cerebralhawks

LibreOffice is starting to look nice! How an office suite looks shouldn't matter, but... it does. I have decades of experience with Word and Excel, and while I don't love them, they are kinda the standard against which I compare others. Before (last time I looked, a few years ago maybe) LO looked like Office 95. Trash. The program was okay, but it irked me it was an all or nothing affair, like you had the LO core and you only saved a few KB by ditching one of the apps in the bundle. These days, that is less of an issue — and LO looks more like Office XP. It's a good look, especially for Ribbon haters. (I quite like the Ribbon, but I'm also nostalgic for the time before it, so I could take or leave it.)

I'm on a Mac now and we have our own office suite (iWork) and that's free, private, and it can read/write docx/xlsx files (newer Office files) pretty well. We use Microsoft 365 at work, and I have no problems importing anything made on that to the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers), and/or exporting files from them to the Microsoft formats and using them at work.

I don't think any spreadsheet program is quite as good as Excel, though. And I really don't do number crunching with it, I use it more to make forms. What I really like in Microsoft's suite is Publisher, and Apple doesn't have an equivalent of that. Not sure if Libre does. I think the other suites want their word processor to do double duty as a publisher, but none of them are quite there IMO. But as far as Word goes? Yeah, I'll swap that out with Libre Writer or iWork Pages (or even Google Docs if I weren't concerned with privacy) in a heartbeat. Word is nothing special.

I was just looking at it. And I should preface, I do not like or trust AI chatbots. I saw "uncensored" in the headline, but when I scrolled down to the pricing, it's actually censored unless you pay. So for free you have a limited number of prompts (seems quite generous though) but there's a maturity filter implied on the free tier which is "disabled" on the $18/mo tier.

I've just been using Duck.ai (DuckDuckGo) for simple and stupid questions (e.g. who would win in a fight between X and Y, dumb shit like that) and it's been fine. You should know DDG has been linked to Bing (Microsoft) for searching. They claim their AI is private. Doesn't really concern me, I think all AI is inherently shit, so I take them at their word that it's private... because I'm not sharing anything with it that matters. Just asking it dumb questions.

Happy with a phone that’s basically based on UNIX and isn’t run by a personal information broker. I can put Google apps on it if I want (and I think I have a couple) but ultimately it’s up to me what I want advertisers to be able to buy.

I dunno, just seems better, especially given the two cost the same. So all that personal information they sell doesn’t work out to a cost savings for you, plus the phone they make themselves is like 20-40% slower, newest model to newest model. So in a sense you’re kind of paying them to sell your data? Not my cup of tea.

You ever see a dump truck that says "not responsible for broken windshields"? Guess what. EVERY truck — this is US law anyway — is responsible for securing its load. So why do they have the sticker? So you don't bug them about it. Or at least so most people don't bug them about it. They also say stay back 200 feet. That's not a law. It's just a bumper sticker and is equally as enforceable. If they crack your windshield because they didn't secure your load, you (or rather your insurance company) can go after them. But the truth is, most insurance companies just write off so many broken windshields per however long anyway, they won't go after the company even if you have proof. But they could — and so could you.

Post the review anyway. Or at the very least post a review that says "the terms say I can't post a negative review so believe me when I say the service was acceptable." It's not a negative review. It's not a positive review either. It's a neutral review and it calls out the clause. It is heavily implied to be opposite of what you said. You said the work was acceptable, implying it's unacceptable. If you used the same tactic and said the work was great, the opposite would appear true, that it was not great. But acceptable is not great. So say it was acceptable and imply you were forced to say that. Thusly, an intelligent person will see your message for what it is.

Hate that this is being downvoted by people who are mostly objectively right.

I think it’s poetic. I don’t think it’s true or even feasible but I wouldn’t downvote it.

At least with Cyberpunk we have a number e.g. CP77

It's Lemmings not Lemmites, so keeping that same energy... Piefeedings? Piefeddings? I think Piefedders sounds better, though none of them are great.

However, Piefed does have fed in it like fediverse, so it's not a bad name, just hard to riff off of.

