#oneaday Day 439: Parallel dimension

A recent post over on WIRED begged the question "OpenAI is poised to become the most valuable startup ever. Should it be?" Leaving aside the obvious Betteridge's Law commentary for a moment, the actual content of this article was utterly baffling.

OpenAI claims it is worth $500 billion. We've heard this a lot of times over the last few months, and everyone seems to sort of have accepted it as the "truth". And yet there's this in the article:

[An anonymous OpenAI investor] argues that the math for investing at the $500 billion valuation is straightforward: Hypothetically, if ChatGPT hits 2 billion users and monetizes at $5 per user per month — "half the rate of things like Google or Facebook" — that's $120 billion in annual revenue.

"That alone would support a trillion-and-a-half dollar company, which is a pretty good return, just thinking about ChatGPT," the investor says.

Except that "math" isn't "straightforward" at all, is it? In fact, I would go so far as to say that it isn't "math" at all, because all of it, all of it, is complete fantasyland nonsense plucked out of the arse of a particularly flatulent ogre, then mindlessly parroted by breathless idiots who think spicy autocorrect is in any way a substitute for the most bare minimum of interpersonal interactions.

Look at it. Two billion users. That's a significant portion of the planet, and it's only very few services — likely Google and Facebook among them — that can count that many user accounts on their books, let alone active users, which is what this nonsense is actually talking about. For context, ChatGPT, at present, continually reports somewhere in the region of 300 million weekly users. That's a lot, sure, but an overwhelming proportion of those are people who are not paying for the service and just using it to burn down a forest or two for a picture of Garfield with tits.

To put it another way, assuming that not only are two billion active users going to magically appear from nowhere, but that every single one of them is going to pay $5 a month to use the lake-boiling plagiarism machine that loses OpenAI money on every paying user already, is patent nonsense.

It is, right?

It is, yes?

I know nothing about economics or business, and I feel like I can see beyond any shadow of a doubt whatsoever that this is an absolute absurdity. Couple that with OpenAI's Sam Altman making incredibly stupid comments like "building a Dyson sphere around the whole solar system" just so we have enough space for all the data centres these two billion imaginary users will need to use their equally imaginary $5 ChatGPT subscriptions, and I'm just left feeling like at some point between COVID and now I've crossed over from a dimension where things make sense into one where they just… don't.

Are we really living in a world where a company's valuation is determined based on completely imaginary figures? Well, I guess it makes sense when they have a completely imaginary product, too. Nearly half a decade into this nonsense and there are still no compelling use cases for the technology for most people — and even the most sweaty AI apologists are obliged to admit that yes, the chatbots get things wrong quite a lot of the time.

Microsoft put CoPilot in Excel! You know, the software you use when you want accurate data analysis and calculations! They added it with the disclaimer that it "might be wrong" and that it "shouldn't be relied on for high-risk situations". Like, you know, pretty much fucking anything you might use Excel for in a business situation.

What are we doing? What are we doing? And WHY?! ARRRRGGGGHHHHHH

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 431: It ain't our photos and emails causing a water shortage

Here in the UK, we are suffering something of a water shortage. Several areas are in full-on drought status, and many areas, including hours, are subject to what is colloquially known as a "hosepipe ban", more officially known as a "temporary use ban" or "TUB". In other words, we're not supposed to use our hosepipes to water our garden (or, indeed, anything else) for the duration of the ban — which, of course, is exactly when our gardens and plants could actually probably do with a bit more water than usual.

There was an insultingly stupid press release that went out today from the government. Amid all the obvious advice like "fix anything that's leaking" and "don't leave your shower running all night" they had the gall to offer this nugget of wisdom:

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

Yes, that's right; people hanging on to their online memories, because no-one saves things locally any more — and that's a discussion in itself, I'm sure — are to blame for this drought! All those pictures of your beloved pets and family members, some of whom are likely no longer with us? They are, apparently, hoovering up all the water! Those precious emails from your first contact with someone special? Glug, glug, glug! And that draft of your novel you're never going to finish almost certainly drained half of Yorkshire's reservoirs just by existing.

