They probably thought taking photos of their dishes would have been complicated or expensive. Funny thing, if they were going for this overall aesthetic, then taking the photos with a cellphone (no matter how crap and outdated) and slapping Instagram filters (or equivalents) on them would have worked beautifully. Anything is better than this.

The problem is that the services are asking for age verification, but to do that, you need to supply them personal information, and the way the information is handled is opaque. You’re handing highly sensitive information to a private company that, more often than not, cannot be trusted to handle that information responsibly for the singular purpose they’re tasked with.

One solution would be an official government service which supplies this information and nothing else. We have “strong identification service” in Finland, they supply your identifying information to government services and businesses that need to have the actual information on record, while you see which information gets shared. There’s no technical reason this service couldn’t just supply “Is this person 18+? Yes/No” and absolutely nothing else, even anything tying this person to any identifier.

Actually, if age verification would become a legal requirement, I’d expect the technical side to be exactly that. I frankly can’t believe the UK half-assed this stuff and went “whatever, let private providers use whatever voodoo they can come up with to make age verification happen”.

Somewhere in the “strong desire to drop whatever the heck this current society nonsense is and become a swamp witch and make a living by growing weird flowers for people” region. Now, some may call that a girlboss stage, but it’s kind of its own separate thing? Once again, real life can not be mapped neatly on a linear axis, I’m afraid.

For a few years I had a subscription to Office. I thought I was more productive.

But I… probably wasn’t?

It’s hard to qualify. LibreOffice always felt like an office suite. “You can do things here.” Boom. I did it.

Office was like “But wait! There’s a zillion more things you can do! Until your subscription expires at least.”

But then I got curious. How exactly do I do these zillion new things in LibreOffice??? They claim to be mostly document compatible, so how do I do the same stuff?

Aha. I can actually do this shit. Turns out most of this stuff was very minor spreadsheet thingamaijggery. Want to lock rows or columns? It’s slightly different. Want to do weird icons for values? It’s slightly different. Etc.

Very important learning experience!

😑 But I don’t know crap about Ableton, I’m an FL Studio girl.

Things have changed significantly since Super Mario Bros. was released. For example, vast majority of video games released these days feature no senseless violence toward turtles. Many even portray turtles in factual, chilly way! 🐢

Yeah, for most things, GIMP user interface is absolutely fine.

Most of my mild grumbles about GIMP are not really usability problems, rather just features that would be nice to have. (We got better layer groups now, yesss. Non-destructive plugins are finally within the viewing distance. Yay.) There is stuff that GIMP doesn’t do but competing open source apps do, and while there’s interoperability, it could always be better. (I hear GIMP is finally going to come up with a replacement for xcf files, hope they cooperate with Krita devs and blow the dust off the OpenRaster project.)

The only really aggravating GIMP usability thing is that exporting is very janky (would rather have one single unified export dialog with all the settings), but I assume that’s just a thing because of the way GIMP file plugins have worked in the past.

Reminds me of some interview of Linus, where they showed another photo of his workspace. Linus said the first thing people usually notice is the standing desk (he was a bit of a trendsetter). The second thing they notice is the wall colour. They use the paint in mental hospitals. It has a calming effect on the human mind. (Goodness knows Linus needs all the chill he can get.)

Game that was literally named after a crime involves doing crimes? I’m sure this came as a surprise to Elon, but I must say that I’m a seasoned video game enthusiast, so this wasn’t surprising to me at all.

(Also I never got too far into GTA5. Decided to instead go back to Saints Row. GTAs pretend to be super serious games while still being satirical at the core. Saints Row was basically ramping up wackiness constantly and being unapologetic about it.)

There’s two variants of Debian: Debian, and “damn, this distro is not as flexible as I’d like, I guess I should have just installed Debian in the first place”.

Just use #.

It was just an obscure character, toiling in the sidelines. Then Twitter happened.

I have a headache and the coffee isn’t working. I read that one heading as “avoid instant reptiles”.

That’s right, I already avoid instant reptiles. I prefer the slightly slower reptiles. Turtles are very cool. 🐢

MacGyver? My childhood hero? Oh what do I think about the series oh boy [5 hours of gushing omitted for brevity]

I have the DVD box right on the shelf in case I have a MacGyver emergency and need to watch MacGyver

Skyrim.

Oh yeah, the world is going to fear my stealth archery powers.

I’m in my 40s, and last time when I was at McD I saw some 20-somethings sitting at their table, looking at the liner notes of an AC/DC CD they had no doubt grabbed from the second hand store one block over.

I almost went over to say “oh wow, am I ever happy to see you kids enjoy classical music, eh?” but I didn’t, because this is Finland and talking to random people at McD is considered weird, of course.

Which is why I take a completely different direction. I poison my artwork I post online through the one technique they can’t account for.

See, I’m not super great at drawing, and in order to protect their precious models, they’d literally have to go take a look and say “yeah, that drawing wasn’t very good”. They can’t detect that automatically yet!

/sorry for a very predictable joke btw

LLM bots absolutely don’t care about any stated preferences. Heck, they don’t care about robots.txt rules, which try to give hints to search engines what’s even sensible to add to the indexes.

However, “this isn’t our fault, we told them this shouldn’t be scraped, but did this dumb bot listen, well no” is still good policy.

I just use K3B to rip audio CDs. In particularly tricky places, I use cdparanoia and the FLAC encoder on command line. MusicBrainz Picard to fix the metadata. ffmpeg on command line to convert the FLAC albums to MP3 or other formats.

I’m not sure if posting it to Tumblr will get it noticed by LLM crawlers fastest. (People can, heaven forbid, opt out of LLM crawling there. It probably doesn’t help, but you can.)

If you post it on the bird site or the orangered site, it’ll go straight in, immediately, though.

Yeah, I decided back then I would probably not renew my subscription this summer. And I didn’t!

Funny thing, I thought I was more productive in MS Office because the user interface is more polished. But even when LibreOffice is at times janky, I’m actually far more productive in it, it turns out. Sure, my attention is always drawn on the tiny little things that trip me up, but if I look at the sheer amount of text and spreadsheets I can churn out, I’m doing much better on LO.