I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
Yeah it’s steadily getting enshittified.
I used to have a mythtv box that I’d built , like, 15 years ago and it was pretty good. For a while there TV UIs were adequate enough that I didn’t need it, but it seems that maybe it’s time to build another one.
TVs that do anything more than displaying a signal exactly as it’s input shouldn’t exist.
Some of that input could do with a bit of tweaking though.
I wouldn’t mind if the TV was able to do things with the audio track, like remove background music, or lift the volume of people speaking, or erase laugh tracks/live audience hooting& hollering.
There’s probably similar manipulation that you could do on the video side (eventually, once TVs stop getting the worst processors ever, not here and now). Imagine a prompt that says “Airbrush every recognisable brand name on-screen so that it blends with the background”.
I seriously doubt if any major manufacturer would do that kind of thing though, so better get working on jailbreaking those TVs.
I search for complicated things on google, because that’s when I need to search for stuff.
I take about three seconds to look at the LLM-generated summaries/answers, disregard them as tedious monotonic bullshit, and then scroll down to links where real people are discussing the real problems and the real solutions they have.
22 million users. 2700 million likes. 122 likes per user?
That engagement ratio seems a little off?
Does it download the actual music tracks from youtube-music, or does YouTube helpfully provide the video version of the music?
I’ve used a few downloaders and it seems these days that every music video is a whole “production” with 30 seconds of dialogue and intro before the actual music starts, or there’s background noise over the first dozen bars (because the artist is in a cafe or car park or on the train in the clip) and all of that is just a bit tedious when listening to the audio only.
You’ve got the motive back to front.
yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs
In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.
Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.
A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.
Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.
What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?
A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.
I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?
Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?
“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.
“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.
As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track (with occasional accidents), but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.
To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.
If it said, “hey I don’t know a huge amount about X” then you could work with that. But it will blithely say “no problem” and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don’t know the terms in the area you’re working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.
I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.
It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.
Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.
Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.
If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”
Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.
That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my “helpful” text above, SEO’d recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.
I have an Oki laser printer that I bought for $129. I’ve had it so long I gave it to my kids for university. Duplex, wifi, and I’ve bought two toner cartridges for it in the 8 years we’ve had it.
(Side note: If you go to an airport, you’ll find that the dot matrix printer spewing out the passenger manifest at the gate is often a Okidata Microline-series printer, an updated version of the printer I had in 1992)
Basically, don’t buy an inkjet printer, and don’t buy HP.
I buy a washing machine after a 20 minute search and going to a click and collect website to place an order with a local big brand store.
For the next 6 months:
“HEY CHECK OUT THESE WASHING MACHINES LOOK AT THESE REVIEWS WASHING MACHINES ON SPECIAL CLIIIICK MEEEEEE”
Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
HP and/or Compaq used to make their own PCs in the 90’s going into the 2000’s.
For example they used to have special motherboards that were basically backplanes and CPU cards to suit.It’s quite possible they did dumb shit with IDE connectors/pinouts that meant that some devices didn’t work.
It wouldn’t have been a major scandal, it just would have been, “yeah some aftermarket drives don’t work with HP”, which was pretty common across the entire market back then. We’re basically in the golden age of system compatibility right now, things were an absolute shitshow back then.
But… what about my 83k karma and 13 year badge!
Gamification is a powerful addictive force.
When Reddit locked down their API and Boost stopped working, I forced myself to do casual browsing on chrome on my phone. It was clunky enough that I didn’t bother replying to comments, and navigation is a bit of a pain on mobile, and that was enough to ruin the game.
Because people are addicted to spreading their political opinions like evangelists of old.
Luckily that only generally seems to be Americans. So if you could all kindly tag yourselves in your profiles as such it would make it a lot easier to filter. /s
Sure, there’s always some low-level background muttering about politics in other countries, but the USA has really taken the cult of personality/political party to it’s absolute max.
Looking from the outside in, I pin the beginnings of this on the pledge of allegiance. Indoctrinated a whole bunch of young boomers into the idea that the USA was at the pinnacle of society, and once you blindly believe that, your eyes are closed to the actual issues. Rinse and repeat for a few generations and here we are, watching a country tear itself apart via a political system stained with polarisation, bias and narcissism.
Lots of expensive industrial equipment runs these kinds of processors still. You can still buy motherboards with 8 bit ISA slots even, although you’ll pay quite a premium.
But all of that kind of gear typically runs its own distro with an in-house build system. For example, my work uses a flavour of Buildroot for their embedded Linux systems and you can just set whatever processor type you like all the way back to plain old i386 when you build it.