I jest, obviously, because cloud storage on an individual scale is — no pun intended — a drop in the ocean in terms of water usage for these data centres. Even for all the people in the UK. Even for all the people in the world.

You know what actually is sucking up all the water in a completely wasteful, pointless way? All that shitty AI that is continually being foisted on us! ChatGPT-5 doesn't know how many letter B's are in the world "blueberry" but it's guzzling up water like nobody's business.

Per 404 Media, a report from the USA earlier this year estimated that the 250 million AI queries generated in America every day by people who think talking to the lying plagiarism robot is somehow "productive" consumes enough water to fill roughly 1.67 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That's every day. The World Economic Forum claims that AI datacentres will be responsible for consuming up to 1.7 trillion gallons by 2027, which is more than 4-6 times the total annual water usage of Denmark. From the same report, a "medium-sized data centre" (regarded as 15 megawatt) consumes "as much water as the yearly consumption of either three average-sized hospitals or more than two 18-hole golf courses".

Yeah. My Google Photos library isn't the problem. My email archive isn't the problem. The fact that we are blundering headlong into an environmental, economic and societal catastrophe by going all-in on the demonstrably idiotic and useless thing that is generative AI is the problem.

I say "we". I don't know a single person who actually wants this AI-powered future. Even from the most delusional AI glazer, I'm yet to hear any concrete proof that any of this is in any way helpful or desirable. (That is not an invitation, by the way.)

And now we, the people, are being punished for something we apparently have no control over. We, the people, are being given the responsibility of being more "frugal" just so we can watch the world's most useless corporations continue to incinerate billions of dollars an hour, contaminate our water supplies and take advantage of the most vulnerable people in society.

God. I fucking hate the future. It wasn't supposed to be like this. It has been said numerous times before at this point, but this is the worst possible cyberpunk future. And it seems so obvious that everything is terrible, and yet no-one with any power to do anything about it appears to want to do anything about it.

If you need me, I'll be emailing all my photos to myself.

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#oneaday Day 413: Our tedious cyberpunk future

So, it seems like today is the day that the UK's "Online Safety Act" rolls out, which means all manner of sites and services, from Bluesky to PornHub via Discord, have started demanding that you "verify" your age, either by gurning into your device's camera (or, indeed, providing a photo of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2) or by — fuck this all the way to hell and back — sending over a photo of your ID, or registering your payment card details.

The reason for this is ostensibly to "protect children" from all the nasty, terrible awful things on the Internet, but as we've seen it can be circumvented by a few nerds on X, The Everything App or enlisting the services of a VPN — exactly the sort of thing these services are for — then it all seems a bit pointless really. Plus then you have to consider what might be the real reason this is all happening. It may sound a bit tinfoil hatty, but most people aren't entirely comfortable associating a photograph of themselves, their ID or their payment information with, among other things, something they fancy cracking one off to.

The ID verification services, of course, assure us that your photographs and data are deleted immediately after you've been verified, but we have no real way of knowing if that is actually the case, or if the deletion process simply copies them to a server somewhere offshore that isn't subject to GDPR. And if the latter is true, given that the services associate your ID information with your email address in most cases, it's probably straightforward enough to tie any sort of "unsavoury" (regardless of legality) activity back to an individual — be it hammering one out to stepsisters stuck in washing machines, looking up instructions on how to make a bomb or attempting to organise political protests.

Over the course of the last few years, with the rise of AI and all manner of other tech enshittification, I can't help but feel — and I'm not alone in this — that we're getting all the downsides of a cyberpunk future that authors warned about, and none of the upsides. Our city centres are not the sprawling, darkly beautiful neon landscapes they're supposed to be — though you might have a backlit, animated ad for Persil on your local bus stop — and no-one is going through life kitting themselves out with cybernetics to do interesting, unusual, creative, daring and illegal things.

