@baldur@toot.cafe
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baldur

@baldur@toot.cafe

Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff.

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baldur, to random
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So, another trend this year—beyond all of the “fire everybody, figure out how everything works later” shenanigans—is the winding down of all the mundane cons of tech, such as the unsustainable “unlimited” deals that made it impossible for small or medium-sized companies to compete in the SaaS space.

Both Dropbox and Google have been dropping their ‘unlimited storage’ features because, y’know, apparently money is no longer free

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845554/dropbox-ending-unlimited-storage-advanced-plan

baldur,
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And of course they’ve been doing so in the most clumsy way possible

Like Tim Burke who got a notice from Google that he has seven days to find some other place to store almost 240 TB before they delete it.

https://bsky.app/profile/bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us/post/3kg4we2o3d72z

baldur, to random
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“EU AI Act briefing”

I’ll need to update my post on the draft to note that the final version was watered down into uselessness. https://danmcquillan.org/eu_ai_act.html

baldur, to random
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“iA Writer in Paper”

I won’t ever buy one of these, but this is supremely cool. https://ia.net/topics/ia-writer-in-paper

baldur, to random
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“is-land Web Component—zachleat.com”

One of the more versatile custom elements around. https://www.zachleat.com/web/is-land/

baldur, to random
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‘Google calls Drive data loss “fixed,” locks forum threads saying otherwise | Ars Technica’

One more incident and Google will have pulled a full “dysfunctional organisation falling apart because of ill-conceived lay-offs” hat trick https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/google-calls-drive-data-loss-fixed-locks-forum-threads-saying-otherwise/

baldur, to random
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Medium has become the place where blog posts go to die, hasn’t it?

baldur,
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@dan Yup.

baldur,
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@archiloque Medium, I guess? Both the new place and the old for hiding away blog posts where nobody can see them.

baldur,
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@billseitz @archiloque 😄

baldur, to random
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These are all just basic UX features! https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-announces-upcoming-changes-to-windows-to-comply-with-the-eus-digital-markets-act/

Why are people only getting software usability improvements from tech companies when there's literally a law forcing them to do their job properly?

(Don't answer. I know why.)

baldur, to random
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“Michael Tsai - Blog - FastSpring Risk Screening”

I had a very rough time dealing with payment providers initially. FastSpring has hidden costs. And I tried to get approved by Paddle multiple times, but they replied with “you and your products look like fraud” every time https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/07/fastspring-risk-screening/

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Lemon Squeezy has worked decently for me. And Teachable worked mostly okay, although the platform itself is one of the biggest UX disasters I've seen since in a while. And that's saying something since I was forced to use Shopify earlier in the year.

The sporadic errors people were seeing at checkout with Teachable are worrying too.

baldur, to random
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“CSS Wrapped: 2023! | Blog | Chrome for Developers”

A lot of good stuff got cross-browser support this year. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/css-wrapped-2023

baldur, to random
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“Please, Expose your RSS • Robb Knight”

I second this. https://rknight.me/please-expose-your-rss/

baldur,
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@oligneisti Yeah, and now I feel the urge to add a link to the feed somewhere on my website 😄

baldur,
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@stfn 🙂👍🏻

baldur, to random
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This would be at least the second time that Google has been caught faking an AI demo, right? Or are there more beyond Duplex and the dodgy Nemesis video?

baldur,
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“We made it to inspire developers”

What a fucking con.

baldur,
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@hula I think the core issue is that the arrow of causality is the other way around. The credibility issues exist because people involved have a tendency to exaggerate or even fake results.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@matthiasott I’m choosing to interpret that as sarcasm 🙂

(It’s faking because they didn’t tell people it was a vision video. Had they done that in advance I would have still called it bullshit, but it wouldn’t be fake.)

baldur,
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@matthiasott 😄 I was like 90% sure. I’m not good at spotting sarcasm 😝

baldur,
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@hula Yeah, that part is definitely weird.

baldur,
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@matthiasott I all worked out in the end 🙂👍🏻

baldur,
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@archiloque 😄

baldur, to random
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“IA Writer 7”

IA Writer releases are always interesting. The idea here of tracking pasted text versus your own has broad application. It’s sad that it’s tied so strongly with ChatGPT

I’m also very sceptical about the idea that talking about your ideas with ChatGPT is beneficial https://ia.net/topics/ia-writer-7

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@aslakr Yeah, the annotation markup is quite opaque even without the hash requirement..

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