They are the epitome of the adage that their earlier stuff was better. For me, they jumped the shark when Roman Catholic bells were ringing.

This is shitty behavior by the company (and a reminder not to rely on online services for anything, not even storing your shopping list). But it isn’t Doctorowian enshitification. It isn’t a focus shift from consumers to suppliers to then be able to hold both captive, squeeze them dry, and making the service worse in the process. This is just new management pissing off nerds.

First thing, disable all auto backup on your phone. This is step 1 for anything.

If you have access to a computer, log in to Photos through a browser and delete images there and it won’t affect your phone’s storage. Maybe test it with an image if lesser importance before you bulk delete.

You could also move your locally stored photos to a different, temporary folder. Then delete the backed up ones in Photos. Then move the local files back.

I wouldn’t rely on the Google Takeout images. If the standard settings applied, the images will all be in Google’s compressed format. Granted, most people in the world couldn’t tell the difference. But it might be better to keep the best quality for the future.

And those folks aren’t on here because they already do their socializing in person. A frightful thought.

Florida Man strikes again.

What’s wrong with these people? The rabbi had time to sink to the floor, the priest is clearly passed out on the floor, why is the pastor still walking into the bar? Are they all blind and deaf?

The deeper message must be that just out of shot an imam and a Buddhist monk are looking at each other puzzled exchanging remarks like “They really cannot learn from each other, can they.”

(I do get the bar joke, internet. No need to well actually me. This was very much tongue in cheek.)

I feel like the Atari 2600 is quickly becoming for so-called AI what the “how much is a gallon of milk?” gotcha question had become for politicians who run for office. A rather pointless bit of news.

As Scotty said: the right tool for the right job. An LLM is maybe not a chess engine and that’s fine too. Why would we expect these models to be Magnus effing Carlson if they cannot reliably summarize an email or recommend eating pebbles?

Maybe 10 years ago I tried designing a font in Inkscape. It was possible but more of a gimmick. I then installed Fontforge and very quickly decided I wasn’t going to learn how to use it, didn’t have the bandwidth. But the tools are there. Both methods have a learning curve but I think have enough instruction resources online.

It’s one study. It’s pretty sturdy in terms of methodology but it hasn’t been peer reviewed as far as I can tell. They also only looked at established software projects, not anything new. So this is a narrow scope and it doesn’t prove that so-called AI cannot enhance productivity at all. It just indicates that pro devs can be fooled into thinking they are better off with it when they are not. But I feel like that’s hardly news in these mad times.

Are you beginning to feel a narrowing of your throat?

Das war Englisch.

I think this has been true since the start. They have never not been in hot water financially.

No.

The rise of progressivism has nothing to do with corporations decorating themselves with the relevant messages where it suits them. That’s just marketing. You see that in companies who championed the marginalized during the previous administration and dropped it near instantly when 47 came in. That’s corporate opportunism.

We have seen the rise of representative democracy, of fascism, the rise of communism in the past. I don’t think we have seen anything that deserves a similar label with regard to progressivism. There is a general sine curve thru the ages of left-leaning and right-leaning politics. And thru the swings from one side to another we have still abolished slavery, enfranchised women, built social security nets, decriminalized abortion (or at least permitted it in some cases) and same sex relationships, etc. A lot of it was built on political movements but I dare say none that rose to the top and stayed there. So a rise of progressivism is as non-sensical to me as a rise of conservatism. They are just opposite ends on the political scale and we dance from one side to the other and back again.

It’s difficult 2 transpose what u can do in English just 2 other languages written in the Latin alphabet for centuries. English has a remarkable and quite confusing amount of homophones that is absent from other indoeuropean languages. The apostrophe as a letter skipped marker is fairly universal. But beyond that it’s already a different ball game in other more similar languages. 2 to too, 4 for, r u - that’s very English only.

Simplified Chinese characters are a hint at what they did on the Chinese mainland to cut down on writing time. Beyond that (and I don’t speak the language so 🧂) there are single character abbreviations for countries. 美国 is America and 美 suffices as shorthand, which means beauty otherwise. Your example phrase is “R u coming 2nite?” In English we use the present progressive tense here, which doesn’t exist like that in Mandarin. It would be phrased as “Come tonight?” The question mark could be replaced with the character that functions as a question marker by itself. And I think you can do this in 3-4 characters and I think they might just beat you to it in a bilingual texting competition in terms of speed.

The mainland population may also be more adept to obfuscate their speech especially online. So similarly pronounced character combinations take over the meaning of a term the censors are actively looking for.

The Japanese like shortening stuff, mostly loanwords, to unrecognizable words. The word for part time work is アルバイト (arubaito) taken from the German for work (Arbeit). Cool kids have whittled it down to baito. A remote control has become a リモコン (rimokon) in normal parlance. Overly long Chinese character combos like 自動販売機 for a vending machine get shortened to 自販機 dropping characters that can be inferred (if you speak it).

I also want to add that text speak is heavily influenced by restrictions on text length and charges for each text. Non Latin script characters take up more than one Latin character per Chinese character for instance. It’s probably 5+ in decoding per character. So you reach 160 letters quite quickly and that’s why SMS in China was very cheap and quickly adopted a system where message threads would be sent and put back together on the recipient’s phone. In Japan they used email from the start, even in dumb phone T9 texting days. They had no Twitter-like restrictions on text length so they didn’t need to be shorter than what their thumbs could successfully fumble together.

Let’s not call it psy op then. We need a new term. BS op maybe?

I think you’re looking at correlation more than causation. That’s what the enlarged gas tank metaphor in another comment here is trying to hint at.

I don’t mind your fiddling with that razor at all. I see what you mean.

Your intelligence isn’t improved by calmness. Calmness may simply be the state when it is the most unimpeded.

I think what you’re not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

I don’t know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn’t be actors. He could’ve really had it in his lung but played up the “haha, maybe I breathed in a seed” line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn’t mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that’s when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.