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blindsight

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blindsight ,

Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.

blindsight ,

I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.

And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.

What am I not understanding?

blindsight , (edited )

I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.

Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?

And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.

Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.

blindsight ,

Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

Can someone explain me USA obsession with prom and similar school rituals?

I just don’t get it… Why is that important, especially for kids now, that feel like they need to do a YouTube video asking for a date or doing some meme stuff. Some teens even hire the hottest celebrity or ask them to appear in their prom? This is so bizarre for me, all that just for a frivolous night....

blindsight ,

Thoroughly explained and well supported. I want to save this in case this topic ever comes up again so I can copy-pasta this.

blindsight , (edited )

This is probably the avenue to shut this down. If funding is contingent on making the publication freely available to download, and that comes from a major government funding source, then this whole scam could die essentially overnight.

That would need to somehow get enough political support to pass muster in the first place and pass the inevitable legal challenge that follows, too. So, really, this is just another example of regulatory capture ruining everything.

blindsight ,

It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.

A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels (www.npr.org)

Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds....

blindsight , (edited )

To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.

blindsight ,

Beehaw never defederated with lemmy.ml. Most notably, Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world which is one of the main reasons I’m happy to stay here. If Beehaw moves away from Lemmy, I’ll definitely need to find another instance that’s defederated with Lemmy.world.

blindsight ,

Yeah, fair. It’s frustrating when prices fluctuate; I’m lucky that we don’t have many “must have” items on our shipping lists, and I’m very price sensitive, so I just don’t buy things that are expensive. And I only used to go to Superstore at most weekly, so I’d never have noticed daily fluctuations.

blindsight ,

Clickbait explained:

[When on a quest] you’ll see bright blue birds fly into frame and perch on signposts and tree branches and stone arches, their beaks pointing the way to the hobbit you’re looking for.

It’s a lovely fairytale touch.

Sounds like it might be an interesting game for people looking for more Stardew-Valley-inspired cozy games to play.

blindsight ,

There’s probably something in the terms about it, and it would take a very expensive legal battle to settle it. And I doubt it has enough legal merit to be taken on as a class-action lawsuit.

So, really, does it matter if it’s illegal? With the asymmetrical power imbalance, they literally don’t need to care about the laws. Realistically, no EU regulator is going to fine them for cancelling “a purchase made in India”, either.

blindsight , (edited )

This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?

blindsight ,

I was surprised with how many people were watching Star Citizen streams on Twitch. I don’t know if there was some sort of event on or something, but it was near the top of the Twitch leaderboards.

I was one of the suckers that bought the game in the initial campaign and I haven’t played it yet. It looks like there might actually be enough content now to be worth checking out, but I’m not convinced it’s worth pushing past the jank to play when there are so many amazing, polished games to play instead. I’ll wait until I hear it’s reasonably stable. (Which it clearly isn’t, yet; the streamer I briefly tuned into the other day was saying that he can’t complete a quest line the intended way because of a game-breaking bug that’s been around for months.)

blindsight ,

An Omdia report from April 2023 claims Valve sold 1.62 million units of the Steam Deck in 2022, which was expected to grow by 14 percent to 1.85 million units in 2023. If we assume the 14% growth continues, and those numbers are accurate, then Valve is closing in on 4½ million units sold.

blindsight ,

There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

– Lynn Stout, professor of corporate and business law, Cornell University

blindsight ,

I don’t want to quote dump multiple paragraphs, but Stout explicitly explains that’s not correct in the following paragraphs, citing relevant case law where appropriate.

I’m not a lawyer, but that article reads pretty clearly to me; I’d be interested to hear if you read it and get a different interpretation.

blindsight ,

Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and The Scream (respectively).

blindsight ,

Yep. Z-Library loaded fine for me with their app, which leads the darknet site.

But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.

blindsight ,

That’s terrible, but so are the treatments this article is suggesting. ABA is abuse.

Behaviorism, in general, has lots of research supporting its efficacy in changing behavior, but completely ignores the mental health effects of the trauma from the behaviorist interventions.

