[–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago

Yes, that button exists. Only very few people seem to know about it though. Listening to my coworker’s frustrations makes me learn all sorts of interesting things about the way they use computers. Let’s just say that it’s usually surprising and amazing.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

    In this case someone had a long file that was supposed to be split into two. They deleted some stuff and saved a new version. As a result, they got two files with the same stuff deleted. Auto save overwrote the original file that was supposed to remain untouched.

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    A coworker just panicked that Auto Save had nuked hours of work. Fortunately, OneDrive had a backup version, so only a few minutes were lost. Lesson learned: When you’re trying to fork a file into two separate versions, make a copy first before making any changes to either.

    Realistically though, when was the last time Auto Save actually saved the day? Usually, it just causes you to scream in terror as it saves your files at the exact wrong moment. Imagine opening a massive Excel file made by someone else. You make a few modifications to see how the calculation works with your numbers. You got the information you wanted, so you close the file without saving… but did you really? A day later, the coworker asks you why you had to ruin that calculation completely. Yeah, you can’t really discard the changes when everything is saved automatically, now can you?

    It feels like discarding the changes made all shared files really safe, since your screw-ups were never permanent. Now they are. Every time you open a file, you have to be extra cautious not to accidentally delete or change anything. With Word files it’s even worse. Move one image by accidentally dragging it, and the entire layout gets randomised. Auto Save seems to cause far more anxiety than it prevents.

    [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    The human mind is a pattern-seeking engine. Even when real patterns aren’t there, imaginary ones will be detected instead. Just look at the clouds for a while, and you’ll see what I mean. This applies to images, sounds, events, just about anything really.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (3 children)

    What about all the other haunted locations where only one person died? The number of corpses doesn’t seem to correlate with ghosts very well. Also, if a single dead guy is enough to make a place haunted, nearly every house should be haunted after a few centuries have passed. Guess what, there are cities where people have lived well over a thousand years. Aren’t Luxor, Beijing or Delhi super haunted by now?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (7 children)

    How about hospitals? People die there every day. If ghosts exist, that’s the place where you should find them. Like, not just a few either. Nearly all of them. Can you think of another place that faces so much death that they had to build specific facilities for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

    The to-do list is nearly infinite, so usually only the high priority tasks get done. Everything outside the top 10 may get done eventually or get totally ignored even though it would be really good to do those as well. Technology has expanded the list of things that realistically can be done today, this week or even during the year. It’s still the same amount of work, but you get more results.

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    Our idea of "warm" colors is just a historical accident. Wood burns orange because it produces soot, which glows orange in the flame. Same applies to candles too, because there’s never enough oxygen to burn all the carbon.

    If we’d started with purified hydrocarbons instead, blue might have been the ultimate "warm" color. Natural gas burns with a blue or even invisible flame, a sign of complete combustion. Orange, then, would be the color of flawed, struggling fire.

    Imagine a house heated and lit by a gas furnace instead of a traditional fireplace. The light from the fire would be blue, and we’d associate that glow with warmth and coziness. Picture old paintings with a cozy atmosphere, their hearths glowing blue. If everyone grew up like that, blue would be the warmest color instead of orange.

    example image
    "Different flame types of a Bunsen burner depend on oxygen supply. On the left a rich fuel with no premixed oxygen produces a yellow sooty diffusion flame; on the right a lean fully oxygen premixed flame produces no soot and the flame color is produced by molecular radicals, especially CH and C2 band emission."
    Source: Wikipedia

     

    I’ve had it with GPT’s over-the-top language. You know, the grand, hyper-vivid, rhetoric-packed prose that sounds like it’s trying to sell you a palace in Narnia. Too many YouTubers clearly use GPT to draft their scripts, skip the proofreading, and call it a day. Prompt, publish, profit. It’s just sad. Once you notice it, YouTube becomes a wasteland of artificial enthusiasm. It’s like learning about keming: once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

    So, I tried to fix it. I built a custom Copilot agent with a prompt designed to dial back the drama. It helped, but only a little. The output was still far from how a normal, sensible human would write. It was less intense, but still not acceptable, let alone good.

