You kids and your AI.
Back in my day, it’s my wife who does the work and I take the credit, and history remembers that it was me.
2 Likes
Outlook (now*)* has a “reactions” option (like Facebook “likes”) (*It may have had it for some time, but I’ve never used it, or had anyone respond with it until just now)
When someone uses it, Office365 sends you an e-mail to let you know - which it sends straight to the Junk Email folder… (99% of the junk emails in my work email are from Office365 - mostly to tell me someone in Teams has just mentioned/messaged me)
5 Likes
I also encountered them for the first time recently. Absolute nonsense. They make sense in instant messaging platforms like Teams, but what am I going to do with an e-mail reaction? If memory serves, it doesn’t even tag the copy of the e-mail in my Sent Items that it has been reacted to. If I wanted acknowledgement that it had been read I would have set that up when I sent the e-mail. If I’ve sent something as an e-mail only it is probably not urgent and any useful response would be either (a) longer than convenient for a Teams message or (b) something I’d want to archive, most likely both.
I think the only useful e-mail notifications I receive are when someone leaves a comment on a shared document.
5 Likes
I’m on a lot of email listservs for work. Every time a really hot conversation gets going, with a dozen replies, people start using reactions (often on three or four responses all in a row), and Gmail, which helpfully threads all the messages together, then forces me to scroll past pages and pages of emails I’ve already read to get to the one thing that really is a new message (and not an emoji) somewhere in the middle of the mess.
I’ve tried explaining to strangers on the internet how miserable they’re making me, but they generally seem to think I disagree with the content of their reaction (such as it is) and accuse me of ridiculous opinions. So we all go away unhappy.
4 Likes
Something something AWS.
Apparently there was some drama today.
It barely affected me – I had to reschedule a meeting because a colleague couldn’t access the thing he needed to show me, but otherwise I didn’t much notice.
(I’ll admit to a degree of schadenfreude, though, as I have little affection for AWS.)
I hope it didn’t wreak any havoc for the rest of you. (Unless good things happen as a side-effect, in which case I hope it did…?)
3 Likes
My friend’s business basically supports brands marketing on Amazon - his day was completely screwed!
4 Likes
Only thing that failed for me was Signal. I’m disappointed that they were so locked to a single provider (Amazon now knows it can shut down Signal, US gov knows it can lean on Amazon to shut down Signal) and this accelerates my move to look for something else. (But I’ve tried getting people to use pgp/gpg with email…)
4 Likes
we had something much worse than an AWS outage. Our electrician caused a power failure and I had to cancel a meeting because I was sharing on the big screen and … while the laptop was still running and our small server battery was keeping internet alive for a bit… I couldn’t keep presenting.
They put in a rough fix and took today’s luncbreak to repair it and I had to almost postpone another meeting because they took longer than the lunchbreak … mimimi!
Power failure > AWS -.-
We still don’t have solar.
6 Likes
One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.
“My bed is stuck in Relax mode and won’t change,” moaned one user, while another admitted they were “sweating through my sheets because the app’s dead.”
3 Likes
For anyone using Google Drive, this may be of interest:
Basically, AI is now enabled by default and you have to untick the option in settings.
2 Likes
Good to know, thanks. I do use GDrive, and combine with GDocs for free OCR.
2 Likes
Anybody else having fun with Microsoft’s outages?
3 Likes
Professionally, I’m greatly enjoying it as we see one of the repercussions of SaaS platforms and hyperscale computing.
Personally, I’m barely effected.
3 Likes
I’m on leave this week so I’m Iooking forward to catching up on the fun when I get back.
3 Likes
The Azure outage apparently took down Typst’s live web editor. I was already the sort of person who runs that kind of thing locally, and now I’m more so.
4 Likes
It’s the brave new world where buying a ticket to an event and actually obtaining a usable ticket out of the transaction (in an offline-accessible form, and without installing anyone’s mobile phone app) involves going through the ticket seller’s tech support, talking to a chat-bot until it gives up, and finally having a nice human email you a PDF. Apparently I can look forward to this delightful and convenient process being a common future occurrence.
8 Likes
I had to use an app for a gig ticket for the first time on Friday. Of course when I stepped off the train the app refused to log me in. Cue a frantic spell in the queue while I tried to get it to show my ticket.
The app says I can move the ticket to my phone’s wallet. Maybe I will do that next time but I’d much prefer a PDF that I can download and/or print.
6 Likes
“But copied tickets!” “Yeah, that’s why you already scan every ticket on the way in.”
When a company says “you have to use our app” I hear “what you pay isn’t enough for us, we want to steal and sell your personal data too”.
8 Likes
The only time I had to use an electronic gig ticket was at a Dent May show in Leeds a few years ago. The app required an active Internet link for the venue to validate the ticket, and apparently nobody thought to check in advance whether the show was taking place in the most impenetrable data blackspot in the whole city.
7 Likes
No irony this time.
My laptop is 4 years old and only has an nvidia laptop graphics chip which was barely enough to play Borderlands 4 on the worst possible settings–solo. But the laptop is still good for everything else.
I was quite frustrated because I really want to be able to play with my friends. But I don’t want to move back to desktop computers and don’t want to spend money on a new laptop right now. And so I was once again looking for eGPUs … I couldn’t find any available product I would buy.
Then someone told me I could just use the nvidia streaming service (Geforce now or something). I have previously laughed this off as useless… except now I am super-happy that for the small price of 22€ (this is certainly subsidized by nvidia my friends who know about costs for such things told me), I can stream the latest graphics power to my old laptop and put off buying a new laptop for some time. There is a bit of lag and every once in a while I can’t get a connection… but I have had a lot more trouble playing on my laptop than with the streaming.
It really solved my current issues and who knows if I want to even play Borderlands 3 months down the line.
Also there is at least one eGPU product soonish available hopefully here as well that I would be very interested in… and now I can just wait it out until the reviews are in and it is available over here.
3 Likes