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zabadoh

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What happened to the PC games (or what happened to consoles)?

I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I’m coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it’d be one thing if I just wasn’t seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and...

zabadoh ,

And cryptocurrency mining. That drove a lot of GPU prices through the roof before the pandemic.

Also, most young kids play games on phones and tablets, because parents don’t need to buy an expensive console or PC.

Check this out this short by a game developer if you want to feel old…

youtube.com/shorts/h8ElOpITBjQ

zabadoh ,

Oh good, then twatter can now become as successful as Truth social…

zabadoh ,

If they haven’t been brushing their teeth and there’s visible calculus on them, you could use a metal pick and scrape it off like a dentist doing teeth cleaning, to show them how thick it is.

zabadoh ,

Joe’s Classic Videogames is great and fun nostalgia about the insides of the classic arcade cabinets and pinball machines of yore.

Lots of insider information on how these things worked and what goes wrong with them, and satisfying play on the machines after they’ve been fixed!

zabadoh ,

Forum.Rojadirecta.es has nodes dedicated to pretty much any major sporting events: Soccer, NFL, MLB, F1, NBA, Rugby Union, et al.

Mostly they’re direct downloads from sites with way too much advertising, too many popups and misleading links, so they’re best handled with JDownloader2

Actual torrent links are available sometimes.

zabadoh ,

There are plenty of crops that have to be tended and harvested by hand: Most green leafy vegetables for example.

This opens those fields to dual use alongside power generation, which might reduce agricultural use of fossil fuels, and provide shade for field workers which is especially dangerous with climate change raising heat levels.

zabadoh ,

I disagree somewhat.

A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.

And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.

Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?

The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.

Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.

zabadoh , (edited )

It’s been that way for a loooong time.

Movies became so expensive to produce that studios can’t finance them themselves.

So they turned to the banks.

Banks are by nature risk averse.

So a production company has to submit an application to their bank’s movie financing department like you would when applying for a home loan.

The bank decides whether to finance the movie based on the information submitted: Script, subject matter, director, which stars have committed to the project, etc.

Now if you imagine, people from the banking industry are not artists and creatives and visionaries. They just look at raw investment potential, i.e. Is this proposed production going to pay off the loan with interest?

If there’s any risk, e.g. this has never been done before, or there’s no recognizable franchise branding, or if something could be controversial in a meaningful way, the bank won’t approve the production loan.

So sequels, brand name franchises, with writing committees, are easier to get approvals from the banks, therefore are more likely to make it into production.

That’s why Hollywood doesn’t make daring, experimental, and controversial movies much anymore.

zabadoh ,

Enshittification doesn’t just happen to online platforms.

zabadoh ,

And it’s not just movies.

Hit song analysis systems like Platinum Blue, aka Music XRay, use algorithms to compare new songs to hit songs of the past to rate the chances that they will become hits themselves.

This is why all new songs sound the same and there are so many cover versions.

New songs are scored by hit song analysis system(s) and have to achieve a high score showing how much they resemble previous hit songs before money is allocated for promotion.

zabadoh ,

Avistaz has the a great selection for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Thai, Hong Kong content.

zabadoh OP ,

The Internet version of QVC or Home Shopping Network that previous generations used to watch.

zabadoh ,

I’m neutral impoverished.

zabadoh ,

Was part of a team that was sent to Boston for a project. While we were there, the company announced they were changing the meal expense policy from reimbursement for submitted bills to a fixed stipend.

But that policy change was a couple of days away, so the whole team went to this fancy expensive restaurant for dinner, and we ordered expensive food and wines as one last hurrah.

I don’t even remember where or what I ate or drank.

I just remember it was a good time.

zabadoh ,

Depends.

Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.

I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.

But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.

Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.

I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.

Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they’re getting picked off.

I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I’ll let others opine on it.

Bernie Sanders Champions 32-Hour Work Week With No Loss in Pay (www.commondreams.org)

As part of his Labor Day message to workers in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday re-upped his call for the establishment of a 20% cut to the workweek with no loss in pay—an idea he said is “not radical” given the enormous productivity gains over recent decades that have resulted in massive profits for...

zabadoh ,

I can only see this happening hand in hand with Medicare For All and the decoupling of healthcare from full time employment.

