So vindicated.

I didn’t “think I got you”; I was leading into something: what was it about Photopea prior to this that made them fundamentally different from Digikam, Slackware, and discuss.tchncs? I’ve donated to Lemmy too and various other FOSS projects, so I authentically appreciate that your donations strengthened that interconnected ecosystem.

You clearly got plenty of use out of them, indicating how integral this apparently was to your workflow. You don’t show any indication you had problems with the Photopea maintainer’s actions or attitude before this. Was it the fact that Photopea isn’t FOSS? I’d agree it’s a huge difference, but at the same time, they’re basically free as in beer, and you weren’t just idly not paying them; you were actively, recurrently using their finite resources. Wouldn’t you agree that, even if you don’t want to give money to proprietary software (assuming again that’s the reason), they at least deserve to break even? If so, you could’ve just whitelisted them on uBO. But I also resent digital advertising for ethical reasons and because it’s a vector for malware, so I’d understand not wanting to turn off uBO and not wanting to give €5/month in compensation. But then it looks like, despite being plenty familiar with the FOSS ecosystem, you never gave it a fair shake. You just called GIMP icky and didn’t do the bare minimum level of searching that’d tell you ImageMagick exists for batch edits. So you weren’t willing to pay for the ad-free subscription (fair in isolation), you weren’t willing to turn off ads (fair in isolation), and you weren’t willing to try something else (fair in isolation), and thus you were just draining their money to your own ends (not fair).

So realistically, it sounds like you were never going to support the Photopea maintainer regardless of what they did or how they acted, and now that they’ve cut you off from using their service for free, you’re acting like this is some kind of principled stance rather than being a lazy, entitled cheapskate.

I am not financially supporting developers who act like this.

Are you financially supporting literally any developers at all? You made it clear you were not paying for a Photopea subscription and were using uBO, so there’s not a carrot or a stick here for the maintainer of Photopea (I guess there’s a very tiny carrot for losing you as a user in that you’re not using their resources). I mean that as a genuine question, by the way:

• What software that you use have you paid for and/or donated to?
• Was it because you had to, or because you felt strongly that they deserved compensation for their work?
• Did you ever at any point stop giving said software maintainer money when you felt they were no longer acting in a way that comports with your standards?

I don’t really understand why you’re using ad-supported proprietary software that you’ve never paid a dime for (or given a dime to, since you use uBO), claiming that you don’t use GIMP or Krita instead because the former “is terrible” and the latter isn’t meant for cropping (a trivial, fundamental feature of the software), and then acting entitled to use the Photopea author’s own personal work with zero compensation. So you have free alternatives (as in beer and as in freedom), refuse to do even the bare minimum to learn how to use them, and then go full “you took my only food; now I’m gonna starve” when Photopea’s author stops you from using their own site/web app for free that they run and maintain at their own expense.

If anything, you seem entitled and willfully ignorant, and I say that from the perspective of someone who resents digital advertising and proprietary software.

It’s 100% grammatically correct, for what it’s worth. If it helps, swap the two comma-separated components: “Turn them off, please.”

I’d go even further: the learning curve for Rust is shallower than C/C++.

• C is obvious: dealing with strings is a goddamn nightmare in pure C, and strings are used all the time in modern programming. Almost no guardrails for memory safety mean that an inexperienced programmer can easily run into undefined, nondeterministic behavior that makes bug hunting difficult.
• In C++, there’s a trillion ways to do anything (which varies enormously based on C++ version), and when you make mistakes of even moderate complexity (not “missing semicolon on line 174”), compilers like gcc spit out a gargantuan wall of errors that you need to know how to parse through.
• Rust, in my experience, gives you a much clearer “good” way to do something with some room for expression, and its compiler tells you exactly what you did wrong and even how to resolve it.

The fact that the compiler actually guides you, to me, made learning it much easier than C/C++.

I don’t know how else they could react:

And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…

The compiler is slower because it has more to check for, but “the code that came out was slow” seems like nonsense, exaggeration, or PEBCAK. Rust code is highly performant and very close to C code.

The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.

Dude what? C’s build systems like cmake are notoriously unfriendly to users. Crates make building trivial compared to the ridiculous hoops needed for C.

I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!

He doesn’t say what the program was, and the borrow checker operates by a set of just a few extremely simple rules. There’s no idea of what he was trying to accomplish or how the borrow checker impeded that.

So my reaction as someone who cares deeply about how disastrously unsafe C is and the tangible havoc it creates in modern society:

• I agree the compiler is slower. Honestly boo hoo. It’s slower for two very good reasons (better static analysis and better feedback).
• The code being slower is such a minor issue as to effectively not be true. Benchmarks prove this.
• I’m not going to take “big and slow” as a serious critique of Cargo from someone who idealizes C’s ridiculous, tedious, convoluted build system.
• The borrow checker is trivial, and unlike C, the compiler actually gives you easy, intuitive feedback for why your code doesn’t build.

Maybe I can start building up savings if I work overtime by zoning out of movies and thinking about stocking the grocery store for half an hour…

Hell wait, if I just think about being Nvidia CEO, can I split Jensen’s salary?

That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.

Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed. Not only am I almost never checking who an editor is when I check their edit, but I maybe know 100 people total (orders of magnitude less than the pool of very active editors); even among the few people I’d consider acquaintances, I’ve had my edits reverted and reverted theirs.

The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.

(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)

If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to take a look and see what the reason edits got reverted. Obviously it’s stale enough now that I can’t ask anyone involved to not bite the newcomers or tell them why reversions they made may not be correct, but I’m still curious to see what kinds of edits by new editors commonly get reverted.

