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Fun With News Media Sites Again

 Recently while slogging through a few articles from the news media, my entire system slowed to a crawl and on two occasions my browser crashed. During one slowdown, I checked Windows' Task Manager and found that one of the articles was consuming 2.3 GB of memory, pushing the total to 90%.  This is because many news articles continuously load ads, many in the form of videos, while wedging dozens of processes into the background which are never shut down even after you close the browser tab that the article was displayed in. After looking at the news each morning my system ends up being filled with sometimes hundreds of processes running in the background, which I have to tediously shut down manually one by one using Task Manager (which doesn't allow selecting more than one at a time). Daily Mail is typically the worst offender, since each page has hundreds of thumnail images in the righthand column and gobs of ads that are constantly loading. A single Daily Mail article someti...
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AI Images

Image
 Although current AI systems have many amazing abilities, they are still generally poor at presenting the image you asked for (producing text on a requested subject is usually far better).   Artbreeder's Composer option produces the following map when prompted with "topographic map of england":  This is not what England looks like, needless to say. Here's what it produces when prompted with: "photorealistic image of a neon sign of a piece of pepperoni pizza" It gets the "pepperoni pizza" part correct for the most part, but seemingly has no idea what a neon sign is.  In fairness, if you click on the "variations" option it gives the following image which is closer to a neon sign. After having it generate another set of variations, one of them was the following: This one certainly has a neon sign, but the lettering is gibberish. It has a neon-tinged giant pizza slice in there, but it's seemingly an actual giant slice of pizza and it'...
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Longstanding problems with Windows

 Among the problems that Microsoft still has not fixed in the Windows operating system after all these decades: * Copying a bit of text on a long line within a wordprocessor such as Windows Word Pad is needlessly torturous, because if your mouse cursor happens to stray even one pixel outside of the long line of text, it ends up highlighting text on the line above or below. It often takes me so long to copy only the snippet I need that it's actually faster to just manually type the entire thing out from scratch. This is easily fixable. * In Word Pad, when you load a new file the file selection window defaults to some senseless directory that I never use rather than the directory in which the current file is located. This is very easy to fix. * Open windows sometimes get stuck behind everything else even when selected, which makes it impossible to see the window unless you close everything else. 
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Google News Again

 The default news feature still doesn't work correctly, but I finally figured out a way to see foreign language results:  you need to edit the parameters in the URL for https://news.google.com/search  by changing the following :  if it says something like  "&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen"  (which means it defaults to only English results because you're in the US), you need to change  all of those parameters: the "en-US" (American English) needs to be changed to a different language and the others have to be changed to a different country (e.g. to get Mexican Spanish, change it to:  "&hl=es-MX&gl=MX&ceid=MX:es").  This is overly complicated and "hacky", but it's the only method I've found which works. Google News used to just automatically provide foreign results if the search terms would naturally produce results in that language: e.g. if you searched for a Spanish phrase then it returned Spanish results. Now...
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Electronic Thermometers Glitch All The Time

 A couple decades ago, some meterologists were admitting bluntly that electronic thermometers simply did not work correctly; and it's easy to see that they still do not work.  Today, the thermometer in my car suddenly increased almost ten degrees within seconds while driving down the road (usually it decreases while driving due to the cooling effect of air passing over the car at high speeds), and the thermometer at my house was showing an even hotter temperature (hence even more inflated). The various temperature readings from my town cited by the "Weather Underground" site often vary by ten degrees, even the ones that are within a few blocks of each other. I'm old enough to remember mercury thermometers, which had less variation and none of the crazy spikes that electronic thermometers are plagued by.
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And If Google News Search Wasn't Bad Enough....

Online news media outlets tend to fill their webpages with popups, endless ads, videos that follow you down the screen when you try to read the article, and other nuissances that make it difficult to read the news which the outlet is ostensibly trying to publish. And if you try to write a comment to correct mistakes in the article, there is often a convoluted process of signing up and then verifying your account, only to be told that the system has detected "suspicious activity" which requires another round of verification. Which pointy-haired executives think these policies are good ones?  It's like living in a Dilbert cartoon.
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Non-Computer-Related Rant

 This has nothing to do with the internet or computers, unlike most of the posts here.  While in town this morning, I was confronted yet again by cars that were parked diagonally across multiple parking slots (multiple cars simultaneously in the same small parking lot). Two days ago I was prevented from squeezing my car into an on-street parking zone because two drivers had both simultaneously left a large chunk of space between their car and the one in front of them, thereby restricting the total number of cars which could park on that section of road. Other people have commented that this is a recurring problem in this entire county.  Presumably this mentality is caused by the relatively large amount of space per person in most areas of the county, which is predominantly small towns and farmland. Many people apparently feel free to use up as much extra space as they please, and they maintain this habit even when in a city where parking space is at a premium. Irritating....
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