Worse, and this is probably the biggest kicker, is that all the "villains" of the piece are so very boring. Cyberpunk villains are vibrant, exciting, dramatic — but not in reality. We have Trump, whose name literally means "guff", and Elon Musk, who is just a fucking idiot, and Sam Altman, who is a delusional cunt. None of them have the charisma to make them worth hating; they're just… there, making the world worse, bit by bit, one little nibble at a time. The world is suffering death by a thousand cuts, and it feels like there's not much we can do about it other than to subscribe to NordVPN (and feel weird about it after all the jokes about YouTubers shilling it) and just try to muddle on the best we can.

Perhaps this will mark a grand return to finding discarded porn mags in bushes. That'll be a blast from the past, won't it? Though hopefully not a blast you come into direct contact with.

If you're in the UK, you might want to sign this.

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#oneaday Day 410: #StopKillingSoftware

There's been a lot of attention on the #StopKillingGames movement of late, and with good reason: they have a good point, and they've also had said point misrepresented quite severely on a number of occasions, but I think most people are starting to get it.

That's all very well and good for games, but what about software?

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows today. I haven't lost anything important — the computer just needed a "refresh", plus it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the plunge to update to Windows 11 (and then promptly "debloat" it).

Any reinstall is typically followed by trying to remember which applications you had on the computer that you actually need, and then going about reinstalling them one by one. This is one scenario in which I am grateful for the digital age, rather than requiring that I hunt down a million and one CD-ROMs, though it is still quite tedious having to download everything again — and, in some cases, find license information buried deep in your email archive.

One snag I ran into today is one that I thought I might come across at one point or another: the fact that the video editing software I use, Hitfilm Express, no longer exists. Moreover, it appears that the company which made Hitfilm decided to… stop doing Hitfilm in January of this year. In fact, I get the impression they stopped doing anything.

I had been using an old version of Hitfilm for some time, because upgrading to a newer version would mean abandoning the "pay what you want" copy I had, which was perfectly fine for my needs, and instead moving to the company's new subscription-based Software as a Service model. I was disappointed to see Hitfilm move to this model, but with the amount of other software packages out there doing the same — and the original developer of Hitfilm getting acquired by a larger company — I wasn't altogether surprised. But the old version still, at least, worked.

When I went to reinstall said old version today — which I used to be able to do from my account page on the company's website — that was no longer possible. All I could do was download the subscription-based version… or so it said. The downloads page had buttons to download it, but they weren't actually linked to anything. So the software was just… gone, basically.

If I had been paying a subscription, I would have been a bit annoyed, but recognised that this is always a risk when using Software as a Service. But I paid for a perpetual license to that software — granted, I didn't pay much for it, but I still paid for it, and expected it to remain available.

But no. Hitfilm Express has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. My only option was to either download the subscription-based one and then do some faffing around in the hope that a subscription would actually somehow "convert" to a perpetual license for that version, or to… well, to pirate it, frankly.

I know how to use Hitfilm. I like Hitfilm — at least I did before it went all Software as a Service. I don't really want to change to using something other than Hitfilm. I know DaVinci Resolve is well-regarded, but it's also several orders of magnitude more complicated than Hitfilm Express, and I'm not sure I want or need that.

So, well… I'll leave you to imagine which of the above options I went for.

Stop Killing Games has an excellent point. It also applies to software. If one buys a piece of software for a particular purpose, one should reasonably expect that software to be left in working order even after official support ends. That doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and that's certainly how it used to work. Hell, I can still plug in an AtariWriter cartridge to my Atari 8-bit and use that, or load up Cubase on the Atari ST. If I still had a Mac, I bet I could still get my copies of Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio working, too.

So Stop Killing Software as well as Stop Killing Games, please. And if you could just generally Stop Making Everything Worse while you're on, that'd be great also.

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#oneaday Day 404: Today's AI idiot story

The latest hilarious story from the world of artificial "intelligence" is the sorry saga of a Redditor who "worked on a book" (and I use the term "worked" loosely) with ChatGPT and found that they couldn't download it.

