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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’m not too mad about this. It’s a good idea, but without legal weight behind it, it ultimately failed. Ideally GDPR and similar regulations would provide something similar, so I can set my preference once and every site would be required to respect it. That would be much better that the current situation, which is that I am forced to navigate every asshole site’s custom cookie notice. Each one’s a little different, and some of them break certain browser configurations. It’s a UX nightmare. This is probably by design — annoy users into submission. Because nobody in their right mind would ever click “allow” if it were not the easier choice.












  • Just marketing nonsense. There are three ways to present AI features:

    1. A generational improvement on things that have been available for 20+ years. This is not sexy and does not make for good advertising. For example: grammar checking, natural-speech processing (Siri), automatic photo tagging/sorting.

    2. A new type of usage that nobody cares about because they’ve lived without it just fine up to now.

    3. Straight-up lie to people about what it can do, using just enough weasel words to keep yourself out of jail.





  • In theory, an “AI PC” (please imagine giant eye-rolls along with the scare quotes) has the hardware to run models locally instead of shunting stuff off to OpenAI or Anthropic for processing. So in theory, it’s more private and secure than similar functionality on a “traditional PC”.

    In practice…wtf knows what Windows is doing anyway? Or what it will do with the next OS update? Same for macOS. On the Mac side, Apple keeps talking about their local AI and private cloud AI, and yet they’re still partnering with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration. I don’t want to use anything that even has the capability to send my shit to OpenAI, for the same reason I don’t like to put poison in my fridge no matter how clearly labelled it might be.


  • Weight & Diet Trackers

    I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

    I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

    Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.


  • And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

    I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.