well. shit. The external that has most of my PC games seems to have shit itself, and keeps disconnecting from my laptop. Which is also in dire straights, as it is. Even with the job I found I cannot afford to buy a new laptop right now, also I don't want to have to use w11 🤮, and was trying to avoid doing any black friday shopping, but I may have to buy another external at the very least.
technology is so frustrating sometimes. I have an old computer that I can plug my games HDD into to see if I can salvage anything from it, but dammit. I hope all my save games aren't corrupted.....😬
so I've been trying to set up a new-ish computer and reached the stage of installing software, but Windows won't let me
I'm trying to install Office 2013 (which I own). I've never installed the Microsoft 365 garbage on this computer, but the installation package is giving me an error that says the machine already has a pre-release or beta version of Office installed. and a new machine certainly doesn't come with non-rent-seeking software
because I can't uninstall something I never installed, I've had to delete the files and folders where they hid all the Office 365 elements, removed all traces from the Registry, disabled everything via Group Policy, and went Command Line Admin to directly strip that garbage from the drive
I even pulled out my old external DVD and installed Office 2000, in hopes that uninstalling that one might clear up whatever is going on with Office 2013. (interestingly, it wouldn't install using the newer Dell drive, but did using the older Samsung one)
and yet. still the error code. MS help offers nothing useful, and even drilling to the depths of Reddit user forums cannot help me
Hollow-eyed insincere robot posters are already flooding Meta's sites and they're everything we dreaded.
Meta’s various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world’s population. But businesses demand constant growth and, not content with almost half of the living people on the planet, Meta has decided to cut out the middle-man. It is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of its own creation.
A December 27, 2024 article in Financial Times laid out the vision. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told the outlet. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going.”
Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered [...] Liv’s account posts photos of children that do not exist, Brian rambles about how much seniors love to learn about textiles above an AI-generated photo of a nursing home where the faces of the elderly melt together like Barbie dolls cooked in the microwave, and Jade posts photos of her non-existent vinyl collection, the labels impossible to read.
“Road tripping with friends is the ultimate relationship test drive. Nothing says ‘friendship goals’ like being confined to a car with your favorite people, navigating unfamiliar roads, and sharing questionable gas station snacks. But the real prize? Watching the miles fly by, creating memories to last a lifetime, and witnessing the beauty of the country together. #imaginedWithAi,” Carter said in a June 25, 2024 post.
Translation: You do not exist as a person on Meta-owned socmed, only an account, a set of data points.
“Nobody asked for this or wants this.”
Like. The only reason they're pulling the profiles is because "they weren't received well." Meaning to say if more people had fallen for this shit and engaged with the profiles, they'd have just left them up ? Because 'engagement' is all that matters, right ???
Another point of ire is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to block the bots through typical channels: the option to block or restrict the profiles is missing.
Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney told The Verge in an email [...] the company has identified the bug that was affecting users’ ability to block the accounts, and that the profiles are being removed to fix the issue.
The idea of purposely flooding social media with bots is ridiculous on its face, but it’s in line with how Meta has promoted generative AI tools. Anyone in the US can make a chatbot of themselves, with the idea being that users can send their bots in their place to chat with followers.
Insane that their entire business model regarding convincing people to use Generative AI is to flood the market with so much substandard generic shit full of stock statements and noncontroversial opinions that it becomes the new normal, the new standard of reality. Quantity over quality. To the point that anyone expressing an actual human, messy sentiment gets flagged as the outlier.
So glad I can work on fic on my unkillable little cunt of a Chromebook while my as-yet-unpaid for laptop throws a tantrum like a $100,000 thoroughbred.
Need the old laptop to help set up the new laptop. Eventually I’ll get some writing done, but the new chapter won’t be up until tomorrow at the earliest. I did start it today, I swear. There just hasn’t been any stretches of uninterrupted time while this old laptop has been functional. In fact, I’m being interrupted right now while making this post so I have no idea if it even make sense.
