Toribor

Toribor , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago) to asklemmy in What’s the worst piece of technology you’ve ever owned?

The Asus Transformer Prime.

It was an Android tablet circa 2011, right at that time they were actually making 10" Android tablets. I bought one as soon as Android Honeycomb launched which had an improved UI and lot of new tablet focused features. I bought the optional keyboard/battery attachment and planned for it to be my tiny laptop replacement that could also play emulators and be used for reading comics. I wanted to like it so bad.

It never really panned out though, a large majority of which was because of the faulty Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Awful performance issues, terrible wireless connectivity, overheating, battery drain and nonexistant software updates from Asus. I ran custom ROMs trying to squeeze it as much as I could but that meant I was constantly tinkering with it and having yet more problems. Eventually I even broke the screen (my fault) and painstakingly went through a whole botched screen replacement before finally deciding that it had been a huge waste of time and money and sent it to it’s grave.

Toribor , 2 days ago to technology in Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising

I’ve been running Bazzite on an old 1st gen Surface Book Pro that I had laying around. Touch screen and all the fancy keyboard stuff works great.

Toribor , 2 days ago to linux in I just realized all my teachers use ubuntu

At one point I triple booted my laptop with Ubuntu, Windows 7 and OSX mostly just to prove I could. Weird times, a lot has changed since then.

Toribor , 3 days ago to piracy in Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

Yes, resolution is not the only factor. Bitrate is equally if not more important.

Toribor , 4 days ago to gaming in Capcom's slapstick zombie mall adventure Dead Rising is being remastered

It’s kind of crazy how off the rails this series got later down the line.

Toribor , 5 days ago to android in This is Microsoft's canceled Surface Duo 3 foldable smartphone

Everything’s a drum!

Toribor , 8 days ago to linux_gaming in What is your favourite game with native Linux port?

Rimworld! Probably my favorite game ever actually.

Toribor , 8 days ago to linux in What is your favourite shell to use

I use Ansible playbooks to keep my config in sync. It’s great but there is a bit of a learning curve. Makes it easy to deploy config changes.

Toribor , 8 days ago to linux in What is your favourite shell to use

Zsh on workstations. Bash on servers.

Toribor , 9 days ago to technology in Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”

ineligible for promotion

This seems like an empty threat to me. Every promotion I’ve ever gotten internally has come with a negligible pay increase (~4%). The best promotions I’ve gotten have been leaving to take a new job somewhere else (~20-50%).

Toribor , 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago) to technology in New York bans “addictive feeds” for teens

Here is a bit of information on how Lemmy’s “Hot” sorting works.

I’m not going to argue about how addictive any specific feed or sorting method is, but this method is content neutral, does not adjust based on user behavior (besides which communities you subscribe to) and is completely transparent as all post interactions are public. With this type of sorting users can be sure that certain content is not prioritized over others (outside of mod actions which are also public). Having a more neutral straightforward ranking system that isn’t based on user behavior reduces addictiveness and is less likely to form echo chambers. This makes it easier to see more diverse content, reduces the spread of misinformation and is much more difficult to manipulate.

Toribor , 9 days ago to technology in New York bans “addictive feeds” for teens

The problem is algorithmically driven content feeds and the lack of transparency around them. These algorithms drive engagement which prioritizes content that makes people angry, not content that make people happy. These feeds are full of misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, rage bait, and other negativity with very little user control to protect themselves, curate the feed or to have neutral access to news and politics.

Lemmy sorts content very simply based on user upvotes. If you want to know why you’re seeing a post you can see exactly who upvoted it and what instances that traffic came from. It’s not immune to being manipulated but it can’t be done secretly or in a centralized way.

Yet based on their actions we already know that Facebook has levers they can pull to directly affect the amount of news people see about a specific topic, let alone the source of information on that topic. These big social media companies guard these proprietary algorithms that are directly determining what news people see on a massive scale. Sure they claim to be a neutral arbiter of content that just gives people what they want but why would anyone believe them?

Lemmy is not the same thing, though it’s not without its own problems.

Toribor , 9 days ago to til in TIL most cultures and peoples all over the world have historically had trouble recognizing the color blue

I think part of this phenomena is that the color of the sky on a clear day just wasn’t considered as a color, it was ‘blank’, the absence of clouds, stars or sunset. Kind of like how water has a flavor but we consider it to be neutral.

Toribor , 10 days ago to memes in This company is the laughing stock of gaming right now

GOG is fantastic but Steam keeps getting my business because of all the extras I really depend on like cloud saves, game library sharing, proton, Big picture and controller mapping.

Toribor , 11 days ago to memes in dogs or kids

My dog will listen but my cat starts eating faster.