This might be made more clear with a thought experiment from Dr Becky Kennedy’s mostly-unrelated parenting book, The Good Inside. (Great book, btw. Highly recommended for all parents.) I know a 100% effective treatment for any childhood behavior: when the child engages in the behaviour, lock them outside in a cage overnight. It will take at most 3 treatments and they’ll never exhibit that behavior again, guaranteed!

Aside from the hypothetical example obviously not passing ethics review, that’s literally how behaviorism research is conducted: the only thing they measure is efficacy in altering behaviour. That’s a really low bar.

ABA is “effective” because children are being conditioned to avoid being abused.

South Australia to legislate 'world leading' electoral donation ban prohibiting donations and gifts to political parties, backed by tough penalties for those who seek to circumvent the law (www.premier.sa.gov.au)

The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has announced plans to ban donations to registered political parties, members of parliament and candidates. The state will provide funding to allow parties and candidates to contest elections, run campaigns and promote political ideas, according to the proposed bill....

blindsight ,

Developed, Developing, or Least Developed, according to the UN.

blindsight ,

It’s not too hard if you follow a build guide. Somebody who’s done the math will tell you how to spec and gear your character.

If I had more time, I’d love to be one of those über nerds, but adulting, y’know?

blindsight ,

Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive… I think that’s going to be a tough hill to climb, especially as they’re only asking to not be undercut as a supplier. There’s no requirement to sell exclusively through Steam, and Steam even allows developers to give Steam keys on other platforms, including with game bundles that have a total “value” well below Steam sale prices.

Like, I use Steam daily, and buy multiple games most months in game bundles, but in the last few years, I’ve only made a handful of purchases on Steam. One game and my Steam Deck Dock were my only Steam purchases this calendar year, and my Steam Deck OLED and two games were my only purchases last year, but in that time I added about 150 new games to my Steam library.

blindsight ,

Yeah, exactly. Steam gets very little money from me (well, aside from the Deck), but I get all the benefits from their services. Not sure how that’s monopolistic…

blindsight ,

This is the first I’ve heard it that way. I haven’t read the contract though, so I can’t say I’m correct with confidence.

blindsight ,

Do videogame records count? A friend of mine from uni holds dozens of works records for a reasonably well known indie game. She’s showcased it on a Games Done Quick charity Steam, too.

I can’t say the game or it’ll doxx her, though. She has most of the records.

Summer is the worst season of the year, isn't?

The sun sucks, being forced to shower like every 4 hours just to not feeling sweaty, the fucking mosquitoes, the fact you can’t wear anything that you want anymore due the heat, the people outside… The fucking beach. I try to avoid it… The fucking sand, not a fan of it. Is scratchy, harsh, annoying and it infiltrates in...

blindsight ,

I didn’t like summers or winters where I used to live, so I moved to somewhere where I like both seasons. Then moved again to somewhere that I love all four seasons.

But I get what you’re saying; you’re describing the summers of my childhood. Hot and humid so you feel like you need a cold shower within 5 minutes of walking outside. Sticky by day, swarmed by mosquitos at night.

But you lost me at the sand bit. I love the beach and ocean when it’s like 10-30°C out. Colder and hotter are okay, too, but not as nice.

blindsight , (edited )

In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)

blindsight ,

I learned from Franklin books and Mario games that you’re wrong. A picture showing a clear cavity where a turtle could pop out won’t convince me!

Vimms Lair is getting removal notices from Nintendo etc. We need someone to help make a rom pack archive can you help? (slrpnk.net)

Vimms lair is starting to remove many roms that are being requested to be removed by Nintendo etc. soon many original roms, hacks, and translations will be lost forever. Can any of you help make archive torrents of roms from vimms lair and cdromance? They have hacks and translations that dont exist elsewhere and will probably be...

blindsight ,

I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.

blindsight ,

I don’t know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you’re uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that “seeding” if you aren’t a “seed” with 1.00 availability? idk.

