DarthYoshiBoy

DarthYoshiBoy , 24 days ago

My kids have child phones on Google Fi which allows me to shut down their Internet with a couple of button presses. Are they simple devices if I geofence their internet access off while they're in school? I somehow doubt it, but it does meet the definition as you've stated it, which in turn means it is as @originalucifer said, not exactly cut and dry.

DarthYoshiBoy , 26 days ago

So this is neat. Potentially life changing for some type 2 diabetics, but that depends because some t2 diabetics are not failing to make enough insulin, they're just no longer sensitive to it at a level that makes it functional for them. I suppose it's possible that this therapy could cause them to grow enough islet β cells to overcome their lack of sensitivity, but (and I'm a type 1, not a type 2, so maybe my info is incorrect here) that lack of sensitivity can grow with further exposure to insulin making this a stop-gap at best for those cases absent other therapies.

...and with all of that said, being able to regrow islet β cells has never really been the problem for type 1 diabetes. You can regrow all the islet β cells you'd like and it's not going to cure the underlying immune disease that has caused your immune system to kill off all of your islet β cells to begin with. Unless you can figure out why t1 diabetes causes one's own immune system to go psycho killer on their islet β cells, you've done nothing to "cure" diabetes. Without being able to suppress that impulse for your immune system to murder your own cells, any ability to replace the islet β cells is going to be temporary at best, and probably a waste on the whole.

My brother in law is a "cured" type 1 diabetic, by virtue of his having had a kidney replacement and being on immune suppressing drugs for that. Since they were already replacing the kidney and he was going to have to take immune system suppression medications for that, they also just replaced his pancreas at the same time and the suppression of his immune system has allowed the new pancreas to thrive and continue to make insulin. Easy-peasy. The only trade-off is that he is super immunocompromised and can be killed by common colds, so not a great strategy in general.

DarthYoshiBoy , 27 days ago

If you'd like to look into it further. the +i flag in chattr is setting an attribute making the file (everything in Linux is a file, so yes this even means directories) immutable. When a file is immutable, it isn't possible to change the ownership, group, name, or permissions of the file, nor will you be able to write, append, or truncate the file.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I don't believe it's possible to have an immutable directory where you can still modify the contents therein, but I may be misremembering that. It would seem unlikely since adding content to the directory should require that you modify the links for the directory, which shouldn't be allowable with an immutable object?

It's possible that the +a chattr attribute may achieve what you'd prefer. I believe that flag will make it so that files (and again, everything in Linux is a file) can be created and modified, but never deleted. I've actually never used this one, but I can foresee how this still may not be ideal for your wishes since updates to games may expect to be able to delete old content which would be thwarted here. 🤷

DarthYoshiBoy , 27 days ago

Attributes only apply to the directory’s own allocation table and child directories have their own tables.

Thanks. It has been a while, but I was fairly certain that this was the case, glad to have the confirmation. 👍

DarthYoshiBoy , 28 days ago

I accidentally misclicked this article and reported it as spam while I was trying to report some prescription drug spam. Hopefully it's not adversely affected. I wish there was an Undo on that action.

DarthYoshiBoy , 29 days ago

The Nissan Connect stuff doesn't work anymore for any of the 2016 Leafs, they used a form of cell service that is no longer in operation.

I swapped a nice Kenwood head unit into my Leaf for a couple hundred dollars. It maintains the backup camera, steering wheel controls, and the built in USB port while offering a larger screen and touch screen controls for Android Auto or Apple Car Play if you want them. It's awesome and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a short range commuter car.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

You or I might, but companies have a constant flow of new middle management who want to make their KPIs this quarter and will shove their own mother in front of an oncoming train to get there. Corporations don't learn, doubly true for corporations like Apple who have basically captured an audience within their walled garden, the motivation is always all the money now, not some money consistently forever.

Even when you have a company like Samsung with their exploding battery fiasco. Sure they have protections now in place against designing a new product with bad batteries, but give it some time and they'll do it again when a middle manager (who wasn't there the first time) ignores the recommendations of their engineers and the company guidelines so they can save $0.001/phone by using a slightly inferior battery design and net that neat bonus for keeping costs down. It will always happen.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

I mean, it's worked for exceptionally well for C. Montgomery Burns, so why not this other cartoon miscreant?