That is so weird, I was just reading about them earlier today. I really only cared about one or two songs off their first album, but Apple Music recommended the 25th anniversary EP, it's like 4 songs on that album that are getting remade or something. Apparently they've gone through some lineup changes, it's still the two sisters singing and writing though, and their latest album of new material was last year.

Too heavy for me but I'll listen to "Brackish XXV." I might listen more than once. I mean, the novelty in 1999/2000 was, here's these 12-13 year old girls (I think one was 14?) and they make metal. And it's not even cute, they're serious about it and they're punching above their weight class. Not by much but they did alright and enjoyed moderate success. I guess it's still a novelty if their lineup is all female and they're writing their own stuff, that still makes them somewhat unique in the industry, but still not really my thing.

Not a fan of Rockstar in particular.

GTA (as in, the first one) was a wonderful gaming experience. GTA 2 changed the game in some interesting ways, yet it remains the black sheep of the series for some reason. 3, 4, and 5 were iconic. Then 4 came out again (oops, the OG 4 is actually just Vice City, it's not the fourth game but it's also not DLC, not sure how that works. Interestingly while GTA 4/VC and GTA 4 were in different cities, GTA 5/SA and GTA 5 both took place in San Andreas (and surrounding areas). Anyway, I couldn't get into the new GTA 4. GTA 5 was better, but I never finished it. Then they paused GTA to do a sequel to their Red Dead games, neither of which really went anywhere (popularity wise) but whatever, RDR2 (sequel to Red Dead Redemption, itself a sequel to Red Dead Revolver) ended up being a massive hit. Wasn't for me, but I enjoyed what I played (the intro and maybe a couple hours after).

I don't think GTA VI will be worth $100. I'm not interested in paying more than like $40 for it, tops. But, that's just me. I know even at $100 it will break records and then everyone will think they can sell their games for $100 each. I don't like it, but it's going to happen.

This is the most stable beta I've used, and I've used every x.0 beta since iOS 10.

I think it was iOS 11's beta that had the prompt to update iOS every time you unlocked the phone. That was fun. So was waiting 1-2 weeks for them to fix it. And honestly that's about as bad as it gets.

Pro Max (16) so I'm not worried about battery life. It is worse with the beta, but that's to be expected.

Liquid Ass is gorgeous and I love it, but I'm not going to stop calling it Liquid Ass. It's funny and I saw the YouTube thumbnail.

So... they let you uninstall it? Or are we talking about spyware not made by Meta?

Because the way I understand it, Meta has been hacking iPhones ever since the App Tracking Protection thing came about. Mostly via the in-app browser. Point is, Tim Cook said Meta can continue to track you, they just have to get your permission first, and even if you said no, they still found a way to do it anyway. Therefore, are Meta products not spyware?

(So are Google products. On iPhone, you block ads system-wide with a DNS filter. Same as you do on an unrooted Android phone, since you don't have access to the HOSTS file — rooted users are just using AdAway or something like it to update HOSTS. Anyway, Google apps use Google DNS, which they say makes them faster, but it also has the convenient upshot (to them) of going around your ad blocking, and forcing ads on a user who has explicitly configured their device to block them.)

Maybe.

I grew up reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and John Saul. I now think horror movies are kind of silly. I like the Scream series because they're smarter. They're good slashers but you have the whodunit aspect as well.

I can't speak for everyone though. And maybe it's not so bad to be scared of horror? Like, isn't that part of the fun?

Never got into horror games though. The problem I have with that is, being that it's a game, either you have the agency to peek behind the curtain, or you don't. With a movie, you only see what they want you to see. I never actually played horror games, as such, but there were a couple scary moments in games I have played, like Fallout 3 with the Dunwich Building. It's a random building toward the southwest corner of the map that is not connected to any main or side quests. (I think one of the DLCs had a tie in to it, though.) When you go in, you find that you can't leave the way you came in, and as you traverse the building looking for another way out, you see flashbacks that are handled like jump scares. It's really not that scary, but the first time through might be. There's a similar area in Fallout 4 (Dunwich Borers, so, same company) and you experience some of the same stuff.