You want to know why? This is the best bit. It's because ChatGPT hadn't actually created anything, because it can't do that. It had outright lied to the person because, as a large language model — which, let's not forget, is essentially fancy predictive text, not actual intelligence — it believed, based on the data it had ingested, that telling the user it had successfully created 487MB of book was what the user wanted to hear.

To be fair, it was what the user wanted to hear, only they wanted that 487MB of book to, you know, actually exist.

The Redditor's eventual conclusion was thus:

After understanding a lot of things it's clear that it didn't [generate the book at all]. And it fooled me for two weeks.

I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

Several other Redditors commented, quite correctly, that this is perhaps not the ideal takeaway from this lesson. This is my absolute favourite response, though. This response deserves to be framed and put in a museum as a monument to how utterly stupid the age we're living in is:

At least you're finally admitting that ChatGPT is working on creating this fictional thing instead of you having "worked on it together". lol. Meanwhile real writers don't need this nonsense to be creative.

As a wise person once said: why would I invest more time reading something than the author spent writing it? Best of luck on something literally no one, including you, will read.

Absolute perfection.

Even more hilarious is the fact that the original poster was supposedly trying to create "a collection of a lot of children [sic] stories with moral lessons that [they] wanted to present in a colourful manner with underprivileged kids of [their] area". They claimed that the text was "all theirs" and that they were using ChatGPT to "refine the flow"… and generate 700 images.

Because what the world needs is an AI-edited book of children's stories almost certainly ripped off from existing tales, illustrated with AI slop images.

Dear Lord. I absolutely despair that we're living in an age where people are this fucking stupid.

Let me be 100% clear on this: if you're using ChatGPT to generate or "refine" anything you want to publish, you are not an author. You are certainly not the illustrator.

Learn to write. Practice it. It is a craft like any other. Develop your own unique, distinctive voice, because AI very much has a "voice" of its own — a particularly obnoxious, hand-wringing, obsequious, simpering one — and it is immediately recognisable. And, if you want to improve, hire a fucking editor. Or, at the very least, just give it to another sodding human being to look at.

ChatGPT is not an editor. ChatGPT gets things wrong a significant proportion of the time. And, as this story shows, ChatGPT just fucking makes things up quite a bit, too. You cannot trust it. You should not trust it. It is not a person. It is not intelligent. It doesn't "know" anything.

And if you need art? Two options: one, learn to do it yourself, which can be rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Or two, and you'll like this, can you guess what it is yet? That's right, it's hire a fucking artist.

I truly despair for the fucking dumb age we live in right now. I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop and all this stupid shit to go the way of the Metaverse and NFTs. Because it's actually driving me insane what it's clearly doing to people. We're going to end up completely incapable of producing cultural artefacts if we're not careful. And that's not a world I want to live in.

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#oneaday Day 392: Never forgive them for what they have done to the computer

[Recommended reading: Ed Zitron's "Never Forgive Them", from which the title of this post is taken.]

This evening, my computer inexplicably ground to a halt while I was doing… nothing in particular. Browsing a few webpages, doing a bit of research in preparation for some videos I'd like to make, if I'm being specific, but it really wasn't anything the slightest bit demanding. For whatever reason, though, everything just stopped, nothing was responsive, and the only thing I could do was force the power off and restart.

When the computer restarted, it took 10 solid minutes to become responsive because a piece of software for a controller that isn't connected decided to spontaneously uninstall and reinstall itself, while at the same time popular chat app Discord decided to install 18 updates that were apparently essential, despite the fact I'd updated it yesterday, Steam updated itself (which, all credit to it, it did without complaining or holding anything else up) and, of course, Windows is bugging me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

At the same time, my phone has been repeatedly sending me notifications telling me it "needs optimising" and "must restart", despite everything working absolutely fine, and despite it never having insisted on this process before. (It does, however, insist on "Optimising Apps" every time you turn it on or restart it, though, which makes what should be a very simple, quick process — turning it off and on again — take a good few minutes.)

