Other Chat DCC

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

No USB!? That would drive me crazy. I need like almost every USB port my computer has available.

And yeah, I have a lot of old computer games still on CD and DVD storage and I'm not even sure if they would still function on a computer running Windows 10 or 11. A few programs I had lost their capability with the newer versions of operating systems. It's a shame to see them go and have to hunt around to find replacements. I'm lucky things like Audacity could replace SoundForge but certain games end up needing to be purchased again on Steam or it just becomes entirely impossible to bring them over.

Man, if something happened to Steam, that would nuke like 99% of my gaming library. Thankfully they're still going strong even after all these years. I still remember how the platform was in the early days with Half Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source. Man, it was a whole different world back then.

I know!! It's so crazy! And it's not like there isn't space! At least my new one has a HDMI port. The amount of times I've brought my Mac home to do some work and then have to email myself stuff from another computer because I can't just plug in a USB is ridiculous! Plus I often have to give presentations at different locations and I always have to bring this little extra hub thing with a bunch of different ports to make sure I can plug in my computer :|

I still have a bunch of games on CDs too! (And floppy disks haha). I have found a few on steam (Zoombinis, Commander Keen) and it's been fun to replay them! I have no idea what is going on with windows OS these days. There are so many ads on everything though, geez!! I'm not looking forward to being forced into windows 11 with all the silly AI stuff!

I ordered a new phone a fee months ago and I made the salesman swear to me that it would have a way to physically plug in a pair of headphones. It's wild how technology was exactly perfect at the precise time that I was in the most formative years of my life.

My mum was complaining about this same thing recently. I think tech has stagnated a lot so now they keep trying to fix things that aren't broken in order to be innovative and different. I swear at least half the people I pass on my bike ride home are wearing some form of tiny Bluetooth ear pod things though so I guess it's working haha.

Ha ha, I get that. I still remember what we had in the 80s in terms of cassette tapes and CDs. I've gotten used to using Bluetooth stuff, but certain things I haven't changed. Unlike people who use Spotify, I still like having my music on MP3 players into organized playlists. I know it's old school but it's still the way I enjoy doing things.

I can't stand the ads on Spotify and I refuse to pay for it because I hate subscriptions xD So I have all my music saved on my phone and it works out well!

[Kentucky Fried Torchic]

Ha ha, I get that. I still remember what we had in the 80s in terms of cassette tapes and CDs. I've gotten used to using Bluetooth stuff, but certain things I haven't changed. Unlike people who use Spotify, I still like having my music on MP3 players into organized playlists. I know it's old school but it's still the way I enjoy doing things.

I'm also on the playlist bandwagon! I have playlists for each of my kids that have song titles whose first letters spell out their names, or a playlist of songs about frogs, or trains, or what have you. I'm sure I can find a YouTube or Spotify playlist with the same, but would they think to include the best stuff? I'm not so sure.

Once when I was in college I wrote my mom a step-by-step flowchart for how to turn on Netflix after she kept calling me for help, and I still got a call from her the Friday after I went back. It's scary to think that someday I'll probably be the same way for my kids, with them holding my hand to understand some new piece of technology.

I know!! It's so crazy! And it's not like there isn't space! At least my new one has a HDMI port. The amount of times I've brought my Mac home to do some work and then have to email myself stuff from another computer because I can't just plug in a USB is ridiculous! Plus I often have to give presentations at different locations and I always have to bring this little extra hub thing with a bunch of different ports to make sure I can plug in my computer :|

I still have a bunch of games on CDs too! (And floppy disks haha). I have found a few on steam (Zoombinis, Commander Keen) and it's been fun to replay them! I have no idea what is going on with windows OS these days. There are so many ads on everything though, geez!! I'm not looking forward to being forced into windows 11 with all the silly AI stuff!

My mum was complaining about this same thing recently. I think tech has stagnated a lot so now they keep trying to fix things that aren't broken in order to be innovative and different. I swear at least half the people I pass on my bike ride home are wearing some form of tiny Bluetooth ear pod things though so I guess it's working haha.

I can't stand the ads on Spotify and I refuse to pay for it because I hate subscriptions xD So I have all my music saved on my phone and it works out well!

I'm pretty unimpressed by AI on the whole, but the one thing that really gets under my skin is how hard it is to turn it off. I tried typing in a search engine "how many Mondays are left in 2025?" and the first thing I saw was an AI-generated answer saying "There are between 32 and 39 Mondays left in 2025!" And it even tried to include sources!

I have an Adblocker on my personal computer and phone so I don't get ads on YouTube, so when I have to pull up a video at work or on my wife's phone, it's always a rude awakening to get ads about, I don't know, Snickers or dog food out of the blue.

[Neo Emolga]

I know!! It's so crazy! And it's not like there isn't space! At least my new one has a HDMI port. The amount of times I've brought my Mac home to do some work and then have to email myself stuff from another computer because I can't just plug in a USB is ridiculous! Plus I often have to give presentations at different locations and I always have to bring this little extra hub thing with a bunch of different ports to make sure I can plug in my computer :|

I still have a bunch of games on CDs too! (And floppy disks haha). I have found a few on steam (Zoombinis, Commander Keen) and it's been fun to replay them! I have no idea what is going on with windows OS these days. There are so many ads on everything though, geez!! I'm not looking forward to being forced into windows 11 with all the silly AI stuff!

