I have an old copy of office 2003 I still use, it's lightning quick on even ten year old hardware. It literally starts in under 1 second.

It needs a plugin to open and save docx but it works well.

I don't know if there's some fantastic functionality I'm missing out on but it works fine for me.

i'm suffering some frequency illusion right now because I only heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time, literally yesterday and today here it is in a comment

It's by far my favorite series. Def pick it up if you have time!

Mine too. I was disappointed I was going to be left with nothing exciting to read after The Wandering Inn, but this series is amazing. +1 on the suggestion!

"slashdot". now there's a name I've not heard in a very long time

I have an X201 (15 years old) and X220 (14 years) that I regularly use, running different flavors of linux. they've both been repaired and upgraded a few times. I'm spoiled by having an M2 Macbook as a daily driver - they can't match it for speed - but I love the ruggedness and resilience and I always will.

omg I used to use httrack to archive interesting sites at home, usual some sort of hobbyist boardgame thing or historical resource. I never kept them but the originals are long gone now, I should have!

I wouldn't presume to understand the bananas ideas of Trump and his kindergarten kronies, but I imagine they're looking at an inaccurately large landmass on a mercator projection map and hearing about the oil underneath and seeing dollar signs.

On a map, it looks to be bigger than all of North America, although in reality its only about 1/5th of the size of the US.

(although granted that's still a very large area that they probably see as 'up for grabs' since Denmark is small and far away and the US already have airbases there)

Yes I think you are misunderstanding. The leaner forces in all of the cases above are not the US, but the opposition.

Contacts, SMS messages, that sort of thing. Some people are also really particular about all their settings and widgets and such.

I just can't imagine having to worry about this.

It is why I like a low end Samsung android. It is borderline disposable and I would never view it as more than temporary storage. Works until it breaks or I lose it then start over. In the meantime, if something is that important it mounts easy in linux and I copy over what I want to save.

I hate that we have spent the last 20 or so advancing digital cameras to the point where a everyone has an amazing DSLR in their pocket and now we're at the point in history where we have to define what a photograph is, because everyone is trying to shoehorn some shitty AI image gen thing into our cameras for a quick profit

Frustrating to me, too, as someone who has recently gotten back into photography and it's difficult to know whether the photos I am using as inspiration are actually real or so highly edited that I'd never be able to achieve something similar.

It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"

> It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"

Almost as long as we've had photos, we've been removing "unappealing" things from them. Famously Stalin had Nikolai Yezhov removed from a photo after he was "purged", but the Soviet Union in general is full of these instances.

More lightheartedly, Disney supposedly (though this seems to be subject to some debate) has airbrushed a number of photographs of Walt Disney to remove cigarettes from them. And perhaps most famously of all, Han only shot first if you were born before 1997.

I mean, I get it, it's a whole can of worms. Also, sorry, little late to the reply here!

I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.

The other is when we are talking about photography as art.

For someone's home photos, I really don't much mind. Do as you please I guess, if you want to remember the time and place differently than it was, so be it lol.

But it's really wild that in some cases we have art that starts as a photograph and then becomes something else entirely after editing. It takes all the patience, planning, understanding and in my opinion gratification out of it when you can just say "yea, replace the sky with this fake one so my picture looks incredibly unrealistic"

Those are the two that tend to cause me the most head shaking lately I guess.

> I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.

While I share the concern over the use of tech to fool people, I think my example shows that using it to fool people politically is nearly as old as the tech itself. And realistically, it's the fooling thats the problem. The fraud of claiming this thing represents truth when it does not. But not only is that as old as the tech of photography itself, it can be done even without manipulating the photo. Don't have a massive crowd to your political rally? Just tighten the angles you take the photo from and don't show the empty arena in its entirety. Or maybe you want to convey a sense of wild recklessness and a breakdown of civility, just get a few closeups of a single trash can on fire and imply its representative of the larger scene.

As for the art, I feel like this is just the same discussion about art we always have. What is art? The tech is new so people are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, but eventually it will fall into its place as a tool in the tool belt, just like every other technology before. A lot of people I'm sure felt the same way about CGI in movies, but does the fact that you didn't have to shoot everything for real and wire RDJ to a plane 20k feet in the air in an Iron Man suit make the Avengers any less "art" than any other film is? We'll probably see the same sort of people making entire careers out of the skills necessary to get the most out of an AI system just like they do for getting the most out of CGI systems today. Heck, we can probably look forward to the trend of "AI free" art in 20-30 years, just like we're seeing the trend of "CGI free" movies today.

I don't mind so much if photoshop has these abilities but to put them inside the camera app is just such a backward step for creativity

Camera app with RAW mode?

Camraw

We're at that point in history BECAUSE everyone has a DSLR in their pocket.

Image quality on modern phones is in large part due to a lot of image processing done by the phone. Multiple photos being taken, combined for least blur and best dynamic range, colour balanced to best represent skin tones etc.

The line between the sort of algorithms that run on an iPhone and inserting a moon is largely philosophical rather than technical. It's an extremely important philosophical line! But the sort of things that have been added are the logical continuation of the sort of work that the camera teams have been doing.

[For context, I'm a Google Pixel owner, but of those three statements the Apple one is the one I agree the most with]

I was giving this my attention until the author included a long quote from Steve Jobs from the author's own dream

Sorry, what?

Apart from the level of dream-detail recalled being highly dubious, quoting your own hallucination of Steve Jobs to help with your argument about generative AI being useless (and missing the irony) is downright weird.

Also Math notes is basically the same thing search engines have been able to do for over a decade now. Enter a sum, get an answer.

No, I'm aware of the irony. I also wrote it down when I woke up, and you can see on stream that I copy it from a Discord message when I'm looking for it (https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8?t=14677).

I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.

> I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.

I mean, any article written by a human is something the brain made up. And I'm fine with that. But it reads like trying to give your opinion extra weight by associating it with Steve Jobs. It just came off weird.

I'm with you on most points. I'm not an iphone user but I can certainly appreciate that Apple Intelligence does not match the hype. That seems to be a recurring theme with AI though. Release a thing, shout from the rooftops about how great it is, and then wait for people to start posting about glue in pizza recipes or urging people to kill themselves or generating fictional news alerts.

the example he gave was multiline with variables. That's somewhat different than what search engines do.

Also, it's almost exactly what Solver has done for years.