This is what people mean when they say "enshittification". All of the above is unnecessary. All of the above are examples of tech deliberately making itself worse, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user, but which I'm sure are "providing shareholder value" via some means or another. This is what Ed Zitron means when he says "never forgive them for what they have done to the computer".

I love that description. I feel like people don't say "going on the computer" any more, because most of us spend pretty much our entire waking life joined at the hip to one form of computer or another, be it a PC, phone or tablet. When I was a kid, "going on the computer" was a discrete activity. You'd come home from school, do your homework, have some dinner, then go on the computer. And the computer would oblige. You'd turn it on, and there it was. If something went wrong, you turned it off, waited a moment, then turned it back on again, and nine times out of ten, the problem would be gone.

Now, granted, "the computer" that I'm talking about here is several orders of magnitude less sophisticated, powerful and, arguably, useful than the PC I'm typing this post on. But it still feels like we've lost something. Things have been taken out of our control. I could literally do nothing while those stupid update processes were running on my PC, because they were so badly programmed that they monopolised the system to such a degree that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to stop them. And, as I discovered, turning the PC off and on again wouldn't have helped, because they'd have just started again — or, perhaps worse, fallen over because of the half-finished job I switched them off in the middle of.

I appreciate that updates are sometimes necessary to add new features, fix bugs and, in the case of operating systems, plug security holes that could be exploited by malicious actors. But man, do I ever miss turning on the Atari 8-bit, booting right into BASIC and being able to just get on with things. Those "things" may have been considerably less elaborate than what I can do on "the computer" today, but was that really so bad…?

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#oneaday Day 375: So very very tired

Earlier today, someone shared a photo of a packet of Uncle Ben's instant noodles or something, which came with a disclaimer on the front that the image of the supposed product festering inside the pouch had been "generated with AI". And I think I felt something actually snap in my brain.

What are we doing. What are we actually doing. I am absolutely beyond sick of this garbage being force-fed to us from every possible angle, and for breathless ball-gargling apologists to come out with all the usual "oh, it's a tool, a tool can't be bad".

No. Fuck off. Generative AI is hot garbage, and I think we've proven that beyond every reasonable doubt at this point. "It hallucinates a bit" should be enough to put absolutely fucking everyone off ever even thinking about using it for research and analysis, and the fact that the companies who trained these models have had to go about it in the most underhanded means possible, potentially destroying creators' rights over their own work in the process, should be enough to ward everyone off. And to cap it all, these people spend billions every month to achieve nothing. Several years into this shit and we're still yet to see convincing use cases that don't have hefty caveats. And still the rich get richer, somehow, and the world, as a whole, gets worse and worse off.

Is the fact that people have been driven to suicide by "conversations" with AI bots not enough? Is the fact that multiple social media platforms are now pretty much unusable and a privacy nightmare due to the flood of AI not enough? Does the prospect of people not actually being able to perform necessary skills — like, say, coding to hold the world's infrastructure together — not absolutely terrify you? And do you not see anything even a little bit wrong with ChatGPT offering to modify an existing piece of writing "in the style of" another magazine so you can successfully pitch something you didn't write a single word of?

Every day, the world gets worse and worse, and frankly, I'm reaching a point where it is becoming less and less desirable to live in it. Couple all this inescapable AI shit with what's going on in America, the looming war in the Middle East (again) and the frankly frightening regressions the world has seemingly been going through with regard to acceptance, tolerance and inclusion, and it's not a pretty sight. It's no wonder that everyone in the world seems to be so argumentative, aggressive and confrontational all the time these days. This is a problem, but it's also a symptom.

When I was growing up, it felt like I was living through one of the most exciting periods in cultural, societal and technological history. Now I'm just embarrassed to be on the same planet as a frankly terrifying proportion of the population, who seem to think that everything we're doing right now is just fine, and we should definitely continue on this course, it absolutely won't cause terrible problems down the line.

