Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine’s contents, so I’m not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they’re claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can’t the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it’s a person trying to buy something?)

Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there’s really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine “I’d like to buy something”. What it sounds like to me is they’re using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

This sounds like an excuse to me. I’m a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we’re ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

It’s really, really clever how they’ve invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don’t even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you’d expect to find in a university.

Thank you! :)

We have actually tried WordPress! I think one person is still using it, but the rest of us had various issues with it, whether that was an inability to export to a basic format, or security issues. The last straw for me was when I couldn’t log in for a week because one random file had an exploit that was being bombarded with attacks, and the security plugins did their job and blocked logins, but that also locked me out as well. My feeling is that WordPress is just so widely used that it’s a big target for attacks.

But thanks for the suggestion! :)

I’d already checked the alternativeto lists prior to posting; sadly all the options either have one or more features missing, or else have been discontinued.

I am a bit short on MPDEWAKEHVHIUCVJTWCJIJ if you still have any? 😁

It’s not quite what I’m looking for, but thank you for the suggestion nonetheless. It’s good to have more options to investigate! :)

Definitely something to be proud of! :D

It’s not quite what I’m looking for, but I appreciate the suggestion. I’d rather look at options that turn out to be not quite right than not have any options at all. :)

I’d prefer not to share my pages, as I like to keep things separate (and also some of the older content from 25 years ago has not aged well but I haven’t had chance to fix it all yet). But yeah, it is really sad that we’re losing tools like this, and how few people have any ability to control their online space. Facebook makes everything so impersonal.

You should definitely make a cute, personal homepage. The internet is better for having such spaces on it. :)

I had already checked the alternativeto lists. Unfortunately most of the options there were missing one or more of the features required, but BlueGriffon, NVU and Kompozer have all been tried, with the lack of maintenance being the major problem - when a bug pops up or there’s a compatibility issue, there’s no hope of fixing it (this is also the reason why we’re struggling to keep using the old versions of Dreamweaver and Frontpage - we can get them to run, but they’re so old that we’re running into compatibility issues).

But LibreOffice and Seamonkey are good ideas, since they’re both still being maintained. Thanks. :)

Yep, it’s really disappointing that most of the options listed as alternatives to Dreamweaver and Frontpage are either discontinued, or lack a visual interface, or are web-based and attached to a specific hosting provider. We’ve actually been looking for the right software for over three years now. Some of the discontinued ones are still accessible and mostly working, but they have bugs that are obviously never going to be fixed.

We do have one or two people using Neocities, as that’s what replaced Geocities - but there’s an understandable reluctance to use free hosting services. We lost quite a lot of content when Geocities was shut down, only some of which we were able to reconstruct. So the majority of us have our own webhosting now - for what we need, the cheapest packages are more than sufficient. It’s kind of depressing how that actually makes it harder - Neocities, Wix, and a bunch of other free hosting options provide page builders, but only if you’re using their hosting. When you have your own hosting, your webhost pushes you to install WordPress and considers their job done at that point.

But thanks for the suggestion of Silex. It’s one I hadn’t encountered in my previous searches, but it looks like it might do what we need. The desktop app and visual interface look promising, so I’m going to play around with it and see if it’ll do what we need. I think PicoCMS is worth investigating further as well - I can install it on a subdomain and poke at it a bit. I’m liking that it’s lightweight and stores everything as text files.

Thank you! :)

The mass application boom is so annoying.

Speaking for the UK, this is a requirement to receive unemployment benefits. You have to prove you’re actively seeking a job for a minimum of 35 hours per week, and you’re not considered to be “looking hard enough” if you’re not applying for every single job that you could realistically travel to, no matter how unsuitable you are for the job. If there’s a hospital 5 minutes walk from your house that are recruiting a surgeon, someone on unemployment would be expected to apply despite having zero suitable qualifications. If they don’t, they get sanctioned, which means they don’t receive enough social security to pay their rent and/or food and/or power.

Yeah, I mean bad guys are going to commit murder too, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be illegal.

That would probably work in the US, but I’m not so sure it’d work in the EU. Even the UK is capable of cracking down on “freelancers” who are obviously just regular employees with bosses trying to dodge regulation.

Yeah, I think the fact that the Fediverse is genuinely and legitmately multiple small websites, each of which can be proven to be run by different people with no connection to each other, would mean it’s exempt.

Making sure their turnover also gets split into hundreds of companies seems like an administrative nightmare though. And I suspect the EU regulators are smart enough to see through such a ruse - eBay would still be one website, not hundreds, after all.

That image haunts me. I can only assume this paper got through peer review because the reviewers saw that image and went mad, like all those who have witnessed eldritch monstrosities.

Very good read!

As someone with a complicated medical history, including a very rare complication arising from a medication for a rare condition, I have serious reservations about the use of LLMs in medical contexts. It’s not that humans can’t get it wrong, but my experience with medical professionals is that if they’re not certain about something, they will go check with a colleague or look something up in a textbook/online resource (and honestly I’m reassured when a doctor does this! It shows self-awareness and humility to admit they’re not experts on everything and they’d rather be careful than protect their ego.) An LLM will just confidently bullshit a diagnosis. That might be fine for someone with a straightforward medical history suffering from a common, easily treated condition. It could be deadly for someone whose medical history is more complex.