I’d still count that as “seeding” since you’re running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there’s a precise definition somewhere.

blindsight ,

I mean, sure… But a whole lot of people use Photoshop professionally without a license.

Krita is great, though. Their Android version is even fully featured, so you can use a tablet with a digitizer if you don’t have a drawing pad for your desktop.

blindsight ,

The Team Fortress 2 community has come together in an attempt to brute force developer Valve into fixing a bot problem that has plagued the hero shooter for years.

Source

Do you use both a personal desktop and laptop?

I’m moreso curious if laptop functions have been offloaded to phones. If you have a full gaming desktop, do you see the use case for an additional laptop? or if most people here don’t see the need for the increased processing power of a desktop, do you just use your laptop and a phone?...

blindsight ,

I have a lot of devices, but I rarely use most of them.

  1. My desktop is my main device for all my work from home. Work desktop for work at the office.
  2. My work laptop only gets used for client visits.
  3. My personal laptop only gets used when I need a second mobile device for work and Zooming with my family (to bring to where my kiddos are set up playing).
  4. My wife’s work laptop is her main work machine and her personal laptop is our evening TV.
  5. My Android phone is my ADHD dopamine machine most of the time. Some light work use.
  6. My gaming is almost exclusively on my Steam Deck (but I’m working on getting a WiFi mesh network so I can stream from my desktop to my Deck). Used nightly in bed.
  7. My 8 y.o. daughter’s tablet is an audiobook machine, some edutainment apps, and sleep sounds machine. Occasionally a screen for shows/art video tutorials.
  8. My 6 y.o son’s tablet is mostly podcasts and sleep sounds.
  9. My DSi is my wife’s Tetris machine.

TL;DR: I mostly use my desktop for work and Deck/phone for entertainment. My laptops see use a few times/month when I’m on the road for work or Zooming with family and basically never in between. But we have a lot of devices that have specific use cases for different members of my family.

blindsight , (edited )

When I use these services (when I’m given a gift card) I select $0 tip and tip with cash. I don’t trust the app makers to give them the tip. I hope parent poster does this, too. I thought tipping in cash was pretty common!

blindsight ,

I see you, too, saw the 24/7 live Biden-Trump “debate” Twitch stream.

blindsight ,

This was mine, but I’m assuming you weren’t referring to the BBC radio play, which is the best version of LotR ever made. The films had major distortions on the themes of the story and completely unbelievable characterization that destroyed all suspension of disbelief.

Sure, the CG was nice eye candy… but Gandalf getting into a shouting match with Elrond? Really? We’re okay with that?

Plus, skipping the correct ending of Frodo and Sam coming back to the Shire in industrialized dystopia missed key parts of their character growth and Tolkien’s anti-industrial themes.

And the massive over-focus on a love story that was barely relevant in the story? And a half hour epilogue of useless wide shots showing how amazing the wedding was and how everyone is doing so great now that they won? What a waste of time. They skipped one of the best parts of the book for that shit.

I could go on if I had watched the films more than twice and could recall all the other huge problems.

The books don’t hold up, either. Ain’t nobody got time to read 3-page info dumps of dense descriptive writing about plot-irrelevant details, or dense blocks of ancient history that demolishes any semblance of pacing left over.

He founded a lot of tropes of fantasy, so I know why he included all those descriptive details, but it just doesn’t hold up. Elf, big tree house, got it. You’ve got me for two paragraphs to fill in the descriptive details, but then let’s move on with the plot, tyvm.

If you’re a fan of LotR, give the 13-hour BBC radio play a listen. And of you’ve watched/listened to/read all three and disagree with me, I’d love to hear why (out of interest). Full disclosure: you probably won’t convince me, but I’m still waiting to hear someone who knows the source material justifying why the movies are so adored.

fathermcgruder , to asklemmy
@fathermcgruder@jorts.horse avatar

What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I'm having a stroke?