I don't know what to do any more. I feel powerless, helpless, alone. And I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling that way.

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#oneaday Day 372: In which my neighbour determines voice assistants are useless

I was having a poo earlier, as you do, and since our toilet is like sitting inside an actual blast furnace during the summer months, I had the window open as wide as it could go to let some air in. A side-effect of this is that I can hear what is going on outside (and quite possibly that anyone outside can hear what is going on inside the toilet, but I've never tested that theory) and, more often than not, I hear my neighbours going about various business in their garden.

Our neighbours have a couple of kids, and the kids are often out the back using their trampoline. This evening it sounded like there was some sort of family meal or gathering outside, and there was music playing, evidently via some sort of Alexa-based smart speaker, because every couple of minutes — and inevitably well before a song had played to its conclusion, because who has time to listen to music in its entirety any more? — I heard one of my neighbours going "Alexa, next one". And, on multiple occasions, repeating this command at least once before Alexa actually played the "next one".

After several failed attempts to get Alexa to stop playing the Electric Light Orchestra, I heard some frustrated-sounding swearing coming from the garden, then the music stopped suddenly. A few moments later, it started again, but with no voice commands required. I imagine my neighbour had given up on trying to control the music with his voice and just gone back to good "old-fashioned" streaming from his phone.

I honestly have never seen the point of voice assistants. It is several orders of magnitude less convenient to do things with your voice than it is to just click on something on a computer or tap on it on a phone — with one of the chief reasons being, as demonstrated by my neighbour's frustrations, the fact that on a statistically significant number of occasions, you probably have to correct the device's misunderstanding of what you said, by which point you may as well have just fished your phone out of your pocket and typed what you were looking for into Google (not that Google is a great help these days with those fucking AI summaries) or opened your music app and pressed "Next".

I don't know. It's been said many times before, but it feels like a lot of today's tech is being built to solve problems that never existed in the first place. If I run out of milk, the last thing on my mind is telling a robot that fact; I either go out and get some milk myself, or I do what a normal person does and write it on a bit of paper on the fridge, forget about it until 10.48pm, then have to brave the mean streets of Southampton to walk to Tesco Express just so I can have a coffee the following morning. If I tell Alexa, or Google, or whatever, that I'm out of milk, sure, that fact is recorded somewhere, but it doesn't achieve anything. I could probably make it so that it ordered some milk from Amazon or something, but what an absolute faff. Shopping with a voice assistant is an absolutely alien concept to me, because it completely eliminates the ability to look at what's available, the prices and suchlike. So why would you bother?

Answer is, we don't. We have a couple of smart speakers, but all they get used for is finding our phones if we've forgotten where we put them down, and occasionally streaming some music, which we do via the "cast" button in our music apps rather than attempting to talk to them. I think our Alexa thing also controls our smart light switches, but again, no voice controls are involved there, and it could probably be done via another means.

When I did a very brief stint working for a courier company, it was vaguely useful to say "okay Google, take me to [postcode]" and it be able to navigate me there, but I'm not sure it was actually any quicker or better to do that than just typing said postcode into Google Maps. And if I'd typed it in, at least I knew it was right.

As tech critic Ed Zitron frequently notes, tech used to be fun and exciting, but these days it just seems to be finding new and exciting ways to make things less convenient and more annoying. And, of course, this isn't even getting into the "AI" garbage.

I hope that one day very soon the tech industry manages to wake up and realise that it's doing both itself and its customers a great disservice. Unfortunately, I am very concerned that process isn't going to be a pretty one, with the obscene amounts of money being thrown around for what, to the layman, very much appears to be products that don't actually exist.

What are we even doing any more?

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#oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone?

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

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#oneaday Day 290: Foxit? More like Fuckit

Good one, I know.

As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a bit of time collecting together scans of old computer and video games (and Computer & Video Games) magazines with a mind to sticking them on an old Kindle Fire tablet to use as a portable "magazine reader". As part of that process, today I found myself looking for PDF readers, both for Windows and for Android.