Service jobs, which are currently 80 percent of US employment, require the same amount of hours with actual people present, e.g. you can’t wait more tables, or answer more customer service calls, in 20% less time.

Removing the cost of healthcare from employers will allow them to allocate some of the savings towards employee salaries instead of healthcare insurance.

zabadoh ,

How are the employers going to pay for the additional employees to work those 8 hours, while paying the existing employees the same salary for working 8 less hours?

The money has to come from somewhere.

P.s. Not all employers have CEOs making millions in bonuses. Nearly half of employees in the US work for small businesses , including single person businesses.

zabadoh ,

Or closer to the founding fathers’ intent: Wotan’s Day

zabadoh ,

Come to think of it, I just used the first version that came to mind.

After some more research from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin

Wotan - High German

Odin - Norse

Wōden - Old English.

Wōden would be the correct origin for Wednesday, which is the source of the W and D.
Not sure how the “ō” got changed to an “e” though.

'Where ambition goes to die': These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they're desperate to get out. (www.businessinsider.com)

‘Where ambition goes to die’: These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they’re desperate to get out.::Drawn by the promise of an emerging tech hub, some tech workers who flocked to Austin found a middling tech scene, subpar culture, and scorching heat.

zabadoh ,

Insider spoke to six workers in tech who recently left Austin or are trying to relocate …

zabadoh ,

Green/florescent green pee that looks like Mountain Dew can be a sign of diabetes, or consuming more sugar than your body can handle.

Check with your doctor.

zabadoh ,

Actually the atmosphere on the Borg planet didn’t look that great.

They’re not really into fresh air and suntans.

zabadoh ,

“Don’t open your eyes Marion!”

zabadoh ,

Realizes both Batman and Harley are dead. 😭😭😭

zabadoh ,

I think you’re misunderstanding what the article is saying.

You’re correct that it isn’t the job of a system to detect someone’s skin color, and judge those people by it.

But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.

They staff are designing the AVs to safely navigate in a world of people like them, but when the staff are overwhelmingly male, light skinned, young and single, and urban, and in the United States, a lot of considerations don’t even cross their minds.

Will the AVs recognize female pedestrians?

Do the sensors sense light spectrum wide enough to detect dark skinned people?

Will the AVs recognize someone with a walker or in a wheelchair, or some other mobility device?

Toddlers are small and unpredictable.

Bicyclists can fall over at any moment.

Are all these AVs being tested in cities being exposed to all the animals they might encounter in rural areas like sheep, llamas, otters, alligators and other animals who might be in the road?

How well will AVs tested in urban areas fare on twisty mountain roads that suddenly change from multi lane asphalt to narrow twisty dirt roads?

Will they recognize tractors and other farm or industrial vehicles on the road?

Will they recognize something you only encounter in a foreign country like an elephant or an orangutan or a rickshaw? Or what’s it going to do if it comes across that tomato festival in Spain?

Engineering isn’t magical: It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and recorded knowledge of what works and doesn’t work.

Releasing AVs on the entire world without testing them on every little thing they might encounter is just asking for trouble.

What’s required for safe driving without human intelligence is more mind boggling the more you think about it.

zabadoh ,

The moment those Chinese EV startups enter the US market, Tesla will be in real trouble if they don’t have their product quality image problem fixed by then.

It’ll be like Detroit’s Big 3 automakers tanking when small fuel efficient Japanese cars landed in the 70s oil crisis.

Assuming those Chinese EV companies don’t have their own quality problems…

zabadoh ,

In Chinese we say “your mouth/breath smells”

zabadoh ,

Calling a male a “nephew” in Chinese 契弟 kai dai is calling them a male prostitute.

Usually it doesn’t mean target male has actually been used sexually, but commonly used for general belittlement.

This term comes from ancient times: Traveling businessmen who would take a young boy with them for sexual use, but if anyone on the road or destination asked who the boy was, the business man would euphemistically explain “He’s my nephew”

契弟 kai dai is commonly translated as “nephew” but it means “adopted brother”

zabadoh ,

Crypto as an investment, and NFT for digital art, sure it’s a scam.

