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shinjiikarus

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

shinjiikarus ,

You are alright bot, you tried your best!

shinjiikarus ,

Every good thing the EU does is stuff which slipped through the cracks of the deeply corrupt officials and their lobbyists overlords. The EU just does so much stuff, that sometimes something slips through before the officials can be bribed to stop it.

shinjiikarus ,

Which meaningless drama did I miss here?

shinjiikarus ,

Thank you for your detailed reply! I personally view LMG videos as purely entertaining, they shouldn’t trash other people for data quality or accuracy, since they are rather weak in that field as well. Rather they should focus on entertainment for entertainment’s sake, where they are - at least in my opinion - stronger than a lot of the rest.

shinjiikarus ,

This. People read this and think about the removable batteries of Nokia bricks and plastic hardshells, but this would really hamper with IP68 rating. It probably just means the users must be able to replace the battery themselves, instead of artificially locking it down with DRM. And maybe provide some documentation. Otherwise phones would become so much worse, than they have been for more than a decade.

shinjiikarus ,

I only remember the Samsung rugged ones, which do not look great. Some compromise will be needed to get removable batteries into phones. Compromises the buyer of a gold iPhone Pro Max to flex their wealth won’t appreciate. Not DRMing batteries and giving users access to documentation and tools for replacing the battery requires almost no compromise from no one (except a tiny dent in Apple‘s balance sheet, which they will recover from, I’m sure).

shinjiikarus ,

Has this story ever been confirmed by Target directly? As this happened in America and her father was outraged about it, it would have been awfully convenient, to “blame” the algorithm for “discovering”, she was pregnant. It takes quite a data analyst to figure out trends before someone even knows they are pregnant. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a pattern for someone if they know they are pregnant and are just hiding it from their dad.

shinjiikarus , (edited )

That is going to be a problem for apple, better make the next iPhone’s battery be unreplaceable and self destruct after 2 years.

shinjiikarus ,

Oh sorry, this wasn’t an iOS-vs-Android dig, all the android manufacturers are constantly near bankruptcy, but apple has shareholders who are expecting growth, they will be hurt the most by consumers holding their on to their phones longer. (Samsung is reporting over 90% profit shrinkage, the Chinese brands are probably just PLA plants to capture as much communication as possible worldwide without a profit motive to begin with)

shinjiikarus ,

Far from it, it their profit is down like a lot.

shinjiikarus ,

If you’d be born wealthy, it would be pretty stupid to listen to them explaining how to get rich, unless you want to piss away your and your daddy‘s money. Elon hasn’t made it quite the way (but he is getting there), but Trump Sr. must be very disappointed.

shinjiikarus ,

She is giving Tom Wambsgans with Lukas Matsson, human punching bag vibes.

shinjiikarus ,

Oh, I didn’t mean „morally disappointed“, but disappointed in his inability to brutally grow the business instead of wasting his time with petty crimes.

shinjiikarus ,
shinjiikarus ,

Good bot!

A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats (techcrunch.com)

The researchers will present their research next week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas....

shinjiikarus ,

Twice of the much lower cost, due to economies of scale … which may/should still be significantly less than building two - and more, for more features - factory lines and risk not selling a car for a longer time, since it doesn’t have the right feature combination.

shinjiikarus ,

To be honest: keeping the chain alive would be great!

shinjiikarus ,

If you are a permanent employee and get a good salary I can follow your argument, you are a cog in a machine and get reimbursed regularly. But if you are hired project by project and get paid some lump sum (and probably not a good one), then exposure in credits and on IMDb is really valuable.

OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation (www.businessinsider.com)

OceanGate’s cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn’t stop pushing the limits of innovation::Guillermo Söhnleinm told Insider he has wanted to make humanity a multi-planet species since he was 11 years old, and that OceanGate was part of that ambition.

shinjiikarus ,

I hope the tickets are really expensive! And why wait until 2050?

shinjiikarus ,

They wouldn’t have slammed into it, if they’d kept their safe distance as @XTornado wrote. I’m in no way defending Tesla‘s „Autopilot“, it should be banned until they pass a very difficult test proving true self driving capabilities and multiple layers auf fail safes (which they can’t right now). But examples where an autopilot Tesla did something stupid and other people making human errors are disingenuous: if somebody drops their cigarette and breaks unexpectedly and the cars behind don’t keep their distance and slam into it, the reason they have an accident is not the cigarette but their dangerous safety distance.

Brands that don’t buy enough Twitter ads will lose verification (www.theverge.com)

another change to Twitter’s ad policy. Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to...

shinjiikarus ,

He didn’t have the liquid capital to buy Twitter, either, that’s his problem.

shinjiikarus ,

This so hard! I cannot imagine Twitter being relevant enough (especially outside the United States) to get a hitjob, so I’m going with dumb af.

