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.

I have a plan B too, but it’s not so gentle.

The goal is to become the number one energy producer and stomp out all opposition and competition before it has a chance to grow. There are no laws against cartels and monopolies, so you exploit the hell out of it. You file extremely broad patents to prevent fossil fuels and combustion based motors from ever becoming a thing. You play super dirty, no mercy, no remorse. It’s going to be basically like the East-India Company, but with renewable energy.

You lobby governments to adopt renewable energy and electrical devices you provide. You influence the public opinion on fossil fuels by spreading information about climate change, pollution and negative health effects. If the global energy company becomes big enough, you should make your own private army and conquer all the places where large oil deposits exist, and establish massive natural reserve parks in those areas. Lobby the governments to make other similar areas legally protected from all industrial development for the next 1000 years.

You would become the supervillain billionaire of the 1800s, but you put the whole world on a renewable trajectory.

I would go to the year 1800, and bring with me a bunch of books on science and engineering. Basically all the building blocks you need to build wind farms and solar power. I would visit all the universities I can and drop these books in library shelves. Some climate change literature could be nice too.

So, a name and shame kind of site?

Back in the X11 days, I actively avoided GNOME, because Cinnamon, KDE and XFCE were so much better. I had so many issues with the design philosophy, that using GNOME felt impossible.

However, when Wayland started having some support in GNOME, I got very curious and gave it a try. Then, I also bought my first touch screen laptop, and simply had to try GNOME with it. Turns out, GNOME wasn’t that bad, as long as you’re not trying to tweak every little thing about it. If you’re a tweaker, KDE is definitely the way to go. If not, GNOME might be tolerable or even good.

I’ve done so much tweaking already, that I don’t really have that itch any more. Sure, some things like custom keyboard shortcuts have to be just right, but that’s why you have GNOME Tweaks and the dconf Editor.

I used to have a Sony phone. It was so big and thin, that I was constantly worried about bending it accidentally.It had like some super cinematic 21:9 ratio or whatever. Looks good in a movie theater, but feels really awkward in your pocket. Actually, my jacket had pockets big enough for that phone, but It was really difficult to keep it anywhere else. In the bad old days, people used to keep the phone in dedicated belt mounted phone pouch/holster/thingy. I wish I had one of those leather pouches, because that phone really needed one.

Reading, browsing and gaming on it was great though. Having a bigger screen is something I really did appreciate when sitting in the metro every day.

If you need more screen realestate, consider getting a phablet (aka plus sized phone these days). If you can carry a tablet with you, that would probably be even better.

Yeah, that sounds like you’re worried about paradoxes. You might want to check out the Many-Worlds Interpretation to fix that. In the MWI, every decision and event branches into its own timeline. Instead of running into your past self, you would be visiting an alternate you.

If you don’t remember being visited by a time traveler, then your timeline didn’t have that event. That’s ok though, because there are infinitely many timelines. However, you can’t visit all of them. You’ll only have access to the ones where a future you visited an alternate past you. Instead of changing your own past, you’re creating a new timeline where an alternate you got visited by a time traveler.