Crypto as an extralegal means of moving money is totally useful.

zabadoh , (edited )

It’s true that crypto is commonly used in online drug transactions, but there are other justifiable uses, such as moving money out of countries with repressive regimes like China and Russia.

Also paying for certain genres of porn that major credit card banks like Visa and MasterCard have somewhat arbitrarily designated as unacceptable, such as certain types of BDSM e.g. consensual nonconsensual, anything that shows blood, kinky hypnosis and mind control, vampires, etc.

Of course obvious child porn and bestiality should be banned period, so some regulation is needed. But I’m not sure that the government delegating responsibility for regulation to the credit card banks is the best way to do it. The rules and enforcement are completely arbitrary and cannot be appealed.

zabadoh ,

Get thee to eD2K.
They have a smattering of magazines back to the 70s. It’s far from a complete archive, and the scan quality varies tremendously but it’s there.

Otherwise, try to get an empornium account. Nearly everything porn ever is there.

zabadoh ,

We don’t hear about them anymore, therefore the aliens have given up on researching or invading or infiltrating the hooooman planet.

zabadoh ,

Toothpaste.

You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.

The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.

zabadoh ,

Or is it social expectations to wear pants that were developed by subtle marketing by the pants corporations?

E.g. All the marketing you have ever seen shows models wearing pants. Therefore you believe everyone, including yourself, must wear pants all the time, because you believe this the norm.

zabadoh ,

Optional: Add olive oil, or just about any kind of cheap melting cheese, or even milk, or non-dairy creamer to give it richness.

Also optional: Add crushed red pepper flakes, just like the ones for pizza, to give sauce some kick.

zabadoh ,

More fireworks for the Crimean Beach Party!

zabadoh ,

Russia: “It’s not listing, it’s pining for the fjords”

zabadoh ,

Realistically it was always going to be a hard slog after the Russians had months and months to lay mines and dig fortifications everywhere.

Absolutely pointless for Russia, given the cost in manpower, hardware and financial ruin, and no gain.

The land they are temporarily occupying is going to be dangerous to use for decades, maybe even centuries after this ends.

Endangering the world’s food supply for millions?

Just so they could plant their stupid flag on a little more land? As if Russia doesn’t have enough land already?

zabadoh ,

!ukraine is the most popular and frequently updated Ukraine related community that I have found in lemmyspace.

It’s a Finnish instance, but all English content.

Edit: I see you have it on your list. Try reading it natively on sopuli.xyz’s website. sopuli.xyz/c/ukraine

Reading across instances misses a lot of posts and comments.

zabadoh ,

Then ye need plenty of wenches! And he-wenches and nonbinary wenches, if ye be that way!

And grog! Plenty of grog!

zabadoh ,

The problem with older media is that you have to actively create torrents, the tracker might fold, etc.

With eD2K, it’s very old school P2P filesharing, just give it a directory and the files on it are shared on the network.

Of course, the “push” part to torrent tracker sites isn’t as active.

I use both torrents and eD2K, depending on what I’m looking for.

zabadoh ,

The porn instances got defederated by most of the “mainstream” instances, including this one, lemmy.ml.

That strikes me as a bad move, because free porn == user growth

zabadoh ,

pornlemmy and lemmynsfw are both linked to each other, but there isn’t much content on pornlemmy so far.

zabadoh ,

Cries in Street Fighter…

zabadoh OP ,

I installed and played around with ArchiveBox after your suggestion.

The login/cookie copying function seems to be oriented to how Chromium is installed on Linux, which I don’t have up and running in any meaningful way, and there doesn’t seem to be any support place where I can ask questions.

zabadoh OP ,

To continue my travails:

Httrack didn’t do a great job: It was slow, even copying from the same machine, and it flattened the directory structure of the website it was writing, making it almost un-navigable.

Here’s where Cyotek WebCopy shines: It’s copying the website from SurfOffline’s database webserver quickly, so I should have the entire website re-extracted very soon!

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