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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

    A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

    I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

    I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

    For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.


  • It’s quite frightening to see how fast these AI models have improved during the last few years. You can still spot errors in the videos, but how long will it take until you can’t do that anymore?

    It sounds terrifying to not know what’s real or not anymore. And also, these videos will put a lot of people out of jobs, especially in the creative industry. Who needs someone following a car with a drone anymore, when you can just generate that footage on the fly?






  • Tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.

    But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.

    Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?

    “If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble,” one of the people told BI.

    I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.









  • It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.

    I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.

    Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.

    It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.

    I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.



  • You’re in luck, I just had this problem today and got it solved! :) Also on Fedora (38) with an Intel UHD 620. Proof:

    First I got Photoshop 2020 from m0nkrus, because that’s a patched version without the online activation. I installed it with qemu on a virtualized Windows 11 to get all of the files (because the installer depends on an unimplemented mshtml function and is just a white, unuseable window in wine).

    Then I prepared a custom wineprefix with all of the neccessary files: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe winetricks -q allfonts fontsmooth=rgb gdiplus atmlib vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2022 msxml3 msxml6

    I copied all of the files in the C:/Program Files/Adobe and C:/Program Files/Common/Adobe directories into the same directories in ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c.

    That’s enough, you can now run Photoshop with a command like this: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe wine ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 2020/Photoshop.exe or create a nice looking app shortcut with wine-create-shortcut.

    Some things to note: The “new” file open dialogue doesn’t work, you have to disable it in settings. Otherwise, nothing will happen when trying to create a new file.

    Adobe Illustrator 2021 also works fine, but you need to build your own variant of wine with a patched gdi32.dll. The most annoying part was getting all of the -devel.i686 packages in Fedora, which took a lot of googling around. Haven’t documented the full list while doing it, sadly.