My partner is an archivist, and we’ve talked about AI a lot.

Most people in their field hate this shit because it undermines so much of what matters in their jobs. Accuracy is critical, and the presentation of the archive requires humans that understand it. History is complex, requires context and nuance, and understanding of basic ideas and concepts.

Using “AI” to parse and present the contents of the archive pollutes it, and gives the presentation over to software that can’t possibly begin to understand the questions or the answers.

There are more than enough technological advantages in this field to help with digital archiving, adding LLM doesn’t help anything.

This has nothing to do with economics. It’s the national archive, not a business.

Productivity is irrelevant here. A big part of archiving is accuracy and presentation. All of which should be done by human beings. Period.

Moreover, they’re going to want an emulator that can be managed alongside the rest of the museum software.

That’s like saying what’s the point of the air and space museum if they’re not actually flying the planes.

They’re not going to use the original hardware and put wear on them. That’s a standard part of archiving.

Just for the record, this is exactly what any museum would do, because they’re not going to actually run any of the older hardware. Because that hardware is part of their collection, and it behoves them not to put wear on them.

Also because emulators can be managed remotely.

Problem is disabling it will likely be locked behind the Enterprise edition.

Kind of like the “Recommended” section in the Start menu. There is actually a way to disable that entirely…if you have an Enterprise license. There is no way to do it on any other version.

I said it was back when they took Group Policy out of the Home edition: the long term goal is to make truly controlling Windows a premium feature that only corporations can afford, and you see that with the slow elimination of many of those settings.

It definitely depends on the game and the particulars of your own system.

The answer to the question is a resounding “you’ll have to try it for yourself”. It could be flawless, it could be a nightmare, there’s a lot of variables.

Unfortunately our director just doesn’t pay attention to these things. When I try to bring them to him, suggest “hey this looks very bad, maybe we should plan on something now”, he brushes it off. Same thing happened when I pointed out how much VMWare we use and that it would be good to start a transition, or at least start shopping around for some alternatives to consider.

Now like a year later he’s only just starting to mutter stuff about Hyper-V.

Which just feels like…Hyper-V is fine I guess, but god damn, could we at least try not to sink further into Microsoft quicksand? There’s better options out there.

The cloud is many things, but most of all, it’s a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don’t control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:

The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can’t be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.

I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software, and it depresses me to no end how few businesses or users see it for what it is.

And it’s exactly this: a trap. A trap users people are racing into, and they have no idea, at all, how bad it’s going to get when the doors close behind them.

The rest of us are left with little recourse. Looking at the difference between Outlook and New Outlook is genuinely depressing because that’s the future we’re all being shepherded into against our will. I swear, in like 10 years, Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.

At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.

Except that’s just straight up not true. You can’t escape it? You can’t escape installing the Michaels app to get a $5 discount coupon?

I’m absolutely flabbergasted by what I’m reading here because I have no idea what the hell any of these people are doing in their lives where they’re collecting this many apps out of necessity. This is entirely selection bias. They seem to be incapable of resisting the pull of trashy, useless apps, and insist the whole world is.

Nothing is stopping you from walking into any of these businesses, getting your purchase, paying with a card, and leaving.

That’s what I used to do, but a good portion of the time they’d continue their spiel to try to change my mind.

Where are you shopping where you are routinely encountering cashier’s that are this pushy about the apps? The overwhelming majority of cash register attendance are underpaid employees that are just trying to get you through the line. They said the line because they have to say the line, but most have no intention of really trying to sell you on it.

Once upon A time, these things were just rewards programs, with the key ring bullshit. Were you signing up for each and every one of them too?

I was like “I’m gonna stop you right there: flip phone.” and pulled it out of my pocket and brandished it like I was the sheriff of Luddite-ville.

I…is the implication you would have no other choice but to install their app if you didn’t have a flip phone?

I’m baffled by these comments. Who the hell is actually listening to these people and installing apps on their phone just because a cashier mentioned it?

What on earth are you people talking about?

I go to CVS all the time for random things, I’ve never once been pushed to use an app, nor have I ever encountered anyone that is legitimately pushing you to do anything after a simple no.

I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.

There’s your problem right there.

Does this author not understand how dumb this makes him look? You downloaded an entire app, in the checkout line, for a $5 coupon on something you were likely overcharged for in the first place?

Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.

If only there was a universal form of payment that you could keep in your pocket and pull out to use anytime with very minimal interaction. Maybe a card or something.

Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app.

Why are you using them?

Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus.

Why are you using all of them??

Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods

Why the fucking hell do you need any of these?!

This is literally the 2024 equivalent of your mother having a dozen toolbars in Internet Explorer because she kept clicking on coupons.

Just go to the place, pull out your credit card, pay the cashier, and leave. How the hell does any functioning adult blame the technology when they have this little self control?

I don’t think that’s necessarily an unpopular opinion. Burton allowed his villains to chew the scenery, and so did Schumacher. We got what we expected with Jim Carrey.

I think most people’s issue with Schumacher’s Batman is that the extreme camp was a departure from Burton and not exactly what fans wanted from a Batman film at the time. The swashbuckling 70s Batman comics, and the dark, gritty 80s Batman had more than proven the character could be done seriously. Burton put that on screen with his two movies, which carved out a more modern, more gothic, and (for the time) more grounded Batman than previous adaptations. It worked, and people liked it.

Schumacher’s movies reverted Batman back to the camp of the '60s, and was explicitly pulling from the Batman TV show, which was effectively a comedy more than anything else. Fans weren’t feeling that anymore in the 90s, and they kind of still aren’t (though I’d argue they’ve opened themselves up to camp a bit more after we’ve been to the extreme other end with Snyder).

That said, if there’s one aspect of Batman that is always permitted to be campy, it’s the villains (within reason). Jim Carrey’s Riddler is basically Frank Gorshin’s Riddler from the show, which was kind of the standard way of depicting Riddler for the era. It didn’t align with what we generally expect from Batman nowadays, but it was undeniably entertaining, and not all together unfitting.

It feels like it’s part and parcel with an overall, growing trend in software to be openly hostile to any system wherein the user has proper admin rights.

Because the potential for someone to use those rights to fuck with the software merits refusing to support systems where they can.

Further entrenching the notion that, to participate in a “modern” consumer software environment, the user must agree to be handcuffed on their own hardware.

Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.

They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.

Right? I work with plenty of users in non-technical roles who have at best rudimentary Excel skills, and even they could figure out a better way to manage this. The whole thing with Excel is to make basic data work accessible even to a rube, and let them do an incredible amount of things otherwise outside their skillet.

Using Excel like this is like giving someone a microwave and they only use it as a kitchen timer.

But it is a really good game for the time being

Call me when it’s a really good game forever.

Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn’t mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money

The hell is with all these comments?

Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they’ve actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.

It’s got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no “net good”, only perfection and villains to be spat on.