If you use Google photos: fine, your choice.

If your choice of using Google photos results in a picture with me in it getting uploaded to Google: I'll fucking end you.

Dammit Google, stop telling me to take photos of where I am.

My mom asking about photo storage...
"You said google photos is a cloud... Can I have iCloud and Google photos or would that cause a thunderstorm?"

!rant
A few years back, when my youngest cousin was about 7 years old, she asked me the most innocent question ever.

She said, "what's the internet?"
I answered, "it is where you can find anything that came from other people".

"Wanna see baby tigers?" I added then she nodded.

I Google searched 'tiger cubs' and showed the image results to her. She beamed a very big smile and said "let's look for another one!" So we did search for a few animal photos and I saw how happy she was!

Now she's a gamer who loves minecraft, Pewdiepie, and FPS games! :)

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

And here I am creeped the fuck out by Google (as always) suggesting me to take photos of the bakery I'm at while having location and WiFi turned off :)

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

Google photos, huh?!

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

Tell me more... 🤔

FUCK U GOOGLE PHOTOS, I MANUALLY UPLOAD PHOTOS FROM THE APP AND THEN DELETE ONE FROM THE WEB APP FROM MY PC BECAUSE I DIDNT WANT THAT ONE UPLOADED.....
BUT IT DELETED IT ON MY PHONE.... WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lesson of the Day: Manually copy all photos to PC and external HD first. Then upload the ones you want.

This is taking a while.... i wonder if i have enough disk space.....

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Google just crossed the line from amazing to scary . It somehow took photos from my phone and arranged it periodically and even named that album like "Jaipur Trip " , "Sunday morning at blah blah.." .

How the frake did it know that i was on a trip to Jaipur ? and how the frake did it identify the exact park's name with scary accuracy..?

P.S. I never gave Google photos any access..And i didnt upload them in drive..

Spent around 5 hours last night trying to do honestly one of the most basic things in PHP with a classmate of mine.
We are making a website kind of like Google Photos where the user can upload their images, store some information about the images they uploaded. (Basically just an online photo storage site). For what ever damn reason we could not figure out why our images that the user would upload from a form where not being put into their associated user image folder; Hell for the longest time they weren't even being loaded onto our LAMP server.
We still have no fucking idea what made it start working, we went over our code and iterated it probably over a hundred times and suddenly..... Like I said we have no fucking clue why; it started to work.
Over 2 hours in a hangouts call and around 500 messages later it worked.
I think we all know how this feels.

What a fucking mess.

Hmmm!!! google photos me null? am no null shit.

Just a reminder, services like Google Photos are not a backup.

Want to lose nearly three years of photos?
Use Google Photos and do not keep offline back ups of your photos / Takeout archives.

Fuuuuckk. My phone made a video whilst being in my pocket. Google photos uploaded it... Now I'm 2GB over my data bundle limit on the 3rd of the month.... 😑

Apparently the android function "auto-disconnect from network" has a bug, which is gonna cost me

Machine learning still has a ways to go....
It thinks a cow statue is a car

I'm kind of triggered by all these social media posters and SEO optimizers and "wordpress developers", it's one of the oldest internet scam "jobs" in my eyes where anyone can do what they are doing, yet somehow they are getting paid absurd amounts of money for who knows what. I'm just triggered by how much these people get away with. And stupid ass "companies" that I see all over first google results whose pricing starts from 5k and they're resumes are stock unmodified fucking wordpress themes that cost 39-59 bucks. WHAT THE FUCK. I just want to make a huge wave about this, this is straigh up scaming people. I couldn't live with myself if I would charge this amounts of money for installing a fucking wordpress theme and uploading a few photos. Are you kidding me. And seo scammers? is writting a 200 word essay with fucking yoast seo optimisation worth a few hundred? IS IT?

Apps having their own image picker is annoying.

I hate when apps don't have option to upload image by picking the system picker but instead show their own picker which sucks, you can only pick recent ones otherwise you need to scroll down, there is no search option or any filter at all, just allowing system picker is better, it allows all kinds of searching and Google photos picker also allows searching by dates, faces etc. No point reinventing that, I hope it becomes mandatory to only use system filepicker like it's in web browsers, this can also avoid giving access to entire filesystem when you only need to upload one image.

So I love how for the last what now, 20 years companies that don't seem to have the most obvious sources of income build huge data servers, and make the general public push to digitization and lack of physical ownership *cough google cough* and then they, after encouraging dependency for storage say 'yeah well, we're going to press the reset button anyone who is being detained for 2 years or so or eating dogshit in the street by deleting all the photos attached to an account that is not logged into for that long'..... seriously.

So I developed a tool to download everything.. a few times now. Why should I have to hop from one foot to the other so much ? Thats what I'm asking.

I tell you, for such a rich company their api's are very poorly documented and there is so much goddamn documentation that is competing with other versions.

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

recently i prided myself in my high ability to google stuff but i just blank at this problem:

i have 4 HDDs with my photos on it. They are more or less backups of each other, but not quite. The folder structure is convoluted and i am dreading this task since years. I now want to move to a better backup culture and save the data i really care about.

Problem: i may or may not inserted new photos in some versions of the hdds and not in others. So they are like [Photo1], [Photo2], [Photo3] and [Photo4] but [Photo1] contains a,b and d content, [Photo2] contains a and b but not d, [Photo3] contains c.

