Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

A useful aspect to a completely unambiguous fascist gesture, even though it’s ultimately performative, is that you can use it to gauge which news media you can trust to call a Nazi a Nazi, which will obfuscate things with layers of “both-sidesing”, and which will outright be regurgitating propaganda

This news is symptomatic of the current state of tech. This decision was bonkers dumb.

When you do mass layoffs either the exec who did the hiring or the exec doing the firing was incompetent. You don’t get mass layoffs in a profitable company without incompetence. Period.

Random shuttering of profitable products, followed by frantic bargain sales: incompetence

The tech industry is manifestly, obviously, inarguably run by incompetent executives but there isn’t a pundit anywhere calling it out

“Daring Fireball: DPReview Found a Buyer: Gear Patrol”

There’s something fundamentally wrong with a management team where their first impulse is to shutter a valuable property and only shop it around when there’s outcry. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/20/dpreview-gear-patrol

“Briefly, my concern with ChatGPT - by Daniel Zollinger” https://dznz.substack.com/p/briefly-my-concern-with-chatgpt

Turns out that Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set.

This is opt-out, not opt-in so if you use Lightroom, for example, it defaults to adding all of your photos to the set.

If these are unpublished pictures, work-in-progress, etc. they'll still be analysed as soon as they're synced.

I've been using Lightroom to sync photos from my Windows desktop to my iPad. Now I need to reconsider that.

Flat UI styles have evolved into a UX brutalism. A disregard of the end-user masked by a posturing utalitarianism. Every instance of ease-of-use is shoved underwater by a drive towards minimalism. Affordances are only allowed reveal themselves through undocumented finger-mantras or gestures

“Brian Eno on NFTs & Automatism”

“The idea that Ayn Rand, that Nietzsche-for-Teenagers toxin, should have had her whacky ideas enshrined in a philosophy about money is what is terrifying to me.” https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/brian-eno-on-nfts-and-automatism/

MS Word used to actually be a great app. Bit unwieldy but a solid workhorse. Wrote a lot in it until about 15-20 years ago.

I've still have had to use it semi-regularly since then (can't avoid Word entirely if you're even just a little bit publishing-adjacent). And it's just been one steep nosedive since they added the ribbon UI. Keeps finding new lows.

It’s impressive just how much worse word processing is today than it used to be even just a few years ago. Google Docs is consistently awful but the decline of MS Word over the past decade is awe-inspiring. Between the two of them, it’s amazing the written word is still a thing