Posts

Social Media Bans Miss The Point

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I want to get something crystal clear, here, before I begin this piece. By no means should this be construed as me saying I want people like Zuckerberg to get off scot free for all the crap they've done to the modern web. Absolutely not. I want nothing more than for these chucklefucks who ran Web 2.0 into the ground to be held accountable for the garbage that flowed forth from their respective companies.   These ghouls are the very people that delivered us into this crappy society we now enjoy where technology is no longer seen as a net good, but rather a net  bad.  These people are the reason I wax nostalgic for the tech landscape of the mid-00s. I carry a vehement distaste for these people. Do not think I ever, ever want them to get off easy for anything.   That said, I think these social media bans going around are stupid, and also  fail to solve the problem. Worse, they're being used as a means for government overreach, and on that alone I do not support the...
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Right Place, Wrong Time

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A sentiment I've seen amongst friends and folks in my social circles is that hey, AI isn't all bad! That there are some redeeming factors to it and some things it is actually good at if you look past what the cancerous US AI companies are doing and look at open source models + models developed by other countries.    I will admit: I can personally see some merit to this. While I vehemently hate AI, I do acknowledge that yes, it CAN have applications (specific models tailored to a specific task rather than trying to make a "it only does everything, badly" model). I do acknowledge that local models (on hardware YOU own) are nowhere near as problematic as the ones put forth by the likes of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.   However,  the time is not right for these conversations. No one and I mean  no one  is ready for them to happen. Not now. These are the types of conversations to be had when the threat has passed and the danger is over. As of right now, ...
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Adieu, PS5

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And a hearty fuck you, Sony. Ever since the big announcement that Sony is going to completely kill physical media on the PS5, I've been feeling a bunch of emotions toward this. None of them good. Mostly, I thought back to the Xbox One's announcement. Which Sony famously dunked on, hardcore. What's interesting about that announcement, however, is that Microsoft clearly planned around that whole dumb thing they were trying to do with the Xbox One, and said as such: "Publishers, should they allow you to, will let you resell your game licenses/trade in toward another game, digitally." This is laughable, taken in a vacuum. Publishers hate us. They'd never allow this type of thing, ever. They want to milk everyone for all they're worth. But in the context of Sony's 2026 announcement, shockingly, that's more than Sony bothered to give us when announcing the end of physical games. Microsoft at least left us a ladder, even if the use of that ladder was...
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Not Everything Has To Be A Fucking Hustle

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So, today, YouTube announced that they were raising the threshold for the YouTube Partner Program (y'know, the thing that allows you to monetize stuff and use monetization features) for people not already in the program (as of February 2017)  to 8000 hours of watch time (or 20 million views over 90 days if you're going for Shorts).   In a rare show of mercy, it was announced that if you're already in the program, you'll be grandfathered in under the old rules, which is 4000 watch hours (with 3000 unlocking SOME of the monetization functionality, like superchats I believe). But 1.I don't trust YouTube to remain merciful forever, and they'll either stop honoring this  or  find some weird criteria to begin forcing grandfathered people out, and 2. This doesn't help the person struggling to hit that 4000 hour milestone and maintain it, either.   It's pretty much YouTube saying "last chopper out of 'nam is in January 2027, and if you can't grab on...
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"The 20th Anniversary iPhone"

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Been seeing this one bounce around the rumor mill and reddit and personally, I'm kind of tired of it. Because I'd bet a Caniac Combo that there is no supposed 20th Anniversary iPhone, simply because there's absolutely zero precedent for it in today's Apple.   These rumors swirled back in 2017, too, and I think what John Gruber wrote about it then is still relevant today:  "Apple is not going to make a special edition of any product — let alone the iPhone, their most important product — just to mark an anniversary. Don’t tell me about the 20th Anniversary Macintosh  — that was a product from the old Apple that was heading toward bankruptcy, and a perfect example of why they shouldn’t do something special to mark something as arbitrary as an anniversary." That was almost ten years ago. And sure, one might argue that Apple did in fact introduce such an iPhone in the iPhone X, but I really, strongly believe that the X name was more of a nod to Mac OS X, or spec...
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The AI Hate Progression

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I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is presented to us today. But I want to take a second to talk about  how  I became this way, because I wasn't always like this! Oh no, I thought the whole "I fed the Bee Movie script into a bot and had them make a sequel" thing that perpetuated the early era of generative AI was...amusing, but easily ignored at worst.   In fact, if ChatGPT just kinda sat over there and existed, I probably wouldn't have hated it. Hated the people that used it to "well, acksually" people and be annoying? Of course, but that's no real fault of the technology. Technology is a tool, and takes on the will of the people using it and controlling it.   And therein lies the problem.    At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this,  this  is the next big thing, and that we must ...
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"Retiring" the Nikon D7200

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(I've already written about this over on Tumblr but I wanted to talk about it here too, and maybe type it out when I'm not sickly and half asleep.)   This summer marks an important milestone for one of the longest-running pieces of equipment I have in my collection: I will have had my trusty Nikon D7200 for  ten whole years . Still on its original battery, too! And still going strong short of a dead pixel developing on the sensor. Which is honestly fine in this day and age of AI making things look too perfect.   After thinking on it, I think this is also the year I retire it.    Not completely, mind, I used air quotes in the title for a reason.   But as far as bringing the camera with me to events or places where there might even be the chance of running into other people? It's staying home and in its place I'll either bring my Mavica or RX100M2, or just use my phone. Is it because a DSLR is unwieldy? Nah. Do I hate being stuck with a 35mm prime? Also nah....
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