Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[Sturmvogel Prime]

You know what's bulls... I mean, You know what's a Little Thing That Annoys the Hell Out of Anyone? Cloudflare Turnstile. Don't you HATE when you try to navigate on a website or make a search on a gaming news site just to face a "Just a moment..." all of a sudden?

"Verify you are human by completing the action below."
Claiming the website "needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding".

It becomes irritating when 8 of 10 sites do that crap. And "Mother of all irony", we're verifying our humanity with a click in the age where robots can literally generate photorealistic images and even voices.

[Lord British]

Have you noticed with some games on PSN that getting it on both PS4 and PS5 are separate purchases?

I bought Vengeance Hunters on PS5 because I didn't see another option, and now I see a PS4 version on sale. Too bad I only have a PS4 arcade stick. Fuck.

[Daytime Waitress]

Waking up and wondering if this is just the reality we inhabit now, or if the bots operating the media outlets have merely hallucinated shit that's not actually going to happen, but they're all interlinked and cyclically regurgitate the same thing so it just snowballs.

And then worrying that if they regurgitate it enough, they might actually reify it.

Anyway: more than a few places on the interwebs this morning are reporting that Michael Bay is on track to produce a movie based on Outrun.

Spoiler

Don't want to link to any of the clickholes that feed off this kind of shit, y'all have search engines.

[Some guy]

Voicemail. I have to wait twenty seconds for my phone to tell me the exact time I was called and the number that left a message, then when I actually listen to the message it takes thirty seconds for someone to tell me something that I could have read in five seconds if it was a text message.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Voicemail. I have to wait twenty seconds for my phone to tell me the exact time I was called and the number that left a message, then when I actually listen to the message it takes thirty seconds for someone to tell me something that I could have read in five seconds if it was a text message.

Adding to this, assholes who send you ten minutes long rambling whatsapp voice messages because they're too lazy to type. Now I need to listen to this nonsense because you couldn't be bothered to think first about what you actually want to tell me and then typed it out like a civilized person who doesn't think their time is more valuable than mine, great, fuck you then

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Google forcing an AI search result to the top of every search. Normalizing this is bad for humanity as a whole; the results are a weird combination of pulling a mishmash of information from various sites, and sometimes outright fabricating a plausible but outright factually wrong text response. I keep seeing people post about how they "had a conversation with ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/whatever" and it makes my eyes twitch. You're not having a conversation; it's an elaborate text generator that's creating plausible sounding responses but ultimately does not truly know or care about the topic of hand. It's sleight of hand at best, deception at worst, with the companies marketing it claiming it will continue to improve (obviously so they can sell more crap to the gullible masses).

Autogenerative AI in the hands of commercial capitalism is a recipe for an absolute disaster. We are an idiotic species.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Google forcing an AI search result to the top of every search. Normalizing this is bad for humanity as a whole; the results are a weird combination of pulling a mishmash of information from various sites, and sometimes outright fabricating a plausible but outright factually wrong text response. I keep seeing people post about how they "had a conversation with ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/whatever" and it makes my eyes twitch. You're not having a conversation; it's an elaborate text generator that's creating plausible sounding responses but ultimately does not truly know or care about the topic of hand. It's sleight of hand at best, deception at worst, with the companies marketing it claiming it will continue to improve (obviously so they can sell more crap to the gullible masses).

Autogenerative AI in the hands of commercial capitalism is a recipe for an absolute disaster. We are an idiotic species.

I shudder when I think of how much energy this nonsense is wasting... so many people making "funny" pics to post for their family whatsapp group

[neorichieb1971]

Why don't facebook shorts just play as you scroll past them, instead do a 1 second loop continuously?

[vol.2]

8-Bit guy's brother runs an arcade in Texas. They started occasionally releasing short videos about their arcade, kind of like behind the scenes or what have you. They aren't particularly good videos, but I'm interested enough to watch them to see the cabs they are putting into circulation.

The last video they released they actually had the nerve to fire up a Patreon for. News flash guys, your YT channel is advertising for you BUSINESS, it's not suplimental income for a starving content creator. You can tell they don't even buy their own bullshit in the video.

[Sumez]

Google forcing an AI search result to the top of every search.

I've seen screenshots of this, but I've never seen it on any of my own searches. Is it something you have to enable first? Is it regional? Maybe a GDPR thing?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I've seen screenshots of this, but I've never seen it on any of my own searches. Is it something you have to enable first? Is it regional? Maybe a GDPR thing?

Very likely GDPR or only being rolled out in a few regions at a time. It happens on all searches and delays the actual search results from showing until the AI section finishes displaying. Very aggravating. It's not something you log into Google and opt-into either, this is the default now at least in Canada when you do a search on Google even when logged out, in a private browser window, etc. Not even sure you can opt-out by logging in and toggling it on your Google account.