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

Not for all the money in the world could you convince me to touch him, let alone what you propose.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

If gaming with Nvidia hardware is your primary concern, then maybe Bazzite would suit you. It's based on Immutable Fedora, with tweaks to give it a SteamOS like experience. It offers Gnome or KDE for the desktop, and supposedly has everything dialed in for gaming. I've heard a bunch about it doing great with Nvidia cards and gaming in general, I suspect that you'd be able to do everything else you might need via the desktop it provides, but I have no knowledge of how it handles multiple monitors so maybe therein lies the fatal flaw.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

I'm now deeply curious if it works for your use case. Hit me back if you give it a go and let me know if it works out or not.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

If you use a fancy official VPN client from Mullvad, PIA, etc, you won’t need this since most clients already have a kill switch built in (also called Lockdown Mode in Mullvad).

According to the researchers...

The result of this is the user transmits packets that are never encrypted by a VPN, and an attacker can snoop their traffic. We are using the term decloaking to refer to this effect. Importantly, the VPN control channel is maintained so features such as kill switches are never tripped, and users continue to show as connected to a VPN in all the cases we’ve observed.

Killswitches are insufficient protection since the TunnelVision attack never disables the VPN tunnel. The TunnelVision attackers are instructing your physical layer connection to route everything through a node of their choosing rather than killing your VPN connection, and since the VPN connection never drops, a killswitch will never engage. The VPN stays up, thinking it is doing a good job, but in the meantime your network interface has been instructed to route no traffic through the VPN and instead route everything to the location of the attacker's choosing. I have heard that a couple of VPNs think their clients are not vulnerable here, but I haven't seen independent conclusive proof one way or the other yet.

I suspect that your "Solution" also fails to mitigate the issues in TunnelVision because it allows LAN access to the physical interface. In a TunnelVision attack the hostile has to be on your LAN (or rather the same LAN you are on since I suspect that "The coffee shop wi-fi" is the more likely network for an attack like this) already, so if they're going to tell your interface to route traffic somewhere else, in all likelihood that somewhere else will already be in the same LAN you are and their exfiltration will be allowed under your configuration.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

I've never listened to Rogan*, but I think https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts does an excellent job of talking about current news and science items in an easily digestible format that mostly avoids bullshit while probably filling the same gee-whiz niche that people expect from Rogan? It's a panel, so not a single muscular male host, but I think if your sibling is pursuing Rogan because they think it's helping expose them to new interesting ideas, SGU is a vastly superior route to that end.

---

*I actually think my only Rogan exposure has been the SGU talking about how he more or less just believes the last thing anyone told him, whatever that might be, which seems... less good?

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

I assume this is a Stargate thing and that there aren't actually that many Skeptical Guide podcasts out there.

I haven't got any dog in the Stargate fight, I've seen the original movie (good) and watched the Richard Dean Anderson TV series (better than the movie) for a while before it just fell off my radar? I'll take your word for it that Stargate Universe is the lesser of the Stargate properties.

SGU in my comment obviously is referring to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe aka, the linked podcast.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

The best that the SMS protocol can tell you is whether the message was delivered and even that isn't a requirement. SMS has delivery receipts, it does not have read receipts.

DarthYoshiBoy , 1 month ago

https://www.patreon.com/Orioto

Might just be a me thing, but this guy puts out a new wallpaper almost every week and they're all amazing. The higher tiers allow you to participate in choosing the next wallpaper, but they're mostly for 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p. Buying in once gets you the whole lot of everything he's done until now.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.

It's called Google Workspace and it's decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it's pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don't track your preferences so they don't have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.

I've been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it's shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It's why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don't care about.

An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they're targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I'm not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they're not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I'd consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.

I think there's a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I'll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don't sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they'd be killing the golden goose. So long as they're contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I'm good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I'm running Firefox/uBlock.

That said, if you don't want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won't get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn't hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that's what you'd get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn't worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it.

My apologies if I implied that you did, that was not my intent.

But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. [...] I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.

Sorry, that was my point though, without the tracking, you're not getting YouTube, or most of Google's services as we know them. The Google secret sauce is that they know enough about their users to curate an experience per user. That's largely why competitors to Google services rarely take off, the competitors lack enough individual user knowledge to make an experience that is better than what Google can offer for most users.

The services more or less are what they are because of the breadth of what and how Google knows to shape the experience for an individual, and that's why Workspace accounts still track what they do. Google would be providing their paying customers with a lesser experience if they genericized everything you're interacting with in those content related services due to a lack of learned data and behaviors per user. Which is probably not what the average user wants if I had to guess?