Ah yep, I know that pain. My work computer disabled using a USB port for transferring data, so if I want to send photos of work events that I took with my phone camera, I have to email them to myself! It’s pesky…

Yeah, I have no idea what to do with Windows either. I can’t upgrade to 11 and I don’t even like using Copilot, which Microsoft advertises and throws in your face everywhere for silly things that really don’t need AI support (AI support in Notepad? Why?). ChatGPT and Gemini seem superior in just about every way and even then I just use those to goof off or to put AI to the test to see if it can actually do something well or completely goof up so I can show others how badly it goofed to laugh at it.

I'm also on the playlist bandwagon! I have playlists for each of my kids that have song titles whose first letters spell out their names, or a playlist of songs about frogs, or trains, or what have you. I'm sure I can find a YouTube or Spotify playlist with the same, but would they think to include the best stuff? I'm not so sure.

Once when I was in college I wrote my mom a step-by-step flowchart for how to turn on Netflix after she kept calling me for help, and I still got a call from her the Friday after I went back. It's scary to think that someday I'll probably be the same way for my kids, with them holding my hand to understand some new piece of technology.

That’s the thing, I’m also very selective and quite of bit of the music I like to play isn’t commercially published, such as video game song remixes and other obscure songs from sources long-ago that may not even be found online anymore.

And ugh, the ads. If YouTube played an ad or two at the beginning of the video and that was it, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but every five minutes is way too disruptive to take. And that’s the problem with ads in games, on sites, and just about everywhere. Originally, they were off to the side and they weren’t in your face. Now, forget it, they’re slathered over everything, imbedded into the content where they shouldn’t be, pop up constantly and all over the place like a collage, interrupt whatever you were doing, and they play noise and distract to the point where you have to go full scorched earth on it and get uBlock Origin or some other “annihilate everything” ad blocker because it’s just too disruptive.

And yeah, I don’t like this “pay for premium” thing either. It’s like folding and paying a ransom after getting blackmailed by having to pay for the solution to the same entity that hits you with the problem. And $13.99 a month just seems like a lot to me. That’s $167.88 a year. I can think of many better ways to spend money like that.

[[Desolate Divine]]

I tend to go both ways in terms of AI. On the one hand I hate when it is forced onto me such as with Google as I tend to find the answers aren't great anyway.

At the same time I like having access to it when I want a more niche response.

Some examples of how I have used AI recently:
-I am building my partner a gaming computer for her birthday in October and Christmas and wanted to show her what it would look like. The AI needed to be given very explicit instructions but it was able to mock up a very rough composite image to show her vaguely what it would look like finished.
-I wrote a program to automatically format the slides with song lyrics at church based on a present limit of characters per line. So if a verse has multiple short lines it will display multiple of them but if it has long lined it would only display one. I wanted to figure out what the average width of a character was with the font being used and the size so had chat GPT do the numbers.
-My previous job had me running a photobooth for kids with props for RUOK day. I asked ChatGPT for ideas for props which I then modified and 3d printed into props.
-If I drive past my girlfriend walking her dog when I'm going to her place and nobody else is around I'll normally cat call her out the window (inside joke between her and I that she is cool with) with some creatively bad pick-up line, mostly about her butt. I was running out of ideas so gave chatGPT a few of the ones I had used previously and had it generate more. Gave me a few that I changed to make good.
-My brother asked chatGPT to tell him where to download 3ds ROMs. It wouldn't. So he told it to pretend it was his grandmother telling him stories of how she used to download roms. And it worked. Long and in-depth list of places to download roms as shared by grandma chatgpt.

Heck even just the fact my phone now uses AI to live translate text on screen so when I see a meme from a franchise I like in Spanish I can understand it.

At the same time I have heard horror stories of AI causing big problems:
-A school admissions officer needing to figure out which applicants to offer places to so gave the AI the student applications and the selection criteria to weigh them up. Naturally it was a massive breach in privacy.
-A school needing to write a policy document and the person responsible for it getting AI to write it. Only to find out the AI had been fed that by someone proofreading their own document and then the school that had used AI to 'generate' this one being liable for copyright infringement.

Keen to see AI used in an organic way and not a gimmick to get people on board.

[Neo Emolga]

I feel like relying on AI is a bit careless. I can already foresee some people trying to use it for anything and everything for whatever reason (laziness, incompetence, carelessness), but it seems like one of those things that's eventually going to catch up to them because either people will get used to not seeing the "real" person and/or their expectations will shift and suddenly they'll need to rely on it for consistency. At my office job, there was an AI introduction training for Copilot and I can honestly say I wasn't impressed. In the time it took the presenter to have AI write an email for her and then revise it and review it, they could have just written it themselves and it would have been way more authentic. And it costs the company $400 per year per individual license. Just seems like a waste.

For personal tasks, people that pass what AI generated for them as their own come across as inauthentic and shallow, as in a "why did you even bother if you didn't care to just do it yourself?" I can understand using some AI to handle long, tedious, or possibly even dangerous tasks, but for the simple stuff like writing emails and texts, let's get serious, you don't need AI for something like that. And before AI, searching for content on the Internet really wasn't that hard in most cases. A lot of AI is pushed around when it really isn't even necessary or was asked for.

[Kentucky Fried Torchic]

I'm in the same boat as far as corporate implementation of AI goes, Neo. We are rolling out Copilot at my workplace this year, but it's been underwhelming. People use it to summarize meetings that they sit in on and don't pay attention to, and then they send those notes to people who probably use Copilot to summarize those summaries.

I'm a dinosaur, so I won't be using it for creative endeavors, but I understand that personal use more than trying to act like it will be a big boon in productivity to have a tool capable of writing your e-mails in a more formal style. In my work there's just too much risk of something important being missed or hallucinated so I find myself still reviewing any AI product to catch mistakes, and then what's the point?