dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants 4 hours ago:
so ginormous
Tell me about it. The Cybertruck is an inch and some change longer and 8" wider than my ratty full size 1990’s pickup, yet somehow manages to have only slightly over half the usable cargo volume – 42.80 cubic feet vs. 70.7. And I’m being extremely charitable by treating the Cybertruck’s bed area as if it were cubic starting from its tallest point by the back glass, when in fact it’s wedge shaped.
It also weighs 3269 pounds more (in its lightest configuration) and as we all know by now the Cybertruck’s towing and trailer tongue weight ratings are outright lies whereas millions of people have successfully lugged billions of tons worth of boats, bikes, lawn mowers, and RV’s with GM and Ford pickups over the decades.
Even for the use case for someone who “needs” a truck, the Wankpanzer is a moronic choice.
- Comment on Philips debuts 3D printable components to repair products 1 day ago:
The one that leaps to mind is Miele. You know, the $1400 vacuum cleaner people. So that’s a little weird, but there it is.
- Comment on Google to Integrate Gemini AI into Android Auto for Smarter In-Car Experience 1 day ago:
They couldn’t possibly make it any more garbage than it actually is.
In the middle of an audio book in any media player but you connect to your car? Too bad! Android Auto is its own separate little world and your playlist position is different in the car vs. out of it.
Someone sent you a text but ye gods forbid, they sent it before you started driving your car? Too bad! You can’t see past text messages, just the ones that were sent while you were driving. I guess if somebody texted you an address in advance you’ll have to fish your phone out of your pocket.
Somebody’s calling you who is already in your address book. Too bad! We’ll only show the phone number on the screen and not their contact name.
Etc., etc.
Android Auto is basically useless. My car stereo supports both, so I just screen mirror if I actually care about functionality. I only use Android Auto itself when all I want is a map.
- Comment on Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout 5 days ago:
It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc.
It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.
- Comment on Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout 5 days ago:
Yeah, like, first time?
The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.
The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.
I sure was, when I was one.
- Comment on Maybe Trump's Presidency Will Make Everything So Awful It Will Facilitate Actual Positive Change Nationwide 5 days ago:
I can tell you that what happens after option 1 is Snow Crash.
- Comment on New grill has been chosen! 6 days ago:
Why does it look like someone had to hastily edit a dick out of it in the bottom center?
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Always remember: The people who apparently faked the moon landing, are concealing the existence of a ruling class of lizard-men, are putting 5G microchips in your water, and have a functioning secret one world government operating in secret tunnels and dark smoke filled rooms are also the exact some chucklefucks who couldn’t cover up the Watergate scandal.
Make no mistake, those in power absolutely are out to get you but mostly for the purposes of making themselves richer and remaining entrenched in power. The one and probably only factor working in our favor is that many of them are in fact working at cross-purposes.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
But that domain’s apparently for sale for a cool $10,000 USD. What a bargain.
- Comment on The Enshitification of Youtube’s Full Album Playlists 6 days ago:
Especially when the poster does not disclose that it’s AI.
The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the “cover” art. But only if you’re not looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, “Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut.” Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.
And golly gee, I’m sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.
W/e. I’m a have it on my hard drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums on their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!
- Comment on The clueless people are out there among us 1 week ago:
Still I have one (1) in a stairwell in my house. So far I’ve left it alone, partially because it also has a stupid piece of stair molding blocking part of its cover plate but mostly because I have never in all my years found any reason to plug anything in there.
Somebody probably originally intended it to be for a vacuum cleaner or something, but even the corded ones I’ve owned have had cords more than long enough to reach both ends of the stairs from a selection of other nearby, non-stupid outlets.
- Comment on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College 1 week ago:
I get where you’re coming from, but in certain fields I don’t think that’s going to fly too far.
The guy selling me a sofa, I really don’t care if he has a bachelor’s degree or not. My doctor? Yeah, I kind of think he needs to have legitimately completed medical school.
- Comment on “This is a huge moment for creators and their businesses,” - Patreon will update its iPhone app to sidestep Apple’s payment system. Patreon was forced to pay 30% fees 1 week ago:
They did disclose it, though. I got popups every time I logged in for weeks warning of the imminent additional cut Apple was going to take from donators/creators, which explicitly spelled out that payments made via other platforms would not be affected by this cut.
Maybe they were prevented from doing so in the iOS app, but they sure did it everywhere else.