Heck, even paid YouTube Premium still needs your tracking data or it's just going to show you whatever popular rage bait is trending day to day with the general public? Or maybe just an unfiltered firehose of all the hours of nonsense that is uploaded every minute to the platform? I guess you could treat it as a whitebox video hosting site, but where does the money come from if YouTube can't make guarantees to advertisers that their ads will be seen by people who might care about the ad, and how do the content creators make money if YouTube can't get advertisers on board, and who is making interesting content if they have to pay to host it themselves because advertisers aren't paying that cost for them? I think my point is that if you pull the tracking and user knowledge out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing just crashes down.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

It is a ridiculously proven and safe technology.

In Planes, where there are 3 or more levels of redundant power and hydraulic systems with an ability to fail down to a limited mechanical operation mode if all the other backup systems fail. It's proven because they designed it with a stupid level of failsafes.

There's no redundant power in the Tesla Drive By Wire system, if the power is cut, you lose the ability to steer. You've got brakes, but you're without any of the assistance that the car normally provides. It's so fucking stupid I can't believe it's allowed on the road. If anything goes wrong that cuts power while you're in motion, you're suddenly captive in 3.3 tons of stainless steel without crumple zones, without the ability to steer, with naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle to determine your outcome. It's nothing like the multiple layers of failures you'd have to endure to find yourself in trouble in a plane both for the power and the hydraulics.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

Very true. Perhaps my statement which continued on beyond what you quoted didn't make it clear, but I did point out what you said: "You've got brakes, but you're without any of the assistance that the car normally provides" as well as stating later that you've got "naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle" both of which were intended to say that it's pretty hard to brake in most cars these days without power brakes.

I don't know how the Cybertruck breaks down on the easy <-> difficult manual braking spectrum, but I imagine that given the high gross vehicle weight and large wheels, it probably steers more towards the difficult end of the spectrum than the easy. Such a dumpster fire of a vehicle.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

I am so glad, that there is no chance of ever meeting one in my country

Lucky 😆

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser's have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I've wanted it without delay or failure? None. I've owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don't think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don't have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you're in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can't get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it's "backwards rhetoric" to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that's just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It's why anything that doesn't have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it's just more reliable and often more efficient. That's not backwards, it's just a priority that you don't value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they'd still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don't weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

Dolphin requires JIT compilation and that is still verboten under these new guidelines.

Further, the rule change says that these apps are allowed to "Download" ROMs, it doesn't say that they can just play anything they want, it in fact says that they have to provide an index of everything their software might run and where it is downloaded from. The rules are not going to allow emulators as we know and love them. It says specifically that the software offered under the guidelines must be offered via In App Purchases, so in all,

A) Emulators can exist

B) They can download ROMs

C) You have to comply with all applicable laws while you offer an emulator that allows people to download ROMs ಠ_ಠ

D) "Software offered in apps under this rule must: use in-app purchase in order to offer digital goods or services to end users."

Which in whole means that they've allowed (for example) Sega to offer an Emulator app that will run ROMs of games that Sega owns, but they have to sell the ROMs to you individually via IAPs.

Feel free to read their guidelines at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#third-party-software, because there isn't any way in my reading to interpret those rules as allowing something like Higan to exist on the app store, the new rules are such a narrow carve out that it's hard to imagine that anyone is able to provide an emulator for iOS any time soon. They've opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn't need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it's business as usual for Apple.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

Agree to disagree.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

One has already been pulled, though seemingly for unrelated copyright issues?

That said, I'm surprised that things have gotten to this point, I suppose time will tell once the property holders get involved how committed Apple is to this whole change, there's still a lot of room to interpret the clause about conforming to all laws for the content that is being run in the app.

Given that I didn't think ANY emulators would make it into the Appstore, I'm going to retract my position. However, I think that we're still in the "Fuck around" stage of things and there may yet be some "Find out" to come.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

Happened today, and for those with governments that actually regulate (the EU) his AltStore is also up.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It's funny how they're allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It's just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It's not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they're generally not a fan of those either. It's disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it's because it's the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it's their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it's disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

...and lest anyone think that this problem isn't solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they're willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it's disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don't exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That's not how it works and frankly I wouldn't want it to work that way because it's just incredibly dangerous. They're trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they're doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn't function at all because that's the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

DarthYoshiBoy , 2 months ago

It depends. In the early days of the Android ROM scene, Twitter was the best place for news. Cyanogen and all the crews basically announced their new releases exclusively on Twitter. There has been a similar vibe for other scenes over the years as well. Discord is largely taking over that space these days, but I miss the simplicity of following one or two people whose updates I cared about a bunch over the new reality where I'm in 30 Discords and they're all chock full of notifications for endless nonsense I care nothing about.

