umbraroze

There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.

I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.

Brave as a whole? Brendan Eich is the next Elon Musk. Not in wealth, mind you, but dude’s got the antics, is all I’m saying. (Not a good look. Look just what’s going on with Reddit.) Also, a dipshit of EPIC proportions.

Brave Browser? Hell no. The whole marketing point is “oh, it’s a web browser, but with ad blocker”. …installing uBlock Origin is a 2 minute job on Firefox and even on Edge. Have literally walked elderly people through the process. (It got even weirder when they talked about replacing ads with approved ones. I don’t know if they still do that.)

I do draw the line on the whole BAT nonsense. “Oh, you can use cryptocurrencies to support your fave content creators? Even if they didn’t opt in to the program in the first place, and you still make it seem like the donations go to them? And then say ‘oh yeah the donations will eventually go to them IF they sign up for the program’ oh FUCK YOU you’re just deceiving fans aren’t you.”