Some android phones have the ability to long press on a notification, click on settings, and alter what kinds of notifications you receive. I’ve had a few instances like you describe, but where I’ve been able to turn off “special deals” or whatever. I think implementation of this is done by the app developer though, because I’m sure I’ve had some apps that had no useful settings. Example screenshot of Gmail settings:
Theme Hospital is one of the greats of an era. (N.b. there’s a mod called CorsixTH which fixes a lot of issues with the original game (mostly age related clunkiness)
You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1
(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll
Incredible
I read this article a few months ago that I found quite interesting: Original link Unpaywalled link
The manufacturer in this blames the DEA, and whilst I don’t trust a pharmaceutical company to do anything other than ruthlessly maximise profits, in this case I’m inclined to believe this depiction of the DEA as the overly persnickety bad guy (because I have even less reason to trust the DEA)
I agree, you’ve captured much of why I came away from the article feeling a bit ‘hmmm’.
Something I read somewhere that I found super interesting is that on Windows, when a process completes, the user often gets a notification or popup alerting them to this, whereas on Linux, it’s more normal for there to not be any confirmation messages when a process is finished. I hadn’t consciously realised this difference until I read this and reflected on how many times I’d have to double check things when I first started using Linux.
I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker
That there is no silver bullet, no quick fix, no “Eureka” moments that happen without work. “Progress” is less an exciting event, more a rhythm made by the repeated struggling against entropy; when you’re doing it well, you’ll come to hardly notice its beat until one day you look around and everything’s different.
You’d think that recognising this progress might be motivating, but it’s often demoralising because it demonstrates how unglamorous the work of self-improvement is. You hardly get time to enjoy your achievements, because as you grow, you become aware of how much more there is to do; the burdens on one’s time and energy tend to expand as our personal capacities do, so even if one makes incredible progress it can feel like you haven’t moved at all — in both your “before” and “after” snapshots, it can feel like you’re still barely staying afloat in life, even if objectively, you have massively improved your coping skills.
And the worst part of it all is knowing that it’s okay to be feeling like this. You’re tired because it’s a lot of work, and you’re demoralised because the work doesn’t end. You’re not the only one who has the stake in your life and your wellbeing, and as you grow, this will be underscored by a greater sense of duty towards the systems and people that depend on you; When I was young and very depressed, I stayed alive for my family and I resented the fact that they cared about me because it bound me to life. (Un)fortunately(?), over the years, my attempts to stick around to avoid hurting the people I care about has led to a bunch more people being invested in my wellbeing and I ended up loving those people too. How privileged I am to have such wonderful people in my life, who give me hope for the world and embolden me to keep fighting. And yet, I resent these people too. I have to allow myself that, at least a little bit, otherwise I’d collapse under the pressure of a duty to a world so much larger than I am. The worst part of it all is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So here I am, still plodding along, despite everything, hoping to make my existence a tiny little monument to resistance, as I stubbornly push back against all-consuming entropic decay. I know that in the grand scheme of things, nothing I, as an individual, does will matter, nor will it last, but I don’t care. Well, I do care — the enormity of it threatens to swallow me whole — but I don’t care that I care, because what difference does it make? The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that everyone feels this way, to an extent, and I’m nothing special. In that truth is terror, but also the comfort of solidarity. I may be scared and exhausted, but I know I’m not alone in this. For better or for worse, my life isn’t just for me.
When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.
My best friend died a few years ago. He was a dumbass with his passwords and I did tech support for him a few times, so I knew his password. It’s nice to be able to share his games with friends (many of whom already had library sharing set up, but it needs to be redone if a sharee switches devices, I think). I was talking about this issue to some friends recently, because we were lucky to have my friend’s details. How grim it is to be on the forefront of this question, eh?
Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive
Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.
[1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.
Damn, kids these days. Like, I knew that I shouldn’t disregard slang as meaningless just because I don’t understand it, but I’m realising how despite knowing this, I’ve probably been subconsciously dismissive. TIL, thank you.
I’ve already played it but yes, that’s a great recommendation for anyone who has enjoyed the games I mentioned. I especially enjoyed it because I’m also a fan of Dark Souls (& other FromSoft games), and it was neat to have souls-like combat in such a cute packaging.
Probably incomplete list that I may update after a nap.
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(Edit 1: formatting)
The words it chooses to capitalise is funny. For all the training on online stuff, it doesn’t get that it should be calling you a fucking IDIOT for even asking such a BASIC question about grilled cheese!
I personally don’t have nearly as much of a problem with that than I do with Reddit making AI deals. I’m still not keen on the idea of having anything I interact with being scraped for training AI, but aside from only interacting in closed wall spaces that I or someone I trust controls, I can’t change that. That’a not great for actually interacting with the world though, so it seems that I need to accept that scraping is going to happen. Given that, I’d definitely rather be on Lemmy than Reddit.
And this way, who knows, maybe we’re on our way to the almost utopian “open digital commons”
It’s sad that I can’t look at a beautiful photo of a UK river without wondering how much sewage has been discharged there.
In 2023, the sewer right near where this photo was taken spilled for a total of 299.25 hours, which is quite low compared to many other locations.
I worry about the long term state of UK rivers.
If anyone from the UK reads this, https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map has info on how people can help