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2 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
I’m not impressed with ChatGPT’s writing, nor its tendency to induce strange psychological states in some people. But you know what impresses me about ChatGPT most of all? Given my well-documented struggles and occasional successes with language learning, I’ll take all the help I can. The Pimsleur app was a major boost to my years-long efforts, but it’s not the only tool I rely upon.
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3 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
China's DeepSeek AI apparently makes Microsoft as nervous as it does Western and Western-aligned governments.
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3 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
If you logged onto LinkedIn at any point in the past day, you may have seen a lot of buzz regarding a post that Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, posted on May 7 describing the new digital toolbox of AI tools that the company is introducing. “Within less than five years, approximately 70% of us will need to acquire new skills to stay competitive in the workforce,” writes Cohen as he kicks off his message. Great. Now I feel stressed. You too? There’s more.
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3 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
Remember back when Netflix went completely angry dad and lashed out at its subscribers for sharing their passwords with their friends, distant relations, neighbors, neighbors’ dogs, enemies, cousin’s primary care doctors, and people they’d just walk past and waved to on the street? That was years after Netflix had even touted the ability to share a password with a friend as a way to get the world hooked on Netflix. After the turnaround, people freaked, and the world ended, basically.
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4 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
Mullvad VPN got a solid review from me and an official “okie dokie” when I gave it a test drive earlier this year, and an honorary mention in my guide, The Best VPNs to Protect Your Online Security. It may only be for the Android app, but Mullvad making their VPN reproducible adds one more layer of transparency to an already trustworthy service. what the heck is a reproducible build? I won’t drone on about how a VPN (virtual private network) works. That’s covered in the Best VPNs guide.
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5 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
I know, I know. “It’s so Millennial. Who even uses printers anymore?” you’re thinking. Et cetera, et cetera. Given the stories floating around the news of younger people unable to figure out the somewhat admittedly (by apps’ modern day usability standards) Byzantine settings menus that felt perfectly at home on Windows 98, I don’t blame you. But having one at home really does make life easier. Even if printers in general have earned their reputations as the mules of the office—vital but cranky.
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5 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
Trials may be stressful for the mega-corporations on the stand, but they’re great for scooping up future-product gossip and executives’ strange visions of the future. The latest tidbit, courtesy of Google’s ongoing antitrust trial, came from Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, on May 7 when he said, “…you may not need an iPhone 10 years from now.”So let’s dig into what Cue could’ve possibly meant by that. what could possibly kill off the iphone?
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6 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
Amazon’s building a sensitive robot. And by sensitive, I don’t mean C-3PO, the arthritic fussbot of Star Wars lore, whose core programming was not to harm humans physically but to harm them emotionally with intergalactic whining that stretched from one galaxy to the other. No, I don’t mean Amazon’s new warehouse robot has a heart of gold or a tendency to complain.
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6 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
You’ve got a stack of hard drives taking up space in your closet, don’t you? Same, same. Every few years, as the costs go down and space goes up, I upgrade, and all the old repositories for my Word files, photographs, and memories get stacked away as if I’ll ever actually use them again. As if. The truth is that I don’t want to toss ’em because I know how data fragments stick around on old disk drives like ghosts in a digital afterlife. They just pile up.
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6 days ago | 
vice.com | Matt Jancer
At some point, I just gave up on Microsoft Office and 365. As Microsoft began ushering people away from the one-time-purchase Office suite of productivity software and toward Microsoft 365, which requires an ongoing subscription, I got sick of getting squeezed for cash to have a basic program. Then somebody pointed me toward LibreOffice, an open-source suite of office software run by The Document Foundation.