Stanford researchers find Mastodon has a massive child abuse material problem (www.theverge.com)

Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related...

shinjiikarus ,

Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.

'Android's now better than iOS': Instagram boss weighs in on the age-old iPhone vs. Android debate (www.businessinsider.com)

‘Android’s now better than iOS’: Instagram boss weighs in on the age-old iPhone vs. Android debate::Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s best tech “hot take”? He believes Google’s Android platform has surpassed Apple’s iOS.

shinjiikarus ,

Genuine question: where is apple selling ads besides the AppStore and which data are they collecting compared to meta?

shinjiikarus ,

Economists who want to use the platform to discuss economist topics? Why should public figures hide their identity on all their accounts?

ajsadauskas , to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Called it. Elon's doing exactly what I thought he would do: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/109979152813584947

Twitter is dead.

There is no point in trying to hold on to what Twitter used to be. What Twitter used to be no longer exists.

It died the moment Elon walked in the building.

Anything posted there since then has been free content on his everything app and potential crypto scam, X: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/23/twitter-elon-musk-says-he-wants-to-change-companys-bird-logo

@technology

shinjiikarus ,

I cannot understand this either: we have an everything app, it’s called our homescreen, why would you use that to launch another one?

shinjiikarus ,

Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They’ve sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.

Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.

Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.

shinjiikarus ,

Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.

Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.

Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.

I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.

Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.

shinjiikarus ,

I believe the current audience on Mastodon doesn’t cater as much to outrage farmers, C-list celebrities and crypto bros and is more interested in real conversation about interesting topics. Therefore infosec people (one example) haven’t seen a noticeable dip.

Samsung’s new 98-inch 8K TV is the projector-beating home theater upgrade I’ve been waiting for (www.techradar.com)

Like most of the other best Samsung TVs, the new 98-inch QN900C has Samsung’s Gaming Hub and Motion Xcelerator Pro. That delivers 4K at up to 120Hz, rising to 144Hz with compatible PCs. There’s also support for AMD FreeSync Premium Pro as well as NVIDIA G-Sync like most of the best gaming TVs have.

shinjiikarus ,

My TV hasn’t been connected to the internet except for very specific updates I preemptively researched what they included. Otherwise it’s a „dumb TV“.

shinjiikarus ,

I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.

Turns out all we may need to stop climate change is 139 billion gallons of super-duper white paint (www.businessinsider.com)

Turns out all we may need to stop climate change is 139 billion gallons of super-duper white paint::According to one professor, we may be able to stop climate change if we used a new super white paint to cover the entire United States

shinjiikarus ,

Only after a second run through a hand-network (same with facial reconstruction and inverted faces)

The FTC Gets Steamrolled Again, Can’t Pause The Microsoft Activision Deal Before Appeal (www.forbes.com)

The FTC Gets Steamrolled Again, Can’t Pause The Microsoft Activision Deal Before Appeal::The FTC failed to land an injunction pausing the deal, something that Microsoft and Activision both said may kill it, but the opposite result now means the acquisition…

shinjiikarus ,

I feel like a Microsoft shill, since the fediverse (and Reddit before this) feels so much of one mind and I am not. I know consolidation is generally bad for the consumer, while competition is generally good, but is the Activision deal bad for the consumer or the industry?

ABK doesn’t have a steady output, doesn’t have reliable IPs and doesn’t produce guaranteed hits. What they have is some cash and some overvalued IP from the past (aka “assets”). Let’s look at this one by one:

We are in the “Blizzard can do no wrong”-part of the eternal Blizzard-is-trash-cycle, since Diablo 4 is generally well received at the moment. But their last two games have been Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal. Before that Overwatch in 2016, which - while liked by many - didn’t really catch up to other hero shooters popularity-wise (even though the IP stayed in the zeitgeist for other, unmonetarized reasons). So what is Blizzard living off of? WoW, obviously, which had that much decline due to their decisions, they needed to relaunch their old game again to retain players and WoW is still shrinking (though more slowly than before). Their last memorable IPs are the Starcraft and Warcraft RTS, which did not translate into the current landscape very well. RTS have always been niche as a consumer product, but considerably less so in the times of Age of Empires and Command & Conquer. Their biggest appeal has been in eSports where they have been leapfrogged heavily by LoL and - adding insult to injury - DotA. It looks like Diablo 4 will be a venerable hit, which is great (I personally like Diablo), but it needs to replace a lot of revenue lost from other revenue streams alone.