A good feature if you ever decide to edit again (on desktop, probably mobile too) is that in the source editor, there’s a Show Preview button. This renders out the page as if you’d committed the change. I said in another comment that almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and many of those are self-reverts. The only reason there are fewer immediate self-reverts these days isn’t because I’m making fewer mistakes; it’s because I’ve mostly replaced the “oh fuck go back” button with being able to quickly identify how I broke something (unless what I’ve done is unsalvageable).

The other day during a discussion, a few editors started joking about how many mistakes we make. Cullen328 (yes, the admin mentioned in this post) said: “One of my most common edit summaries is “Fixed typo”, which usually means that I fixed my own typo.” The Bushranger, another admin, replied: "I always spot mine just after hitting ‘Publish changes’… " And finally I said: “It feels like 50% of the edits I publish have the same energy as Peter watching Gwen Stacy fall to her death in slow-motion in TASM 2.” Between the three of us is about 300,000 edits, two little icons with a mop, and over 30 years of experience editing. Not only will you fuck up at first, but you’ll continue to fuck up over and over again forever. It’s how you deal with it that counts, and you dealt with it well.

Inject whatever weird, obscure fucking drama this is into my veins, please. I know Bloodborne has an indie wiki; do the Souls games not have one?

There’s fortunately no such thing as control of the page. Like I explained above, reversion is considered a normal but uncommon part of the editing process. It’s more common at the outset for new editors to have their initial edit reverted on policy/guideline grounds but then have a modified version of the edit let through with no issue. In order not to not bite newcomers, experienced editors will often bite the bullet and take the time to fix policy/guideline violations themselves while telling the newcomer what they did wrong.

If you go to discuss the reversion with the other editor on the talk page and it becomes clear this isn’t about policy or guideline violations (or they’re couching it in policy/guidelines through wikilawyering nonsense) but instead that they think they’re king shit of fuck mountain and own the article, ask an administrator. Administrators hate that shit.

That makes sense. “Probably over 20 years ago now” probably means that there weren’t any solid guidelines or policies to revert based on, since it was only around 2006 that the community rapidly began developing formal standards. I’m betting a lot more reverts were “nuh uh”, “yuh huh” than they are today. If you still remember the account name, I’m curious to see what bullshit transpired. If the watchlist even existed back then, someone probably saw a new edit, didn’t like it for whatever reason (I have no capacity to judge), and hit the “nuh uh” button. (Edit: I bet it was ‘Recent changes’, actually; probably more viable in an era of sub-100 edits per minute.)

Something new editors get confused about (me especially; I was so pissed the first time) is that edits can be reverted by anyone for any reason. (By “can”, I don’t mean “may”; a pattern of bad-faith reversions will quickly get you blocked). Almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and plenty of those have been by people with 1/100th the experience I have (some rightly so, some not so much). Reversion is actually considered a very normal if uncommon part of the editing process, and it’s used to generate a healthy consensus on the talk page when done in good faith. But the pertinent point is that reversions can be done by anybody just like additions can be done by anybody; it’s just another edit in “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit™”. I remember reverting an admin’s edit before (normal editing, not administrative work), and we just had a normal conversation whose outcome I can’t remember. It happens to everyone.

For a municipal wireless network, I’m not too bothered with how OP describes it if it’s accessed through Wi-Fi.

This is an ad for a proofreading service, so nominally it’s meant for you to use in formal writing. In that context, only a small proportion of these words are “fancy”.

That said, a thesaurus is best used for remembering words you already know, i.e. not like shown here. Careful use of a thesaurus to find new words provided you research them first – e.g. look them up on Wiktionary (bang !wt on DuckDuckGo) to see example sentences, etymologies, pronunciations, possible other meanings, usage context (e.g. slang, archaic, jargon), etc. – can work, but if you’re already writing something, just stick to what you know unless it’s dire. You should make an effort to learn words over time as they come up in appropriate contexts rather than memorizing them as replacements for other words; this infographic offers a shortcut that’s probably harder and less accurate than actually learning.

A one-night stand with a word you found in the thesaurus is going to alienate people who don’t know what it means and probably make you look like a jackass to those who do.

Just do what Josh Nichols does.

Yeah, I retract my comment. The SVG cat with the Peter Griffin ballsack chin told me it’s fine.

don’t say “very accurate”; say “exact”

First line of this infographic is already deeply misleading. It’s the equivalent of:

don’t say “very good”; say “perfect”

It’s overly superlative compared to what it’s trying to replace. “Exact” is inherently “very accurate”, but “very accurate” is not inherently “exact”.

Dude, I’m sorry, I just don’t know how else to tell you “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. I’d refer you to Chapter 20 of Goodfellow et al.'s 2016 book on Deep Learning, but 1) it tragically came out a year before transformer models, and 2) most of it will go over your head without a foundation from many previous chapters. What you’re describing – generative AI training on generative AI ad infinitum – is a death spiral. Literally the entire premise of adversarial training of generative AI is that for the classifier to get better, you need to keep funneling in real material alongside the fake material.

You keep anthropomorphizing with “AI can already understand X”, but that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a deep learning model is: it doesn’t “understand” shit about fuck; it’s an unfathomably complex nonlinear algebraic function that transforms inputs to outputs. To summarize in a word why you’re so wrong: overfitting. This is one of the first things you’ll learn about in a ML class, and it’s what happens when you let a model train on the same data over and over again forever. It’s especially bad for a classifier to be overfitted when it’s pitted against a generator, because a sufficiently complex generator will learn how to outsmart the overfitted classifier and it will find a cozy little local minimum that in reality works like dogshit but outsmarts the classifier which is its only job.

You really, really, really just fundamentally do not understand how a machine learning model works, and that’s okay – it’s a complex tool being presented to people who have no business knowing what a Hessian matrix or a DCT is – but please understand when you’re talking about it that these are extremely advanced and complex statistical models that work on mathematics, not vibes.