Aether (moved) @Taylor@awoo.space

I hate the iPad. I hate what it started.

I don't strictly had tablets as an idea, but the iPad kind of spawned a whole lot of other problems, culturally, and in terms of tech design.

• it made people more often use restrictive, locked down machines as their catch-all devices,
• it made the industry try to make their devices stronger walled gardens once they learned they could get away with it
• it made web design prefer to design for mobile than for desktop,
• it bled into desktop design and oversimplified things to appeal to that market

Apple's design sense for its mobile devices has done and continues to do so much harm to tech at large, because everyone has to follow Apple's footsteps to support their users, or to not lose out potential users by providing similar functions.

Shame you can't change your username on Mastodon. If this being Amaterasu really has stuck, maybe I should... change my username.

Of course, if I later collapse in on myself and go back to being Taylor then changing my username back would be kinda embarrassing...

New avatar, by Shlimaz over on Twitter.

More Amaterasu art...

oh my god I am so tired of Twitter changing my timeline back to "Home" algorithmic garbage

There's a point where neglect to make your website not undo settings goes from incompetence to malicious neglect.

https://twitter.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/1221713792913965061

Half the replies to this are "some people don't deal with constant narrative?!" and the others are "wait you hear and actual VOICE in your head?!" and I think we're getting some miscommunication here.

Whenever stuff comes up about thoughts, I think sometimes people think the experiences are a lot more lucid than they are. I (personally, at least) don't *literally* hear a voice when I read or think. I can distinguish my imagination from literal sound. The same goes for "picturing" things - that's another thing I've seen posts confused about.

I'm not going to claim that people that say they don't have an internal voice or can't picture things are wrong or lying, but I do wonder if a lot who do react to these sorts of posts are misunderstanding them.

That said: how the heck does someone without an internal voice read text?? I can concede about an internal narrative being more emotional or visual or anything else but... what happens... when they read books... or posts online...

Hack into people's IoT garbage purely to flash a new rom on them and install Doom.
They don't have to pay a ransom to use their fridge, they just have to beat E1M1 on it.

🖼

It begiiins.

I hate that the current going meme on Twitter is controversial opinions, because Twitter thrives on discourse as being a source of engagement.
The spread of controversial opinion memes is simply supporting this source of engagement as being effective.

Twitter knows this - an official Twitter Movies account is asking for "controversial movie opinions".

I feel like corporations don't understand the difference between archival and maintenance.

Okay maybe that's not the right words.

Basically take old roms and the original Doom for example: Nintendo keeps wanting to resell you Virtual Console ports of things, and Bethesda is trying to sell ports of Doom on consoles.

But the thing is, these games are old enough that 95% of the original developers aren't working at their respective companies at best, or the original companies don't exist at all and the trademark is owned by someone else now at worst.

The current distribution model holds the perspective of treating the games as a product to continue selling on the same level as actual new games, but that's the wrong way to go about it. This is what I mean about "maintenance", the corporations want to keep servicing you the product as if it's brand new, to keep profiting off of it.

(And maintain copyright.)

These games should be free. They should be presented as relics with the preface that the games might not work, or would require emulation efforts on the part of the user.

Archivists could work to assist in the accessibility of this with their own source ports and the like, and this work could be supported through donations.

While you could argue that's the intent of the corporate model - to provide accessible means to play old games with source ports - the fact is is that profit still remains a motive. Money is not going towards the devs of the game, while being framed as purchasing the game. Donating to archivists for their work isn't framed as buying a game, but supporting archival and maintenance.

This maintenance too allows archival to be essentially criminalised as copyright infringement. Frankly this is absurd for numerous reasons, but it may mostly stem from the fact the digital age has broken the concept of "theft".

Imagine if libraries were punished for having copies of books that publishers decided to resell in new editions for. Of course, this isn't strictly an appropriate comparison because physical books exist in a finite number. Data fundamentally doesn't work this way, copying data does not create any loss in the availability of that data.

Despite that no original devs may exist at the copyright holder, despite that copying these old games does not hurt the accessibility of those games, copyright infringement is treated as "theft" because certain higher ups want to keep control and maintenance of a product, because the industry can't comprehend that nothing is lost from letting someone else distribute some ancient software.

Hell the tech industry wants to make everything you own just rented in the form of subscription models, so they can keep an even tighter hold on things, but this post is long enough.

For god's sake Youtube, I know you have the feature, when will your AB testing give me the option to block channels so I can stop getting PDP recommendations?

... for that matter, Paypal, when will your AB testing let me set invoices to not require a delivery address? I know that feature exists too! Other people have it!!

Changing up more of my profiles as I get more Amaterasu commissions and fall further down this rabbit hole~.

... if we had spaceships with artificial gravity, what would stop those gravity cores from curling themselves, or the ship, into a ball?

I guess the best solution would be spherical ships.

You know half of this wouldn't be such a hassle if you could just set new tabs to load the home page you set?

Like, why let me set a custom page for the home page, but new tabs only allow "Firefox Home"?

I wonder when they'll stop allowing custom pages, too?

Really hate how any time Firefox breaks userchrome because of some random background change (read: element rename) I then have to spend hours searching for solutions.

I have better things to be doing.

Anyway apparently -moz-binding got deprecated, thus breaking the dynamic loading of CSS and JS I was doing. This was apparently done in FF72, and yet it didn't rear its head until tonight's 72.0.1 zero-day patch.

Which makes no sense, but, wwwhaaaatever.

Computers!

What are we going to do when we get actual high-level intelligence emerging from computer systems?

The term "AI" is so cursed by Silicon Valley garbage that we're going to need a new word.