- Comment on “This is a huge moment for creators and their businesses,” - Patreon will update its iPhone app to sidestep Apple’s payment system. Patreon was forced to pay 30% fees 1 week ago:
This is exactly it. It feels like about 99% of the crap these companies are pushing has no reason to be an app. Patreon is already primarily a web page. I guarantee you everything anyone cares about in the app you can do on the mobile version of the web page. Without being locked to the App Store/Google Play, and on (practically) any device. Isn’t that what these companies should want in the first place? Totally device and platform agnostic, ready for the maximum amount of
suckerspotential paying customers to be able to access it? - Comment on Half Life 3 1 week ago:
I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random unresolved cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.
You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.
- Comment on Half Life 3 1 week ago:
If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.
Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.
On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.
- Comment on Meta's Reality Labs Has Now Lost Over $60 Billion Since 2020 - Slashdot 1 week ago:
Just for one example, it’s well known that they sell their hardware at a steep loss just to try to entice people to get locked in to their ecosystem. Meta’s plan is to get VR devices into people’s homes and then figure out how to spy on them to make money off of it afterwards, and in the bargain use the piles and piles of cash they make from Facebook to squeeze out any competitors and become the defacto monopoly in the VR market.
For this blatantly obvious reason I always recommend that nobody buy a Meta/Facebook VR device, ever, for any reason, no matter how “cheap” it is.
Let Zuck Zuck continue to lose money on it until he either goes broke or gives up. This is a rare case where deliberately not buying a product from the dominant player in the market can literally help the entire scene as a whole.
- Comment on Could wastewater plant simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water? 2 weeks ago:
Not only that, but given that heating up volumes of water is basically the metric around which energy units and calculations are all derived, it’s easy to determine just how much energy.
Assuming an inlet temperature of a fairly optimistic 60°F or 15.56°C, it takes 12,934,470.48 joules to heat one US gallon of water to 500°C. Or if you prefer, possibly because you’re an American used to reading your electricity bill, 3.59 kWh to heat that gallon. Just one.
The EPA estimates that just in the US alone, wastewater plants treat 34 billion, with a B, gallons of water per day. No need to get out your calculator, that’s 122,060,000,000 kWh or if you prefer, just under 11.5 times the existing average daily power production of the entire country (10,640,243 MWh, if you’re wondering).
So, uh. Yeah. Probably not feasible.
- Comment on Game preservationists say Switch 2 Game-Key Cards are ‘disheartening’ but inevitable 2 weeks ago:
And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.
- Comment on Prusa XL cam 2 weeks ago:
I’m with you on it being fascinating, but this also has the same drawback as the stock camera in my Qidi which is that the frame rate is ass. And mine actually manages as many as 6 or sometimes even 8 frames per second!
I imagine this is in no small part due to the video compression happening in the dinky SoC on the printer’s mainboard, and obviously it prioritizes timing the print head moves over everything else. When my printer is idle and preferably showing a largely black frame (i.e. the internal lighting is turned off) the framerate rockets into the 30’s. I’ve toyed with the idea of splitting the camera out onto a separate board since it’s only USB internally and can be unplugged and the wire rerouted, but thus far I haven’t cared enough to overcome my laziness in setting it up.
To be fair I also have a GoPro that’s usually not doing anything productive. If I really wanted to go whole hog I could adhere one of its little mounts in there somewhere. I’m sure there’s enough clearance inside the case for it, and then we could print at 4K60.
- Comment on Game preservationists say Switch 2 Game-Key Cards are ‘disheartening’ but inevitable 2 weeks ago:
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
- Comment on If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica 2 weeks ago:
Obligatory Linus video for a similar, but not identical, monitor.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUxxn53mBE
This Dasung model is mentioned at the bottom of the article. TL;DW: These things have the exact list of drawbacks you think they do including miserable contrast, color accuracy so bad it’s fallen off the bottom of the chart, a low refresh rate, and quite a bit of ghosting. So it’s awful, but surprisingly not as awful as you’d think if your primary experience is an e-reader form the first couple of generations. Linus being Linus he does attempt to game on it and gets… a result… but this is a display technology with niche applications and still best suited to displaying mostly static content.
- Comment on McDonald’s reports largest U.S. same-store sales decline since 2020 2 weeks ago:
Hey now. McDonald’s is a very useful resource, e.g. if you are on a road trip far from home and need to stop somewhere to take leak.
What, food? I wouldn’t know anything about that.
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 2 weeks ago:
You can already theoretically do this with the doors on a Jeep, but it hasn’t exactly turned into an epidemic.
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 2 weeks ago:
Low towing capacity and an outrageously miserable bed size. Less than five feet? The powertrain of this should have been put in a station wagon, not a “truck.”
- Comment on Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025 2 weeks ago:
All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 3 weeks ago:
Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.
It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 3 weeks ago:
And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 3 weeks ago:
We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell is that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.
How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people wre using?
- Comment on Don't worry about it 3 weeks ago:
Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.