umbraroze

joined 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google's own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community's concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

One of my favourite tragicomical video game achievements was in Firewatch:

Adopted a turtle as a pet. The average lifespan of a box turtle is fifty years. It will outlive you.

And this is why I will not get a pet. I'm by definition incapable of taking care of them because they might outlive me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Probably a floppy disk hardware emulator, something that essentially plugs to the original system's floppy disk interface, has a drive for modern removable media (USB/SD card/whatever), and buttons/displays to support disk image swapping and unmount/eject.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

"Now those liberals are using these things they call 'letters' to form these things called 'words' and putting those together to form 'sentences'. I won't be fooled. Those are them evil Satan runes. No place for them in a Christian household."

[–] [email protected] 190 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Salmo has two AI packages commanding him to take five loaves of bread to the Two Sisters Lodge at 10am and to the West Weald Inn at midday, but the packages never execute as he has no bread in his inventory and the packages are of "escort" type, meaning he doesn't actively seek any out. It's possible this bug was introduced to avoid another, more serious one: if bread is given to Salmo using the console or CS, he will walk to one of the inns as commanded, take a bite of bread, and the game will crash. (UESP)

Right, this is classic Bethesda stuff right here.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

This was so long ago that I can't actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn't as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn't exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Oh, but the power of American superhero comics is that you can just start reading them wherever. Sure, there is deeper lore, but you're not required to know all that. There's this bat-dude, see? He punches crooks and does awesome shit in the night. There's also a bunch of wacky villains. See? Just go read it, you'll pick up the rest of the details as you go along!

And I also love a lot of European comics because most often they have a pretty good balance between complex writing and manageable size. And publishers here tend to be more lenient toward artists making one-shot kind of comics, without any expectations that it'll become the next endless blockbuster cash-cow property.

Still, I do like how most of the manga series are like "OK, here's the beginning, here's 20 or whatever volumes, here's the end."

[–] [email protected] 119 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Plot twist: the "wolves" are just furries going to a major infosec conference, and will also talk endlessly about Linux

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Dead turtles are the saddest turtles. This is why I never got to Mario games that much and went with TMNT instead.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ah!

Now let us never discuss it if we can help it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Last I checked LinkedIn doesn't even have a way of straight up turning all emails off. I had to individually turn off email notifications on bazillion categories. ...Then they just invented more categories.

 

BONUS PERIOD ACCURATE MACHINIMADOTCOM MEME: Yes, I Am A General

 

Original title: [Super turbo mega hella fucking cursed] "We've Got To Stop The Mosque At Ground Zero" - Trade Martin

The final say on US patriotism.

 

My random tales:

One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. "Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets." (I almost sent back a message saying "thanks for your concern, but I'm in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you")

Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)

Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying "the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff".

 
14
Tears of Steel (www.youtube.com)
 

I'm genuinely sorry about posting shit a week ago. I was drunk. ...I'm less drunk now. This is genuinely awesome, however.

 

Also known as the "organ piece that the TRUE C64 ENTHUSISTS will ask for their funeral service".

...I'm not saying it's going to happen NOW to you PERSONALLY. But I do think you should mention this to your next of kin. Memento mori.

 
 

[Not my photo obviously]

 

Despite the obvious levity, this is actually serious. It was made by why the lucky stiff, a pretty prominent member of Ruby community, back in the day. This, however, was part of his mysterious burnout manifesto, for lack of better term. He really really bloody needed a break.

"programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

 

Also shout out to all shell programmers and turtle graphicians and turtle roboticians! Turtles are really awesome, they have shell access! And won't be rushing to push anything on production too fast either.

 

When I read the sentence, I was like "Wh... w... how? WHY? ...and OF COURSE it was distributed via FTP, I mean, what else do you use for entertainment in AIX. Or business, for that matter."

(Abuse)

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