Depends on how urgent it is. To some extent, it’s entirely normal, since eating tends to have that effect.

Ask anyone with babies what happens after every breakfast.

Translating the UI is annoying, but trying to translate the function names is just pure agony.

As long as you’re doing simple little things, it’s fine. Try to do serious stuff with it, and you’ll end up fighting against the program at every turn. Professional grade software aims to make your life easier, not harder.

Speaking of programming, I’ve noticed that all the commonly used symbols are easily accessible in a US layout. In many other layouts, some common symbols are really inconvenient to use.

Just finished setting up a Debian computer with a really strange mix of localisation settings. Keyboard layout and number formats are local, but the UI is in English.

If you’re a small strawberry farmer in rural France, it’s fine. If you’re doing something even a bit more serious like making technical or scientific calculations, you’re using a wrong tool. Excel wasn’t designed for that even though pretty much everyone is constantly pushing those limits.

When you see someone using it in another language, you can immediately tell that they aren’t doing anything serious.

I kinda get it where MS is coming from with this decision, but I don’t approve of it at all. They want to be more user friendly with all audiences, so that they can sell excel to small farmers in France, who definitely don’t speak a word of English. I guess that attitude should tell you that doing serious calculations wasn’t the main goal here, even though nearly everyone is using Excel that way.

This application is a victim of its widespread success. People make some pretty intense things with it that definitely call for switching to Python, R, C#, fortran or whatever. Because of that, serious professionals can’t avoid it any more. They can’t just treat it as a fun little toy it really is.

Here are the reasons why I use all of my electronic devices in English:

• I already know English, so it’s not a burden.
• Localization is never perfect. Just dig a bit deeper into the settings in Windows, and you’ll always stumble upon some English here and there, no matter what the language setting says.
• Troubleshooting sucks if you have to use another language. There are a million posts, answers and articles about your problem written in English, but only 9 written in your local language. Among the million articles in English, you’ll also find a few that were written by people who know what they’re doing. The 9 articles and posts in the local language were all written by clueless idiots.
• With some applications, like Excel, localization really hurts usability. I guess it’s fine for people who make calculations only a few times a year, but people who use Excel on a daily basis just hate the translated function names. If you already know your way around the English functions, using a translated version means you’ve got your both hands tied behind your back. What used to be trivial, suddenly becomes an epic voyage, just like it is with those who use Excel only once a year. Good luck trying to get anything done with the translated version. It might even be be faster with a pen and paper.

Yeah, I probably spent too much time refining it. Better skip the editing next time, and stick with the initial draft.

Subscribed!
Gotta say, I didn’t have any cooking stuff in my feed. Like, none at all, because I couldn’t care less.
The food I make is super simple, because I ignore all recipes, so what good is a cooking show to me. I’ll just wing it by throwing in some tasty ingredients in a pot and calling it a meal. Just add and heat, time and agitation. Works every time.

Fair enough. Besides, I already have many slop channels I don’t watch. Meaning, I played on video while doing the dishes, subscribed to it, and never heard from it again. There are surprisingly many channels that were created about a month ago, have only 15 subscribers, and those videos have like, 5 views, zero likes and zero comments. I find those kinds of channels all the time now. However, If I subscribe to all of them, they might become big enough to ruin YT for everyone else as well. I see that as a win-win situation.

When I initially started this experiment, the first thing was to unsubscribe from everything I had actually found worth watching in the past. Then, I wanted to check what’s going on in the “trending page”, only to find out it no longer exists. No wonder why. It only had stuff that was apparently very popular to millions of people, but it never had anything I wanted to click, let alone spend time watching. Apparently, that was also true for many other people since YT got rid of the whole thing. That would have been my go-to solution.

Anyway, the not logged in front page is probably the next best thing. I’ll give that a try. Thanks!.

Ooh, and it’s a big channel too. The algorithm must love that one. Subscribed!

Cities: skylines

This one doesn’t even require Proton, since it’s Linux native. It’s also a very chill game.

But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.

If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.

I know many people who use meta platforms, and they don’t seem to be very happy with the material they find. AI slop is getting totally out of control over there.

When I want to talk to friends and family, I just give them a call, send an SMS or have a group chat on signal. I don’t need meta platforms for that.

YouTube is a mixed bag though. I still find some value in there, but that’s through sheer quantity of videos in there. Finding good ones is getting harder every year. Alternative platforms are getting better, but the selection seems to be pretty narrow by comparison.

I tend to block most of the internet cancer out there and only hang out in places where the internet doesn’t suck that hard. Anything touched by Meta is obviously out of the question. So as far as what people generally call social media is concerned, I just avoid all of it. Nothing of value was lost when I abandoned that burning pile of trash. Lemmy is ok though. It’s clearly a social media, but everything about it is just so different that it probably doesn’t even count as a “social media” in this context.

What about AI then? It’s complicated. AI in general is pretty cool, but I’m using that word in a very broad sense. Stuff like isolating human voices from a messy audio signal involves AI. When a camera focuses on a human face, it’s using AI. When your postal service uses OCR to read the address off a letter, it’s using AI. Oh wait, nowadays even your phone can do OCR. Anyway, none of that really counts in this context, now does it? That’s not the AI people are angry about.

AI that generates text, audio, pictures and video definitely counts, but that’s just a fraction of what AI really is. It’s currently visible, popular, widely used and commonly discussed. That’s the type you’re really asking about, now isn’t it? My answer: it’s still complicated. The technology itself is just fine. The way it’s used to ruin the internet isn’t.

For example, LLMs love to use specific phrases and people love to use LLMs to generate text for anything and everything. What you get is AI slop text that has all the telltale signs of being generated by an LLM and proofread by nobody. The internet is filling up with low-effort trash like that, and I’m completely fed up with all of it. Still not fed up with AI as a whole though. Everything under the peak of that ice berg is still very cool.

Yeah, the effect of subscribing seems to be very subtle. So far, the experiment hasn’t lasted more than a few days, but I think I’m beginning to see a pattern.

The channels I subscribed to do show up a bit more often, even in the search results. I also see plenty of other channels in the main feed. Interestingly, there are a few channels I watch every now and then, but they never asked me to subscribe, so I didn’t. Somehow, those channels still show up in my feed as if I had subscribed, which makes me wonder what the role of subscribing even is these days.

However, this experiment needs to continue much longer. I wonder if it continues like this for several weeks. I’m really curious to see what happens to the channels I subscribed to. Will they all show up in the feed consistently, or will some of them disappear completely. Time will tell.

That could work too. Superstitions and religions were in at the time, so I think there’s plenty to exploit.

You could call coal the Devil’s rock, and spread rumors about it being cursed and haunted. You cal talk about the smoke causing vice, moral decay and sin. Oil could be seen as the blood of the Earth, tears from ancient curses, bad omens etc. Only rebellious sorcerers and heretics would dare to tamper with the natural order of things by burning oil. As the un-godly un-natural smoke poisons the air, it poisons the soul etc. God gave you the sun and wind, so using them is the only righteous choice… You get the idea. The 1800s was a magical period of time.