Activision is the CoD machine it looks to be: They drove all their original IP into the ground or simply fell out of the zeitgeist, like Tony Hawk’s, Guitar Hero, Spyro, and Crash (I know, the last two hurt, but they simply couldn’t acquire a new and younger audience like Mario, Zelda and even Sonic could). Movie adaptations, which have been most of the output Activision had in the 2000’s have fallen out of style heavily and movie adjacent IP like PlayStation’s Spider-Man aren’t developed nor published by Activision anymore. Which essentially leaves CoD. Modern Warfare 2 2022 is comparably successful again but Vanguard was such a shitshow it single handedly tanked Activision’s revenue for the 2022 fiscal year. Activision simply cannot continue to pump these things out yearly and expect a steady return each year, which is nice, don’t get me wrong, but is a problem for Activision’s bottom line.

One of the largest contributors of ABK is the dreaded King, which paradoxically struggles from all the same problems as Blizzard and Activision Even though a lot younger. They have one IP bringing in all the money, which is shrinking in player count and revenue contribution: Candy Crush. If boomers start to die en masse, or another Candy Crush is able to capture the “mindless smartphone puzzle market”, King is effectively over.

In this situation ABK makes a little bit more revenue than Take2 (their most comparable competition), with more than double Take2’s employees. While EA makes close to the same revenue, still with less employees and with more “hot irons” in the fire (love or hate EA, but they have Sims, FIFA, Madden, Apex and make decently well received single player games like Jedi and Dead Space on the side regularly, while not really being propped up by a mobile division as massive as King).

I’m not saying ABK cannot compete or is already bankrupt, but their pipeline dried up and they’d need a lot of restructuring (read: fire thousands of people), to justify their revenue and output. Additionally they’d need to diversify and get more IPs back on track or even create new ones (preposterous idea, I know!), to get back to acceptable risk levels.

Microsoft is in a comparable situation currently (let’s wait on Starfield for final judgement of Microsoft’s “situation”): They drove a lot of IP into the ground and didn’t replace it with new one, while losing a console war at the same time (I dispise Don Mattrick’s decisions as much as everyone else and I like Phil Spencer’s public persona a lot, but Phil wasn’t able to turn the tide until now, so I’m not aware that he is a better manager of Xbox’s course than Don). They are not trying to buy ABK the publisher, they are buying CoD to replace Halo specifically and they will bring in Blizzard’s IP into their group of “double A” developers like obsidian, where it fits right in (and some mobile footing doesn’t hurt nobody) and Microsoft needs to pay for Activision’s cash and “assets”, which makes this deal look so big, even though I’d argue it’s not really that big.

I don’t see this as consolidation, really. I think there are two path’s forward: either Microsoft buys Activision, gets rid of a lot of employees, which will be disliked by everybody. Then giving Blizzard the creative leeway they need to produce games for GamePass (probably with smaller budgets and shorter development time like Obsidian). And getting CoD back on track as the live service game it should have been. Or Microsoft doesn’t buy Activision and Bobby Kottick being the visionless uncreative manager he currently is, gets rid of a lot of employees, does put more pressure on Blizzard to create the next WoW (which they can’t), puts more pressure on those poor CoD-farms like Sledgehammer and Raven to produce more CoDs faster. Then the decline won’t be as visible for a few years (due to less payroll) until it becomes visible again since nothing relevant changed and Bobby sells off King for cash and after a few years the rest of Activision gets sold off one by one. I fail to see how this scenario is better than the Microsoft acquisition.

Video games aren’t essential goods and services or commodities. The consumer doesn’t profit from competition as much, if all the competition are bad and run down video game IPs. Creative works are not really substitutable. One liter of clean water from one company is the same as a liter from another. But 100 bad games you play for 1 hour each is not the same as one good game you play for 100 hours. The consumer profits, if there is a climate allowing for creative freedom and the nurturing of existing and new IP, instead. And this climate does not exist at ABK at the moment, while I see a chance it could exist at Microsoft.

shinjiikarus ,

Destiny 2’s migration from battle.net to Steam on the other hand …

shinjiikarus ,

I know this mantra and I agree for most utilities and consumer goods.

But Activision is barely functional anymore. We don’t tend to look ahead, but Activision’s pipeline is all dried up. They’ve driven a lot of their cash cows into the ground or fell out of the zeitgeist, like Tony Hawk’s, Crash Bandicoot (yeah, some 30- to 40-somethings may have fond memories, but the series has no pull factor anymore like Mario and even Sonic still do), Spyro (same thing) and Guitar Hero. Movie adaptations have fallen out of style, which have been most of Activision’s output in the 2000s and the movie-adjacent IPs, that are still pulling numbers like Spider-Man aren’t licensed to them anymore.

