I've come to the conclusion that anyone who uses the term "AI slop" probably doesn't have anything meaningful to say. Not that "AI slop" isn't a thing, but its use is just a buzzword that doesn't mean anything and is becoming less and less relevant as the tools improve.
This is exactly how some others treat anyone who says AI. It’s not as though somehow GANNs are suddenly deserving of being labeled ‘intelligent’ at precisely the time when corporations are betting the farm on their hopes and dreams of replacing biological intelligence. It’s just a marketing buzzword that sells a framing of worker deprecation, something businesses have been fantasizing about since the Industrial Revolution, right? And so anyone who’s using the term must have a dismissible opinion that need not be given serious consideration.
(This isn’t how I approach the topic, but one hopes that such unfounded dismissals are not widespread, eh?)
It's seen as cool to hate on AI right now. I haven't used Firefox in about 10 years, and this is definitely not a feature I would want, but if I were still using it I wouldn't get all exercised over it.
> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker.
This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
VLC has fallen slightly victim to the “developer team tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and still isn’t done with the rebuild but has stopped maintaining the original for like three years” issue that some software seems to have
That's awesome. I used VLC only because of the nightmare of codecs back in the day, and worked well for me for ages. I now just use mpv with some UI plugins.
I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.
You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any chromecast device including chromecast homes with the microphone turned off.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
Third option: I don't pay for it, I don't load the ads, and the trillion dollar company figures out a way to live with the economic consequences of their own decisions.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
I used to dream about owning a programmable calculator in the late 70s/early 80s, but by 1980 we had Apple ][s in my high school and in 1982, I was able to use the PCs in college, first programming in BASIC and later Turbo Pascal, which was the best PC development tool in the 1980s. Most of my classes were in Pascal. My first job was in C++ and I was doing C++ by 1993 and still am.
Have you tried Lazarus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_%28software%29, https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)? When doing something for the fun of it, I would much rather work with Pascal than Python. Both languages were developed to be quick and dirty, but I feel like Pascal is more on the quick side, and Python is more on the dirty side.