DarthYoshiBoy , 3 months ago

Lumines

DarthYoshiBoy , 3 months ago

It's a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.

DarthYoshiBoy , 3 months ago

My 2016 Nissan Leaf is 4400lbs, which is more than my larger (but still not that big) 2016 Mazda CX-5 at ~3500lbs. Both manage to fit my family of 5, but the Leaf is far less accommodating and it weighs a good deal more. Small EVs are still pretty substantial. A Kia EV6 which is roughly the same size as my CX-5 weighs 5500lbs. You add a lot to a vehicle when you add an EV battery.

DarthYoshiBoy , 3 months ago

I've dabbled with Linux on Mac hardware a couple of times and I've got to say that Linux DEs generally hew closer to Windows conventions than Mac ones and I found using the Mac keyboard with Linux to be a dreadful experience without the fact that the chiclet keyboards are the worst shit I've ever put my fingers on.

I very quickly snagged a standard mechanical qwerty 104 key with brown switches and cursed every moment that I had to use that abominable keyboard built into the stupid MacBook. Apple seems determined to do things different for the sake of different as much as they possibly can and trying to adapt all their nonsense to the Win/Lin way of doing things made my life worse in numerous ways (most DEs have great remapping for keys and such, but it gets messy fast if you've got apps from different paradigms.)

I'd very much recommend against going out of your way to get a Mac keyboard for using Linux unless you enjoy fighting against things. But hey, if that's your kink, then a Mac keyboard with Linux would be my recommended way to go.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

Honestly the 1600x1440 screen on the Analogue Pocket and the ability to drive it is what you're paying for when you buy it.

There's not going to be a device that can drive all those pixels at less than the Analogue Pocket's price for some time yet. Sure, none of the Game Boy systems used anywhere near that many pixels, but the fact that the Analogue Pocket screen is so ridiculously pixel dense it can emulate the original attributes of the OG screens from the devices that their FPGA is mimicking means you're going to pay a premium for that (or any) device doing full hardware replication at that level.

Honestly seeing the Analogue Pocket emulate the way that the original DMG GameBoy screen pixels seemed to slightly hover over the background (slightly casting a shadow) was mind-blowing. You can't get that unless your screen actually has those original pixel attributes or you've built a display with enough resolution to emulate what those characteristics looked like. See: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PXL_20211213_155424062.jpg (Seriously, zoom in and notice the mimicry of the shadows under darker pixels, it's just crazy to see in person.)

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

The original Game Boy Color has a screen that is only 160 pixels x 144 pixels at a 6bit color depth. That color depth means it can keep track of 6bits of color information for each pixel (technically the GBC screen CAN display 15bits of color information, but it's limited in software to 6bits absent certain tradeoffs.)

This isn't exactly how it all works, but I'm going to just do some quick and dirty math really quickly that sorta simply illustrates how this works. To adequately display a 60fps image on the GBC display at the 6bit color depth of the screen, we'd need to be able to process 23,040 pixels (each with 6 bits of color data) every 60th of a second. To simplify further, there's 138,240 bits of data to process every 16.6ms just to "drive" the display, or put another way 138,240 bits of data to process to ensure that the display gets all the information it needs to build a complete picture every 60th of a second.

So for a 1600x1440 display, you're looking at 2,304,000 pixels, and the Analogue Pocket has a 16bit color depth, so you're going to need to be able to process 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms to "drive" that display.

Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 138,240 bits of data every 16.6ms is a fairly easy task these days. Getting a GPU/CPU/FPGA that can handle 36,864,000 bits of data every 16.6ms is also a pretty easy undertaking these days, but it's much more power intensive and it's going to cost a bunch more. All of which is beside the shader calculations the Pocket adds in to do things like emulating the pixel fade of old LCDs or other effects that further emulate the properties of the original displays which requires further processing.

The tradeoff is that you can build a more detailed image with all those extra pixels, but you're going to pay for it both in electrical power spent, heat generated, and costs sunk.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

I'd recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren't Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you'll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.

That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they'll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.

iFixIt has the process for doing the work: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113182 and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Right+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113185

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

The 90/90 rule strikes again!

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.

I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don't think there's any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn't shape it up into a product worthy of attention.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

My suggestion would be to reframe your thesis. Rather than consuming content, change your perspective to one where you are appreciating art.

The world is vast and full of amazing things, you don't need to feel like you're wasting time when you dedicate that time to appreciating art that you love. There are books, games, movies, short form video essays, podcasts, and all sorts of things that are real expressions of the human experience from different angles, which is what art is, and there's nothing wrong with appreciating that art, learning something from it, and growing your understanding.