Blizzard has more or less (paradoxically more and less) the same problem: Yes, they are currently remembered for their Diablo 4 launch and lauded again as if they could never do anything wrong, but their last two games in the 2020s have been Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal. Before that Overwatch in 2016. There is just not a Diablo 5 in the books for the next few years. RTS have always been niche, but considerably less so in the eras of Age of Empire and Command & Conquer, when StarCraft and WarCraft have been major hits. I don’t know if a StarCraft III would bring in billions. WoW is an entirely different beast, which fails to acquire a younger audience, while comparable phenomena like Fortnite don’t really struggle with this. WoW and Classic are bankable money hoses, but they are not getting bigger.

Even King has kind of run its course: Sure you have heard of Candy Crush, but its time has passed the moment smartphones became good enough for Fortnite (again). I just don’t see school kids in 2030 playing Candy Crush 2, while I can imagine they are still playing Fortnite. The same goes for Angry Birds. King failed to adapt to the new age after smartphones moved beyond the iPod-touch-era.

ABK has 17K employees and USD 7 billion of revenue, which sounds impressive, until you look into their annual report: nearly half their revenue comes from mobile vs. consoles and PC and it is the only segment not shrinking. According to their last annual, mainly due to the contributions of Diablo Immortal next to the shrinking King-franchises. More than 75% of ABK’s revenue are in-game purchases and subscriptions, which leaves less than 25% for game sales. Additionally Vanguard is credited multiple times in the report as selling so bad it ripped a hole in Activision’s 2022 financial year.

All in all I feel like Activision is the CoD-machine first and lives off of the last people still playing WoW and - more importantly - still playing Candy Crush. With the only exception of CoD (Warzone) they have difficulties acquiring a new audience and are visibly not growing any more. A streak of badly received CoDs can tank their company.

I still remember the heydays of both Blizzard and Activision and have fond memories of a lot of their franchises, but these times are gone and an acquisition now when the times are okay (Diablo 4, CoD MW2 selling much better than Vanguard) is much more sensible, than a sell off in a few years, when Candy Crush dries up and the then-current CoD sucks.

hybridhavoc , to gaming
@hybridhavoc@darkfriend.social avatar

Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23779039/microsoft-activision-blizzard-ftc-trial-win

From the article, quoting Judge Corley:

... the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.

@gaming

shinjiikarus ,

I play only one game from Acti-Blizz regularly which is CoD, since most of my friends play in religiously (time for new friends?). And it is treated so badly by Activision, I hope MS fixes this. I know all the highbrow arguments against consolidation. But I don’t care for Diablo or WoW (sorry) and the one game I play can only win from MS acquisition (impossible to treat it any worse). So I personally want this to go through already.

Would there be any benifit to host another instance?

As the question states. I have the skiils and know how to setup a new instsnce and from looking through the documentation its relatively straight forward. Im just wondering would it actually help the fediverse and lemmy as a whole? There seems to already be plenty of instances to choose from. What are your guys thoughts?

shinjiikarus , (edited )

Not OP, but I’m using this one: <a href="">lemmony on GitHub</a>

EDIT: deleted link, I feel like I made a mistake, see below.

shinjiikarus ,

Yeah, I let it run by night and saw what I did today. You are totally right, I will probably need to clean up a few things.

shinjiikarus ,

I created a bot account for this, so all green on that front, will experiment with it, thanks!

Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users (www.cnbc.com)

Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow...

shinjiikarus ,

I hate Zucc’s guts, but he isn’t stupid. Elon on the other side I am not so sure about.

shinjiikarus ,

If the “hot” and “active” filters continue to work as expected and bots get reasonably moderated or blocked, I don’t even think Lemmy needs a high barrier to entry or petulance. The most important thing is to not optimize any recommendation or sorting algorithm on session duration, ads seen before closing session, and revenue per user.

shinjiikarus ,

Is the M.2 port fully PCI capable? I’d like to put a PCI RAID controller with maybe four or six SATA ports into something Pi-adjacent. But full featured PCI-ports are kinda hard to come by in SBCs.

shinjiikarus ,

Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.

shinjiikarus ,

It has been amateur hour since Elon took over. I have never laughed so hard, as when he was dropping his “thoughts” about Twitter’s architecture.

shinjiikarus ,

I always compare self hosting to PC gaming: it has some very specific benefits, but you don’t even comprehend, how many downsides you will encounter you cannot even start to anticipate. If one doesn’t like the pain a little bit theses hobbies aren’t any good and I totally understand everyone giving up on them.

shinjiikarus ,

haha, I have the same experience tbh, but I still get the obvious “I don’t want to update my drivers or fiddle with settings and controls, I just want something that works”, responses. I don’t even recognize these topics as “pain” anymore, but this probably just shows how high my tolerance has become in the last decades.

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