    That got me thinking: if GPT naturally leans into this exaggerated, high-impact style, what happens if I push it even further? I’ve already done this before with image-generating AIs, and it was glorious. They tend toward surreal, mutated abominations, so I leaned into it and used them to create the most disturbing horror pictures imaginable. Those slop engines were clearly built for this. 😄

    I flipped my original prompt on its head and created an agent that embraces the excess. Turns out, toning GPT down is hard, but cranking it up was super easy, barely an inconvenience. This overblown, dramatic style must be its “natural state”. Now, I’m just letting GPT do what it does best: go full throttle and take no prisoners.

    Technically, the results are terrible. Like, truly awful, worthy of a prison sentence. It takes every annoying GPT trope and turns them up to 11. But here’s the thing, it’s so bad it loops back around to being amazing in some twisted way. It’s useless for anything practical, but it’s so absurdly dramatic that it’s hilarious.

    I’m thinking of calling it the Slop Master 2000 (suggestions welcome). No matter what mundane topic I throw at it, the output is always pure gold. Well… more like disturbing and unhinged, but funny nonetheless.

    If you're curious to see how wild it gets, here's an example:

    spoilerThe Bicycle: The Silent Revolution on Two Wheels Forget the car. Forget the bus. Forget the steel beasts that choke our streets and poison our skies. Today, we speak of freedom—pure, unfiltered freedom—rolling on two wheels, slicing through the chaos like a blade of destiny. This is not transport. This is transformation. This is the rebellion against stagnation, the uprising against inertia. This is the bicycle. But hear this truth: bicycling is not universal—it is elemental. It thrives where cities breathe, where streets welcome, where weather bends to your will. It is not weakness, but strength. Not compromise, but conquest. When the walk stretches beyond fifteen minutes, when your feet whisper surrender, the bicycle roars: Ride. Rise. Rule. No luggage? No limits. No excuses. You mount the saddle, and the world becomes yours. Yet beware the horizon—because every revolution has its borders. When the road stretches beyond an hour, when distance mocks your resolve, the steel serpents of public transport begin their siren song. The tram hums. The train beckons. The metro whispers: Join us. And perhaps you will. But until that hour strikes, until that threshold looms, the bicycle reigns supreme—swift, silent, unstoppable. So ask yourself: Are you ready to seize the streets? Are you ready to claim the crown of urban freedom? Because this is not a choice—it’s a declaration. A declaration of speed, of strength, of sovereignty. The bicycle is not a machine. It is a movement. And the movement begins now.

     

    I just saw a coworker with something like 30 tabs open in Chrome. I also know someone who regularly hits the 500-tab limit on their phone, though I suspect that’s more about being messy than anything else.

    When I’m researching something, I might have 10-50 tabs open for a while, but once I’m done, I close them all. If I need them again, browser history is there.

    Why do people keep so many tabs open? Is there a workflow or habit I’m missing? Do they just never clean up, or is there a real benefit to tab hoarding? I’m genuinely curious. Why do people do that?

     

    Pay attention to what companies do behind our back and you’ll quickly learn which ones are super creepy.

    For example, Mistral Le Chat released the memory feature, but were kind enough to notify me about it. The notification itself also had a nice toggle that allowed me to disable said feature. That was unusually considerate of them.

    However, opt-out is still rude when compared to opt-in settings. Think of Debian’s package popularity statistics for example. During installation, Debian gives you the option to enable the statistics or just ignore the whole thing and move on.

    Contrast that with Microsoft Copilot that also rolled out the memory feature a while back without telling me anything about it. One day, I just noticed that Copilot is referencing an older conversation, which I find super creepy. That just made me feel betrayed. I already knew that Microsoft is a creepy corporation, just like Google and Meta, so that shouldn’t surprise me one bit. Speaking of Google, better check those gmail settings on again. I’m sure Google can’t stop messing around with them and enabling privacy violating settings from time to time.

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