Unless you're harming yourself or others by enjoying the art you enjoy, just keep on doing it.

That said, if you really want something else, gaming is (IMO) a great way to spend some time, tabletop or video. Learning a programming language is another one and can lead to very fulfilling paths where you can make things that you enjoy and easily share them with others.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.

I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn't replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn't harmed me in the least to use both. It's actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.

I'm not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn't, I've still got Mastodon to fall back to where I'm pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

I’m on the other side, why use either?

Microblogging is a great format for following creators. I don't need your life story to know that you've got a new album, a new software release, a new security vulnerability, a new video, a new tour, or a new comic. The shortform communication forced by Mastodon or Bluesky is perfect for that. It gives enough room to share those quick updates, and that's about it. Replies are also kept succinct which makes parsing those for relevant context or side info similarly simple.

I originally got into Twitter because it was the update channel for when new Cyanogenmod releases dropped and I stuck around because following the right security professionals made it so that I could learn about a new CVE within seconds of its filing rather than having to wait for a news site I visit to catch wind of it and write something up. Which in turn made my job easier because I knew what systems we'd need to be patching well before that info bubbled up to my bosses so I could already have a head start on the work before the ask reached me officially.

These days, microblogging (at least with a straight chronological follow feed) more or less achieves what RSS used to back before everyone suddenly decided about a decade back that it wasn't worth maintaining an RSS feed without Google running Reader or some crap. By way of example, ~20 years ago I had 13 comics that I followed via my RSS reader, today only 5 of those creators still have RSS feeds and a couple of those seem like they're on life support for how they seem to infrequently pause updates for a few days at a time. All of the RSS feeds that are gone have moved to microblogging of some sort for updates, and I'd rather they use something open than the likes of Twitter (which I left at the first whiff that Musk was buying the place) or Instagram (which I have never used because it's Facebook and I don't do Facebook.)

Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.

Yeah, I'll agree there. I call them posts wherever they reside. It's what they've always been, it's what they'll always be.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

I'll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

How the fuck this headset weighs over 600 grams?

Because plastic isn't a premium material. Apple users expect fancy alloys with glass everywhere, Apple can't very well show up with a plastic headset and ask $3500 for it, they need all that extra weight to convince people that they're getting a premium VR AR SPACIAL COMPUTING device that is unlike anything ever done before. It's all part of the grift.

I'm a reformed VR enthusiast and I have got to say that it's all a hell of a gimmick, but it's just a really neat gimmick. Without any hard-light tech or something to make stuff that you can actually interact with it's all just Wii-mote waggle style nonsense that abstracts things that should be button presses into complex motions constrained by physical reality that our computers/keyboards/mice/controllers allow us to escape.

DarthYoshiBoy , 4 months ago

Banning Social Media FOR KIDS. Is just a quick means to spy on what ADULTS are getting up to on the Internet. Right now if you don't want to ID yourself to go see cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok, you can just sign up for an account and go searching for cat pics/videos. With this bill, if you want to go find cat pics/videos on Instagram/TikTok in the state of Florida, you'll have to submit a government ID to verify that you're not a kid, and I'd believe for about as long as I can breathe water that the linking of my real identity/government ID with a social media account will have no negative real world outcomes.

Cybersecurity is something that almost nobody takes seriously. I used to say that nobody takes it seriously until they're hurt by their poor cyber hygiene, but these days the insurance policies pay the same either way so companies/people still do the bare minimum and call it a day.

I'd much rather pay a VPN provider to be out of that jurisdiction than ever give anyone anything that concretely ties my online persona to my actual identity and it's just incredible that lawmakers so fundamentally misunderstand how this all works that they don't know it's that easy.

DarthYoshiBoy , 5 months ago

If Mr. Donaldson really wanted to know how much X was gonna give it to him he should have made a video about how Elon is a tiny man-child with an inferiority complex grown out of his inability to satisfy any woman and how Teslas are cheap made in China garbage piles that are handily bested by any other EV on the market in any metric. Only then, I MIGHT believe any revenue numbers he got from such a video, but I think what this article shows is happening is exactly how I'd expect things to go for any other video.

Elon is clearly gonna pull a Facebook and juice the numbers to lure people away from other platforms as long as he can in hopes of growing into something bigger than YouTube. I'd believe Elon's numbers as much as I believe he owns a lovely bridge on Kepler-442b that he wants to sell me at an amazing loss.

DarthYoshiBoy , 5 months ago

Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it's not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can't imagine why you'd choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that'd put this back at the head of the pack.