Maybe they're used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn't explain the emails I've had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics' messages?

@asklemmy

blindsight ,

I always capitalize words that locally mean something specific and technical. Like the Group a Record is associated with in the Student table.

Do you mean things like that? Or just capitalizing all Nouns for no Reason or Something silly?

blindsight ,

To add to what the other poster said:

I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that noise cancellation works by inverting sounds waves to deaden the sound. So, like, if you add sin(x) and –sin(x) you get 0.

This system is actively adding inverted sound waves to cancel most sounds. What makes this system unique is that it samples the voice and uses the unique “voice print” to selectively not invert the sound waves from the targeted voice.

Or that’s what I’m getting from reading this, as a layman.

blindsight ,

It’s missing filling the start bat with a massive Copilot box and weather/news widget. Or maybe missed an opportunity to make Clippy the AI assistant.

I love-hate it.

blindsight ,

But, like, cats wear out by use, not time. (For the most part.)

A car is good for, say, 300,000 km. If you drive 300K in it, then you “fully used” the car.

That’s like saying a pad of paper isn’t used when it’s sitting on your shelf. Technically true, maybe, but the pad is used up when it’s out of sheets. It doesn’t make sense to measure the utilization time for a consumable, like paper or a car.

blindsight ,

I mean, yeah. The point of collectibles like that is in owning the thing, not using the thing. Read the ebook instead.

Or the BBC radio play, which is the best version of LotR ever, including the original books and films, and I’ll die on that hill.

blindsight ,

The deleted scenes and commentary audio tracks were cool, but idk if I’d actually watch any of it now. I heard years ago that there’s a whole system for “MST3King” a movie manually with community commentary tracks that effectively do the same thing and I’ve never cared enough to figure out how to set it up and try one, so I don’t know if I’d ever actually watch a DVD commentary even if I had the option.

Maybe it would be cool for Taskmaster, since I’ve seen every episode so many times and continue to rewatch it? But I rarely re-watch anything anymore. And I don’t think TV shows got commentary tracks anyway.

And deleted scenes could probably just be found on YouTube, I assume? I don’t know because I haven’t cared enough to search, lol.

blindsight ,

I have an AutoHotkey script that drops the current date in ISO8601. I don’t need timestamps often, so date is sufficient. I like to have manual control of file names since I very frequently do not want files renamed.

Cute related story: I taught my 6 y.o. son this macro so he can save his Krita art with the date (and then some keyboard spam ending in “poop”, usually). The macro shortcut I set is `T so he now calls the date “ticky tee”. Any set of numbers with dashes is a “ticky tee” to him, and if AutoHotkey is closed he runs to get me because “ticky tee isn’t working, Daddy!”

blindsight ,

They get 30 days notice of the price increase. That’s pretty reasonable and in compliance with the law, I would assume.

blindsight ,

I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.

For mainstream stuff, it just works. For obscure stuff, it’s about 50-50 if it’s on there.

Manually downloading torrents is just for stuff I’ll be transferring to a mobile device, like audiobooks. And cracked software, I suppose. I needed Adobe Acrobat for something and torrented it.

blindsight ,

idk, I couldn’t care less about 90Hz. I switched to 60 Hz to save battery on my last phone that had a 90Hz display anyway.

I love how narrow the Xperia 10 series is. It’s a great one-handed phone, and the 21:9 aspect ratio is great for getting a lot of text on the page.

blindsight ,

idk… I feel like Valve might be the one with the power to stop this already with refunds. It sucks for them, since they’ll lose their cut of the sale, but if they refund thousands of copies at full price, it adds a financial disincentive for publishers.

If Valve made it a policy to automatically refund games to anyone who asks after DRM is added, that might help encourage more users to request refunds, so publishers might be less inclined to add Linux-breaking DRM (good for Valve), and get more goodwill from gamers, but it will also cost Valve more in fees, and encourage publisher pushback against Steam’s perceived monopoly.

I have no way to speculate which of those incentives is more important for Valve.

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