Fighting with computers

In the latest months, I have found myself questioning more and more often the shorts that YouTube is dropping on my feed. The point is not why they are there; the point is whether they are "real". And it is because the pervasive use of AI in video creation is making me now doubt everything I see.  There is an old Arab saying:  "Believe what you see and lay aside what you hear." Whether the origin is right or not, I cannot say( * ).  But what is becoming evident is that the power of the video as "proof" of an event is becoming thinner and thinner every day. After all, Hollywood built an empire on the idea of filming stories, where the premise is to make you believe them. However, we expect news reports to accurately convey real events, not fictional narratives. YouTube, TikTok, and the like are more about keeping us hooked on whatever crap we are interested in. Whether it is a healthy diet, running, fixing your motorbike, woodworking, plumbing, ... you nam...

I was developing some software and using one folder in my Dropbox. At some point, I wanted to share the results with another person, so I shared that folder with him. After a while, I no longer needed to share that info, so I used Windows Explorer to stop sharing that folder. To my horror, I saw that most of the files in the folder had suddenly disappeared, and an error message appeared on the Dropbox taskbar icon.  As that folder was set to always remain on the hard drive, I did not understand why that was. But even worse, the operation deleted the latest source files from my disk! I panicked and ran to my laptop, disabled the wifi, and recovered the files from the laptop's SSD. Once I felt my code was secure, I returned to my desktop computer. The Dropbox error was a synchronization error, as a file that was opened could not be synchronized. I was viewing an STL file from that folder on MeshLab. Once I closed that app, Dropbox continued to function as normal, and I could see all ...

For a couple of months now, I have been getting calls on my cellphone for a person who is not me. Usually, they are commercial cold calls, but given the influx, I started conversations with some of the people calling me. It turns out they have obtained my phone number from various mobile apps, such as Kaspr , Lusha , or Apollo . No amount of conversation will make up for the time lost. All of them seem to be USA-based companies, but this problem is affecting me in Europe. It won't be easy. The reason is that you cannot talk to an actual human being who gives a shit. By email, they redirect you to their webpage, where you can request that your personal data be removed. But there is a catch: they have messed up merging data from different sources, so your phone number is associated with an identity that is not yours, so you cannot provide all the data they want from you to be able to remove your info from their system, so the calls keep coming in.  I have learned about two different ...