I wanted one for Windows so that I could potentially use it to make some videos about the magazines I don't have hard copies of, and neither Chrome nor Firefox's built-in PDF handling quite does what I wanted. (Chrome, notably, still lacks the ability to display two-page spreads but assume there is a "cover page", meaning it fucks up magazine and book layouts and there's nothing you can do about it.) So I did what any normal person does, and I Googled it, even knowing that Google itself has been gradually going down the toilet.

After skipping past the fucking useless AI summary and sponsored links, I clicked on an article that was absolutely bullshit SEO bait ("The best free PDF readers for Windows!") but was at least from a vaguely reputable outlet, TechRadar. This article informed me that Foxit was the best PDF reader for Windows.

Great, I thought. I've used Foxit before in the past. I doubt it's changed that much.

EH. WRONG.

Foxit has enshittified itself beyond all recognition. Not only has it made the inexplicable decision to model its UI on Microsoft's odious "Ribbon" interface, it also boots up with a floating "AI" button that you can't get rid of without some tinkering deep in the options and then quitting and restarting the program.

Let's take each of these in turn. First, the Ribbon.

I hate the Ribbon. I've despised the Ribbon ever since Microsoft introduced it in Microsoft Office 2007, and every time I use a program that uses this obnoxious piece of crap instead of normal toolbars and drop-down menus, I make a specific effort to find something else to use instead.

The Ribbon is an eyesore. The Ribbon takes up far too much space on the screen. The Ribbon's myriad tabs and huge buttons make it a massive chore to find simple functionality, since each tab is organised with no real care or attention. It doesn't conform to any standard functionality, so you'll find the same functions in different places in different applications, and it feels the need to take over the entire fucking window when you want to do something as simple as open, save or close a file, or look at the program's settings page.

In Foxit's specific case, I am honestly struggling to think of why a supposedly "lightweight" PDF reader has enough functions in it to warrant having a multi-tab Ribbon. I need a PDF reader to do one thing: read PDFs. Occasionally I might need to copy and paste images and text from a PDF, and the ability to take a snapshot of a section of a PDF and save it as an image is always nice. But I do not need multiple tabs worth of disorganised functionality, making it a chore to do something as simple as display two pages side by side and let me flip through the entire document like… well, like a magazine or book.

This is what people are talking about when they say "the computer" is constantly being enshittified. Things that worked perfectly well are being "updated" for no other reason than to say that they have been updated. Simple, straightforward, intuitive interfaces that remained standard conventions for decades are being uprooted in favour of borderline abusive design that forces you to click through page after page of crap in order to find the one thing you're looking for. And for what? To say that the company is "growing"? To say that the company is "innovating"? Fuck that. Just make me a fucking PDF reader that lets me read PDFs.

Which brings me to the "AI" button. I do not need a fucking AI button in my PDF reader. If I have opened something in a PDF reader, I intend to read it or print it. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "summarise" the thing that I'm trying to read either for information or pleasure. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "analyse" the document or figure out "trends". I am a human being. I have a brain. I can do these things myself. I do not need "AI" to "do it more quickly". Believe it or not, I enjoy reading. I enjoy researching. I'm not so fucking lazy that I need a fucking chatbot (&c. &c.) to take the human part out of the equation. Because that's just depressing.

Things weren't much better on the Android front. I tried Foxit on Android as well, just out of curiosity, and sure enough, while it lacked the Ribbon (the one benefit of a phone screen is that it's too small for such a shitty interface) it still had the odious little AI bubble. So I uninstalled it immediately.

If you've been in a similar situation at any point, may I recommend Sumatra PDF for your desktop PDF reading needs, and PDF viewer lite for Android. Both of those seem to fit my needs perfectly well right now: no ads, no subscriptions, no Ribbon, no AI, no bullshit. Just a thing to read PDFs with. Which should not be a hard thing to find in 2025. But apparently this is the world we've built for ourselves.

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