Speaking of programming, I’ve noticed that all the commonly used symbols are easily accessible in a US layout. In many other layouts, some common symbols are really inconvenient to use.

Just finished setting up a Debian computer with a really strange mix of localisation settings. Keyboard layout and number formats are local, but the UI is in English.

If you’re a small strawberry farmer in rural France, it’s fine. If you’re doing something even a bit more serious like making technical or scientific calculations, you’re using a wrong tool. Excel wasn’t designed for that even though pretty much everyone is constantly pushing those limits.

When you see someone using it in another language, you can immediately tell that they aren’t doing anything serious.

I kinda get it where MS is coming from with this decision, but I don’t approve of it at all. They want to be more user friendly with all audiences, so that they can sell excel to small farmers in France, who definitely don’t speak a word of English. I guess that attitude should tell you that doing serious calculations wasn’t the main goal here, even though nearly everyone is using Excel that way.

This application is a victim of its widespread success. People make some pretty intense things with it that definitely call for switching to Python, R, C#, fortran or whatever. Because of that, serious professionals can’t avoid it any more. They can’t just treat it as a fun little toy it really is.

Here are the reasons why I use all of my electronic devices in English:

• I already know English, so it’s not a burden.
• Localization is never perfect. Just dig a bit deeper into the settings in Windows, and you’ll always stumble upon some English here and there, no matter what the language setting says.
• Troubleshooting sucks if you have to use another language. There are a million posts, answers and articles about your problem written in English, but only 9 written in your local language. Among the million articles in English, you’ll also find a few that were written by people who know what they’re doing. The 9 articles and posts in the local language were all written by clueless idiots.
• With some applications, like Excel, localization really hurts usability. I guess it’s fine for people who make calculations only a few times a year, but people who use Excel on a daily basis just hate the translated function names. If you already know your way around the English functions, using a translated version means you’ve got your both hands tied behind your back. What used to be trivial, suddenly becomes an epic voyage, just like it is with those who use Excel only once a year. Good luck trying to get anything done with the translated version. It might even be be faster with a pen and paper.

Would you like some radium water? It was considered highly progressive in the early 1900s since it utilised this fancy new thing called radiation. Borderline magical stuff when you think about it.

We had electric cars at first. Lead acid batteries were pretty miserable a hundred years ago, so no wonder why gasoline and diesel took over so quickly. That was progress in the 1900s, because gasoline was just so much more practical in every way.

Currently, we’re transitioning back to electric cars, but this time we have vastly superior batteries. Today’s progress means we’re driving cars that pollute less than their predecessors. Even when you get less range, it’s still counted as progress because priorities have shifted. That’s not exactly full circle, but it’s close enough.

With bisons and whales we’re really trying to come full circle. About a hundred years ago, we were driving both groups towards extinction, but now we’re trying to get those numbers back to normal. Both directions were viewed as progress because priorities have changed so much.

Either way, decisions were made based on what the situation called for at the time. As the world changes, more information becomes available, and different things become important. These things shape decisions all the time. Perhaps future generations will look down on us building all these wind mills instead of developing fusion reactors.

To me, progress is change in a desired direction. When a lumber mill is built, that’s progress to the company and employees. When the same mill gets decommissioned 20 years later, that’s seen as progress by environmentalists.

The term itself doesn’t define the direction or goals. People who use it take care of those things.

Yes

Yeah, I probably spent too much time refining it. Better skip the editing next time, and stick with the initial draft.

Subscribed!
Gotta say, I didn’t have any cooking stuff in my feed. Like, none at all, because I couldn’t care less.
The food I make is super simple, because I ignore all recipes, so what good is a cooking show to me. I’ll just wing it by throwing in some tasty ingredients in a pot and calling it a meal. Just add and heat, time and agitation. Works every time.

Fair enough. Besides, I already have many slop channels I don’t watch. Meaning, I played on video while doing the dishes, subscribed to it, and never heard from it again. There are surprisingly many channels that were created about a month ago, have only 15 subscribers, and those videos have like, 5 views, zero likes and zero comments. I find those kinds of channels all the time now. However, If I subscribe to all of them, they might become big enough to ruin YT for everyone else as well. I see that as a win-win situation.

When I initially started this experiment, the first thing was to unsubscribe from everything I had actually found worth watching in the past. Then, I wanted to check what’s going on in the “trending page”, only to find out it no longer exists. No wonder why. It only had stuff that was apparently very popular to millions of people, but it never had anything I wanted to click, let alone spend time watching. Apparently, that was also true for many other people since YT got rid of the whole thing. That would have been my go-to solution.

Anyway, the not logged in front page is probably the next best thing. I’ll give that a try. Thanks!.

Ooh, and it’s a big channel too. The algorithm must love that one. Subscribed!

Cities: skylines

This one doesn’t even require Proton, since it’s Linux native. It’s also a very chill game.

You need the following:

• Plastic pipes
• end caps
• wool yarn
• table salt
• citric acid
• soy lecithin
• shampoo
• alarm clock
• popcorn

Leave all of it scattered on the table and let your friend’s imagination run wild.

But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.

If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.

I know many people who use meta platforms, and they don’t seem to be very happy with the material they find. AI slop is getting totally out of control over there.

When I want to talk to friends and family, I just give them a call, send an SMS or have a group chat on signal. I don’t need meta platforms for that.

YouTube is a mixed bag though. I still find some value in there, but that’s through sheer quantity of videos in there. Finding good ones is getting harder every year. Alternative platforms are getting better, but the selection seems to be pretty narrow by comparison.

I tend to block most of the internet cancer out there and only hang out in places where the internet doesn’t suck that hard. Anything touched by Meta is obviously out of the question. So as far as what people generally call social media is concerned, I just avoid all of it. Nothing of value was lost when I abandoned that burning pile of trash. Lemmy is ok though. It’s clearly a social media, but everything about it is just so different that it probably doesn’t even count as a “social media” in this context.

What about AI then? It’s complicated. AI in general is pretty cool, but I’m using that word in a very broad sense. Stuff like isolating human voices from a messy audio signal involves AI. When a camera focuses on a human face, it’s using AI. When your postal service uses OCR to read the address off a letter, it’s using AI. Oh wait, nowadays even your phone can do OCR. Anyway, none of that really counts in this context, now does it? That’s not the AI people are angry about.

AI that generates text, audio, pictures and video definitely counts, but that’s just a fraction of what AI really is. It’s currently visible, popular, widely used and commonly discussed. That’s the type you’re really asking about, now isn’t it? My answer: it’s still complicated. The technology itself is just fine. The way it’s used to ruin the internet isn’t.

For example, LLMs love to use specific phrases and people love to use LLMs to generate text for anything and everything. What you get is AI slop text that has all the telltale signs of being generated by an LLM and proofread by nobody. The internet is filling up with low-effort trash like that, and I’m completely fed up with all of it. Still not fed up with AI as a whole though. Everything under the peak of that ice berg is still very cool.