Psythik
@Psythik@lemm.ee
- Comment on Why am I seeing political ads for Donald Trump in April of the year of his second inauguration? 21 hours ago:
And YouTube ReVanced for mobile.
And NextDNS for everything else. - Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones 1 day ago:
App Ops still works? I haven’t used it in over a decade.
- Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones 1 day ago:
Use NextDNS with strong filters and the DDG app with App Tracking Protection turned on. Stops the vast majority of privacy-invading shit from getting to 3rd parties.
- Comment on Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it 1 day ago:
Also it’s not available on x86-64 CPUs. You need an ARM CPU with an NPU
- Comment on YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design 1 day ago:
No it’s not; use SmartTube beta
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 2 days ago:
I’m aware of this, and it’s not the same because there is a MPH difference. So the 0-60 number will be smaller, albeit slightly.
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 2 days ago:
Can someone please convert some of these numbers to freedom units? Specifically the range, horsepower, torque, and 0-60 numbers?
- Comment on Man, I really slept on Days Gone (mini review) 3 days ago:
I got stuck on this part early on in the game where you have to enter this mobile research station thing. I could never find the entrance and gave up. Not a fan of how formulaic and repetitive the game was, anyway.
- Comment on Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch 3 days ago:
Damn, and I really liked them too. It’s the most accurate LLM I’ve tried and it even accurately cites sources as well (unlike Copilot, which just makes shit up and then cites an unrelated source).
- Comment on [Gamers Nexus] Death of affordable computing | Tariffs impact and investigation 4 days ago:
I was going to wait until the 2030s to upgrade my 7700X to whatever is the fastest CPU once the AM5 platform is dead, but now I’m thinking that maybe I should just get a 9950X3D now and ride out this platform until the 2040s.
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 5 days ago:
We already have TeamSpeak/Ventrillo, and I think IRC is still a thing?
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 5 days ago:
What the fuck does Nitro even do, other than give you some useless emoji?
- Comment on Windows 10 LTSC – the version that won't expire for years 5 days ago:
Mixxx is alright but I prefer the robustness and simplicity of Serato. And my turntables technically are MIDI controllers. Fully digital and no needle or DVS interface needed. But spins and behaves just like real vinyl. I don’t like controllers with static jogwheels, which limits my selection when it comes to MIDI hardware. I’ve considered real turntables but they are out of my budget. And they can be finicky when using them with DJ software.
- Comment on Windows 10 LTSC – the version that won't expire for years 5 days ago:
If you’re interested, you can listen to some of my old shows from when I was a radio DJ. Haven’t uploaded in awhile, though (fucking copyright).
- Comment on Windows 10 LTSC – the version that won't expire for years 5 days ago:
Open format, so literally anything and everything. I go entirely by audience reaction when deciding what to play. But mostly I like happy songs with a party vibe.
- Comment on 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere 6 days ago:
Paywalled. Here’s the full article text:
My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.
Back then a photoshop of a cat saying “I can has cheezburger” or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.
It’s strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous way station for the internet’s anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.
“The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world’s five or so richest people and the government of the United States,” the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”
My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan.
They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.
Many of the 4chan users that called me mid-Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voicemails have never left me in the 15 years I’ve spent covering 4chan as a journalist.
I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan’s users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.
Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan’s rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it?
4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official.”
But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site’s political influence, but I’d argue they were equally, if not more, important.
4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole when he was 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spinoff site for a message board there called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.” Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site’s code and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful’s anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process.
4chan users were anonymous, threads weren’t permanent and would time out or “404” after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.
“The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn’t saved, I think, is really, really fascinating,” Cates Holderness, Tumblr’s former head of editorial, tells WIRED.
Still, 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan’s cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)
“When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers,” she says.
Holderness calls 4chan the internet’s “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.
Our feeds deliver us content; we don’t have to hunt for it. We don’t have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we’re getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we’ll eventually find out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
“The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it’s all skewed,” Holderness says. “There is no record. There’s no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was.”
- Comment on Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered 6 days ago:
Why would anyone think that it would be taken down? The one thing Bethesda is good at is encouraging people to mod their games. It’s the only reason why I didn’t give up on them as a company after those two disasters called Fallout 76 and Starfield. (But to be fair my patience is running thin. ES6 and FO5 both have got to be absolute smash hits.)
- Comment on Windows 10 LTSC – the version that won't expire for years 6 days ago:
Because I don’t want to run hardware that needs to operate in realtime over a USB 2.0 connection through a VM. I have digital turntables with high-resolution platters. These are precision instruments that require the absolute lowest DPC latency obtainable; I need to eliminate as much overhead and have my equipment running as close to the bare metal as I can get from a modern OS.
- Comment on Windows 10 LTSC – the version that won't expire for years 6 days ago:
I would but my DJ year is over a decade old and none of it is compatible with Linux. It won’t even run on a modern CPU without crashing Serato, so I use an old laptop with a 4th gen i5 running LTSC to power my gear; it runs smooth as butter.
Eventually I will get new gear and try to get it working in Linux, but I don’t have thousands to drop right now on updated hardware, so I make do with what I have.
- Comment on What is this called? 1 week ago:
Clothing for old white women is what I call it
- Comment on Is there a federated Strava alternative? 1 week ago:
I simply use the fitness-tracking features that came with my watch. They’re more than adequate, and the close integration with the watch means that I don’t even have to do anything. I just live my life and check the stats later.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 1 week ago:
That’s 3 seats too many. And I rather have a hatch than a bed.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 1 week ago:
Enough with the trucks and SUVs. I’m not buying an EV until I can get a 2 door sports convertible with rack and pinion steering and double wishbone suspension. I don’t want to drive a tank of a vehicle with vague, floaty handling. I want a small, light, and nimble EV that’s fast as fuck and corners like a dream. For under $30K USD.
- Comment on Happy Easter from the POTUS 1 week ago:
If it weren’t for the font being wrong, I would had no idea that this is parody.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
No, seriously, give Rivals a chance. It’s free so you have nothing to lose.
Two of the original OW developers were heavily involved in its development, so the game feels just like OW did back in 2016. Trust me, you won’t miss Overwatch 2 once you get used to it.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
Play Marvel Rivals now while it’s still fun. It’s free.
It plays just like 2016 Overwatch did, because it was made by some of the original OW devs. The same ones who left because they were tired of all the fun metas being made boring to please the hardcore players who have no life outside of video games. That isn’t an issue with Rivals yet. Enjoy it while you still can.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 1 week ago:
Marvel Rivals is better
- Comment on 4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails. 1 week ago:
120x160, actually, but effectively close enough.
- Comment on The good old days 2 weeks ago:
Success /sək-sĕs′/
The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted. - Comment on Interesting logic 2 weeks ago:
15 years ago it was mostly lolcats and rage comics.