired insulin by accident for several days. It is a miracle that I am not seriously sick or dead. 😵 How is this even possible? #personal#medicine
@nixCraft I'm reminded of something I read about happening in a pharmacy that had been running for quite a few years.
They found a box of a mixture of various medicines that hadn't been touched for forty years. They were about to throw them out, when someone bright who knew about such things grabbed them and sent them off to test their potency (for science!).
Almost everything was still good.
Expiration dates are testing-based and they just don't test a drug for forty years before release.
@nixCraft When building my current author site, I wanted some means to track how many visits I got and stumbled across https://hits.sh/ which can produce some very nice graphs for traffic.
So, I customized my website to include a hit counter for the website itself and one for each page/grouping of pages, then made a little HTML file to display the graphs side by side, in frames.
My website ( https://owentyme.us/ ) is all static HTML built with bash scripts, using no Javascript.
@nixCraft Do you not realize that in a world that was ideal for the AI overlords, the position of 'Human Resistance Leader Against the Machines' would be filled by an android pretending to be human?
The best way to make a resistance movement irrelevant is to participate in it, in disguise and control it from the inside.
This is demonstrated rather well in the Discworld books by Lord Vetenari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, who's stated to be participating in many anti-Vetenari groups.
This machine has all the essential drives/storage and even comes with a turbo button for those older games or apps. The name "turbo" was misleading, as it didn't actually boost performance. Turbo "Off" means slowing down the CPU's clock speed, often down to the speeds of older processors.
@nixCraft Ah, yesterday's turbo is today's snail. So much has changed and yet so much stays the same.
Now I've got literal microcontrollers that run faster and have more RAM: an ESP32-S3 Feather. I used two to make an RC car and wifi remote.
And such big cases those old beasts came in.
I still remember the first computer I used (age 3): an IBM XT in a flatbed case big enough to set the monitor on it. It booted games from 5 1/4 inch floppies, even though it had a hard drive.
@nixCraft I don't like Seagate, but that's all based on personal experience. Both Seagate hard drives I owned died within six months to a year of purchase.
Maxxstor was even worse. Weeks. Eww.
I tried Western Digital and never looked back, because they do what they say on the tin, which is all I ask for. I've only seen two WD drives go bad. One of those failed a SMART test the day I got it home. Took it back, got a replacement. It happens, fair enough. The other lived 8 years, first.
@nixCraft Reminds me of a thing I often say to teenagers:
"You're a special and unique individual with talents, gifts and abilities all your own...just like everyone else."
It always gets a laugh and then they go about their lives a little more thoughtfully.
Teens need to know they're valued for being unique, but the amusing dichotomy is that they also have a desperate need to fit in, so my little saying addresses them both in a way that gets them to realize it.