smug woof

Image

We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today “nearby restaurant recommendations” mentioned. Gotta try that!

Ask it where I can get a burger, knowing there’s 3 spots that had it on the menu, AI says there’s none. Ask it to list all the restaurants nearby it can check… it knows 3, of the 10 or so around, but 1/3, even has a burger, on the menu.

Ask it to list the whole menu at restaurant 1: it hallucinates random meals, none of which they had (I ate there).

Restaurant 2 (the one most people go to, so they must have at least tested it with this one): it lists the soup of the day and ¾ meals available. Incomplete, but better than false.

Restaurant 3: it says “food” and gives a general description of food. You have to be fucking kidding me!

“BuT cAnInE, tHe A(G)i ReVoLuTiOn Is NoW”

This one just occurred to me randomly.

Image

I do not agree with every decision the Internet Archive makes, but I consider it a very important tool, for Internet archival and preservation - to the point, it even influenced what licence I chose, for my media and websites.

Sadly they’re now facing another threat, in the form of litigious music labels, that they’re now trying to convince to stop, by collecting signatures here.

AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

Bit of an update, there is now a general licence for all my stuff:

“Unless projects are accompanied by a different license, Creative Commons apply (“BY-NC-ND” for all art featuring the Canine mascot and “BY-NC” for everything else).”

It’s even included on my website, where most of the demand for a clear licence originated from:

Image

In practice this changes nothing, as I was never enforcing anything more than this anyway and given permission for other use too. Now it’s just official that this is the baseline, of what can be done, without having to ask for permission first.

If you have even a passing interest in what, or rather who is the cause of (not just) Googles enshitification and 15 to 30 minutes to spare, I would strongly recommended reading The Man Who Killed Google Search, or listening to the podcast episode, linked at the very top of the page.

It needs to be emphasised, the majority of these changes for the worse, are not an accident. They’re done very deliberately by cockroaches, seeking short-term profits, they can take a big chunk of, only to jump ship to another company and let everyone else, suffer the long term consequences of their actions.

I spent this Monday afternoon back from work, drawing myself as the “you made it to Friday sailors” dog. Totally unrelated to the 3 hours wasted on meetings, pretending to discuss great suggestions from high management, nobody else wants to implement.
Link to OG meme: https://youtu.be/z8x3JS7pP14

Image

Image

The impossible happened, and I actually drew something, second month in a row. Wanted to try drawing him standing, with some semblance of correct anatomy, without heavily referencing someone elses drawing, bring back the collar, darker “hair” and separate every different color, with a black line - for some kind of a more simplified look.

Image

Merry Christmas everyone! Have a very low resolution sitting canine, to end this year with.

Image

Years ago, I had a falling out with PayPal, when they implemented ToS changes, that would let them withhold your money without a reason and randomly subtract “ToS violation fees” from your balance.

They reverted the ToS violation fees part, but I refuse to do business with any company, who has the goal, to even try presenting such a change, to their clients.

I’m not surprised PayPal is alongside questionable fee increases, also running scummy browser extensions (through companies they acquired), that override almost all affiliate links with PayPals and present you with inferior discount coupons, to trick you into spending more money, shopping on sites owned by their partners.

The honey extension scam - YouTube video

Ironic they were even “referal link scamming” the influencers, they paid to promote their extension - PayPals ability to scam the clueless is quite impressive, but luckily it does not work on me.

Just throwing this out there, but does the edit, delete and reply feature work for any of you, through the website? I can only Yarn. Trying to do those other actions, generates a popup, asking me if I trust some # URL thing. Confirming it refreshes the site, without doing the thing.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers: X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

Time for the annual profile picture change. 😅
Second pixelart I drew this year, expecting my least active artist award soon! 💪🏆

Image

Image