Now i would like a program that just takes hashes of all files present and compares them and finds differences among those 4 folders so i can combine them in each other. Additional problem points for a being in a different subfolder on [Photo1] as in [Photo2]

Its probably some backup software that can that, but i dont know which one.

Whelp?

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.

oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔

I must thank past me for DOING A BACKUP! I found my old photos on google drive, so happy rn ✨✨✨

Ughh google photos is shit

Sharing progress on a project I started two days ago.

Elevator pitch: a personal (open-source) photography website where you can search my repository of photos by color, brightness, orientation, resolution, and subject.

I got a new camera and it actually performs very well and it made me realize that there's a lot of interesting data in images, so I've decided to convert my personal blog into a photography-centered personal blog.

My first idea, the one that actually drew me into starting the project, was to pick colors from my images (colorpicker/ eyedropper style) and then on the home page, those colors would appear in a grid and you could click them to see related photos.

Cool idea, but clunky and not very useful in practice.

So I implemented median-cut algorithm to generate a palette from an input image. It has its weaknesses, but it's consistent and does a job that makes you go "yeah that's about right" in 99% of cases. It generates 8 colors and then a second algo removes any colors that are within 5% distance from one another.

Before the color theory nerds ask, YES - I am using plain-old RGB and you can suck my balls. I don't care about human perception enough - not for this project at least.

Then, these colors (and other basic image analysis like brightness) are stored in the DB and related to the image entity from the upload.

Then the user (not yet implemented...) can do the reverse. Either they can choose colors from a colorpicker, or they can upload their own photo to get a palette and then the colors are looked up in the database and the related images are shown in the search results.

This will be combined with a somewhat complex tree-style system for the subject of the photo. For example, a subject like "crow" can be related to the subject "bird" which itself can be related to the parent subject "animal". So if you search by crow, you'll only get crows, but if you search "animal", you'll get birds, crows, etc.

While it's not exactly a reverse image search like google images has, I think it's a somewhat refined take on a way to explore a photography repository - especially a personal one.

I am developing the management portal and the public facing portals as separate projects due to separation of concerns - and so I can avoid implementing (and upkeeping) authentication for ONE user (me) so it just runs on my local network.

Screenshot is the current iteration of the upload page for my management portal, which will eventually take care of watermarks etc etc.

Everytime I am in some shopping centre and google maps asks me to add a photo of it because these photos are popular a thought crosses my mind: don't people have anything better to do with their lives!? For fuck's sake.

I have found a DVD with a Windows XP backup file with my late mother's photos on it. However, nothing seems to open the file. I, of course, did a lot of Google searches on how to do this and what it seems to come down to is a need to run the restore on an XP, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machine. There are several legacy ntbackup restore programs out there, and Microsoft seems to still have a page for downloading that, but it relies on the long-deprecated Removable Storage Service that no longer exists on Windows 10. So, a) Microsoft are a bunch of jerks for not supporting restores of legacy backups and b) does anyone have a successful method you've used to get a BKF file to restore? All the things I've tried say the BKF file is corrupted, but how to know for sure when Removable Storage Service isn't present?

Creating a Google Photos shared collection and added 1000 photos too it... Or so I thought....

Find out afterwards there's a 500 photo limit... So NONE got added...

WTF... WONDERFUL USER DESIGN... DUMBASS

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

Google Photos <-> Google Drive <-> Google Keep <-> Google Calendar interoperability is _very_ limited as I already knew, but it seems to be even worse for "non-technical" people trying to actually use it

Does anyone here use Google Photos and, if so, have you seen an ungodly amount of mobile data usage even though you have mobile uploading turned off in the settings?

Google - fuck you with you service. I made a photo with my phone and it does not show up in google photos and not even getting message why. Go to fucking hell. Burn. You are fucking wasting my time. I should be now sleeping because I need to get up for work tomorrow but now I am am trying to fucking upload a photo to my computer you idiots. And tried with google drive and it also does not appera in it. Fuck you assholes. I feel like breaking my phone , my phone has not done anythjing bad. Its the fucking software.

However hard you try Google, I’ll forever be confused between your Maps’ and Photos’ icons.

first of all, fuck you Google!

So my phone, out of nowhere, decided to download the backup of Photos and all of the pictures of my ex are WIDE and clear to me. Every time I want to post something with a picture she pops up and seeing an image with her makes me feel more and more guilty, so fuck you google! I hope you're happy, I cannot sleep anymore!

I've been using Google Photos to serve images for clients E-Mail Templates since its a one time payment and I didnt want to continually pay for a server and storage.

Anyone knows if that violates any Google ToS since i use it pretty much commercially?
I couldnt find anything about that and was thinking about migrating the images to AWS

FWIW you can store data in google photos and use it's text conversion algo to search for stuff. Such as screenshotting recovery codes and searching for "recovery codes"

And no one else wants to comment on google being part of a conspiracy to erase peoples photos ?

I just disabled 2 recommendation notifications from Google Map and Photos...

My first thought is Google is turning into Facebook. My next read Google knows too much... But what can I do...

It's also very convenient... when it's not data mining the data it stores...

Before tyranny we had homes we could count on being there.
Before the destruction of all values we had family as a backup if we lost our homes, and while we found another job and home.
Before facebook we had photo shop, dvd's and hard drives.

But tyranny took away our homes and our family, facebook and google delete our photos and the servants of tyranny steal our hard drives and dvds.

Heh.