FinishingDutch

It’s pretty ball-sweatingly hot here in the Netherlands as well. Expecting 35c tomorrow and 36-38 on Wednesday.

Problem is, few houses and buildings are equipped to deal with heat like that. Everything’s well insulated, but built more for cold winters rather than hot summers. Every year, more people get air conditioning. Because you need to. It’s that or be miserable for two weeks straight. Anything above 20 makes me want to hit people.

First of all, the term is actually ‘cinephile’. And second… 😄

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the factors is ‘we stopped beating kids’. Back in ye olden days, they’d hit kids until they stopped being ‘weird’. You obviously can’t do that today.

It definitely wasn’t mainstream here in the Netherlands up until the mid 1990’s from my perspective. Any guy who did things with another guy was ‘gay’, irrespective of anything that they might engage in with women.

I imagine if that guy grew up in say, the 70’s UK, they genuinely might not have been aware that ‘bisexual’ was a thing you could be.

For this comment, I want to be absolutely clear that I do not give a shit about AI, and that it in no way factored into my decision to buy this iPhone 16 Pro Max.

With that disclaimer out of the way:

I very much look forward to a class action lawsuit. Apple advertised specific features as coming ‘very soon’ and gave short timeframes when asked directly. And they basically did not deliver on those advertising promises. Basically, I think there’s a good case to be made here that Apple knowingly engaged in false advertising in order to sell a phone that otherwise would not have sold as well. Those promised AI features WERE a deciding factor for a lot of people to upgrade to an iPhone 16.

So, I’ll be looking forward to some form of compensation. It’s the principle of it.

Even my local supermarket has like ‘258 vendors and affiliates’ as their cookie listing.

Can you imagine shopping in person there, and the entire supermarket packed to the gills with dudes in trenchcoats and magnifying glasses, taking a peak at the exact product that I might consider buying? That’s what they’re doing. Fuck all that bullshit.

We’ll also welcome our Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica brethren, obviously :D

Only a fool or a 12 year old would think otherwise. Back in the late ‘90’s, the web had a great sense of community. On forums, IRC, places like Cybertown, etc. You had smaller communities where you could reasonably know most users. They had a human scale; like a friendly neighbourhood.

Modern social media is definitely terrible. It happened because we were too welcoming. Back in those days, the web was a nerd domain. We all shared the same sort of interests and optimism for the future of the web. You had to BE a nerd to get online. To WANT to be online.

But now that it’s too easy for everyone to get on, the idiots have taken over. We really should kick everyone off the web who can’t name at least three characters from either Star Wars or Star Trek.

I’ve seen interviews with him where he mentioned: ‘I was reading a synopsis of a story that sounded really interesting’ only to discover that it was about a book that he had written. And apparently he has no memory of writing Cujo.

There’s ‘doing coke’ and ‘doing coke so much I forgot I wrote a fucking best selling novel’.

I’ll check out Brave, it’s been mentioned a few times.

I don’t mind companies making a dime, but now it’s really devolved in bad results that are profit-driven.

What’s the best alternative, in your opinion? I’ve tried Bing and DuckDuckGo, but both showed me worse results for my particular searches.

I just want classic Google Search back, before everything got turned to shit. But I fear that doesn’t really exist since there’s such an economic incentive behind how search engines rank and show results.

That fucking AI thing absolutely sucks for anything factual. I’m a journalist and noticed that it gleefully listed all sorts of factual errors in that AI summary. Stuff that you can see correctly on the original pages, but it somehow manages to misinterpret everything and shows incorrect information.

And knowing how lazy people are these days, most will happily accept Google’s incorrect information as fact. It’s making me very, very nervous for the future.