[Mero]

I've had this, but only on searches where it's to do with a problem that I'm looking into, not all searches.

[Randorama]

Re: vocal messages.

I mostly use Weixin/WeChat when I am in China, and this App has a one-minute limit to vocal messages and talk-to-text conversion that also works on languages other than Mandarin (and, surprisingly, it is relatively accurate). I do not think that I have listened to a vocal message in at least three years or so, though the one-minute limit is interesting. I found myself learning how to record concise but informative records, because in one minute I can send the equivalent of a one-page document to someone who needs whatever work information they need. When people just rant stuff, also, I quickly skim their rants and write back some kind of AI-style pseudo-answer ("yes, I concur for the most part").

Speaking of which: my limited interactions with "AI's" (or, what is being sold as such, these days) make me think that their model of human behaviour are catholic nuns or priests, i.e. people highly trained in pretending to know what people are talking about, and then "answering" via highly codified but vaguely accurate assertions that may make their interlocutors happy of the false attention they receive. Hey, before you criticise me: I learnt my way in bullshitting answers from great teachers!

...something that is irking me A LOT, workwise, is this.

I do research for a living, and one detail on which universities are obsessed over are affiliations on paper. Basically, when I publish something, the paper must carefully report my academic affiliation (university's address, department, email, name, role, number of funding grant, etc.). For the last 3 years, I have not experienced a situation in which publishers would get these details right, especially when they just had to copy them from online platforms.

Regardless of the publisher and journal, there is always some copy editor who manages to mistype some detail even when a script/AI automatically inserts the details in the formatted version of the paper. Imagine someone who clicks "import name into document" and somehow the software copies and pastes the name/address/etc. incorrectly. Of course, copy editors take days to fix these problems, and sometimes they can provide borderline delirious questions such as "your name is XX on the platform but XY on the paper. Are you sure that our software copied it incorrectly?".

Once I had to explain that the software/AI/whatever effectively wrote my surname by re-arranging the syllables at random (...but "nisiUr" does sound like a plausible surname, I guess: just, not in Italian). Why do I care? Because if these details are not perfectly inserted in papers, my university will not count the publication as mine and will basically ignore my results (yes, Kafkian/Orwellian bureaucracy at its finest, I know).

This Friday I received four cases like this, so I spent my whole Friday evening wondering if there is some renegade AI who really hates my guts, or something. I am writing this post to vent, but two of my junior colleagues were crying, thinking that they were never going to get promoted and would end up being fired even if they publish splendid papers. Believe it or not, I even lecture on this topic, at my dean's request, and graduate/post-doc students usually leave the lecture hall horrified. Piled Higher and Deeper, indeed.

[ryu]

A friend got run over by an old woman on the weekend and died on the spot. You almost can't recognize his bicyle as such on press photos.

[vol.2]

A friend got run over by an old woman on the weekend and died on the spot. You almost can't recognize his bicyle as such on press photos.

Oh jeez man. That is a big thing. I'm really sorry to hear that.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

A friend got run over by an old woman on the weekend and died on the spot. You almost can't recognize his bicyle as such on press photos.

Goodness, that's horrible. Do you have someone to talk about this?

[ryu]

A friend got run over by an old woman on the weekend and died on the spot. You almost can't recognize his bicyle as such on press photos.

Goodness, that's horrible. Do you have someone to talk about this?

I'm ok, thanks. "Thankfully" for me I only knew the guy online (though I interacted with him in one way or another almost every day for like 3 years now). We were part of a discord community so I had plenty of people to talk to. His brother showed up using his account this evening. Felt really awkward at first but he got along with us and was apparently also glad to have found people to talk to.

He definitely wasn't meant to leave just yet, especially not like that. It's terrible, and I can't describe how unreal this feels.

[BulletMagnet]

Very sorry to hear about your loss.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

If you use Google Translate to translate websites, it'll throw up a generic "Can't translate this page" error. That's all it says. However, if you reload it a bunch of times, it eventually decides to work?

This happened to several sites I've tried that I've frequented via GT, so hopefully it's just having issues at the moment.

[orange808]

Skinheads at the show. (Doesn't matter how you dress. I know what a fucking skinhead is--and it's not a haircut.)

Particularly the ones that suddenly get triggered when the band makes it crystal clear what their songs are about. How could anyone be thick enough to listen to the band enough to know the songs and not grasp the obvious meaning behind them? Astonishingly ignorant.

And, if you did "get it", why in the hell did you think the band wouldn't express their views while performing songs that express their views, you twats?