NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Today is the day 1 day ago:
That nazi can rest in piss
- Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking 2 days ago:
There actually are some really cool proof of concepts where people have 100% 3d printed a gun. And “potato cannons” are generally a PVC firing chamber and barrel.
For legal purposes: Preface everything after this with a dozen "allegedly"s. A couple years back I went to a really cool event where people had built machine guns out of wood and plastic (FDM). None had any issue with doing well over 100 rounds each. That said, anyone with half a brain cell was literally hiding in a bunker nearby out of terror when the firing was going on. But… yeah.
Like anything, it is about pressure, strength, and geometry. And, as The Troubles in Ireland can attest… you don’t need THAT much skill to make something that will fire… once. Which is why there are so many shed machine guns and rifles with split barrels and completely exploded receivers in The Royal Armouries.
- Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking 2 days ago:
While I am fully opposed to a 3d printer ban (and abhor the efforts of Bambu et al to sneak that in), it is very important to understand why that is not a fair comparison and, if anything, sets a threshold that can be used to argue FOR a ban.
I’ve ranted in detail before so I’ll do the short version this time:
You are not going to make a barrel or springs yourself. And the good news is that you don’t need to. None of that is a controlled/registered part (for the vast majority of guns) and you can literally buy those at a walmart equivalent. And there at least used to be pre-packaged bundles available online for your ghost gun needs.
So that mostly leaves the receiver and fire control unit. I will bet you money that giving a rando off the street 24 hours to figure out how to go to the local communal machine shop and make even a frigging sten and they will fail miserably. Whereas there are videos (fuck vice for how they abused their workers but old-vice has a really good video where they literally made the gun Luigi allegedly used) of people going from 0 to glock in 12 hours of print time and 4-5 hours of filing.
And that is the big difference. How much that matters when you are considering a country where you can buy the same gear that Tier 1 Special Forces use to abduct (admittedly really shitty) world leaders for under a thousand bucks is a HUGE question. But from the “ghost gun” perspective? There is VERY much a big difference between having a CNC and machining a receiver+FCU versus doing the same with an Ender 3.
- Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking 3 days ago:
Ignoring the legal repercussions of this:
Most of this makes sense. Stingers go back to the late 70s (?) and most of what we see used in Ukraine is closer to a decade old than not (and based on even older tech). Tech advances and what used to be hard becomes cheap.
That said? I would be very curious how this handles inclement weather. Wind and rain are a mofo and that (among other reasons) is why model rockets and the like are only ever really flown on beautiful clear days. And I don’t know enough about how the communication with javelin et als work these days but wifi seems REAL questionable.
Still. This is a really cool project and really speaks to the changing nature of warfare. And, once again, highlights the real reason so much money has gone into FDM processes.
- Comment on I don't have money to pay premium to not see ads. What in the world makes you think that I have money to buy what you are advertising me? 1 week ago:
The sad reality: All that means is that the corporations don’t care about you. But the ad sellers can still use you to pad views.
- Comment on Microsoft patents system for AI helpers to finish games for you 1 week ago:
Yeah.
It is a REALLY dangerous tightrope to walk. But this makes me think of Arkham Knight. I LOVED Asylum and City. Even Origins was pretty good. But that fucking Batmobile.
So I beat the game, enter postgame, and take a look at my menu to see what I need for the secret ending. And I IMMEDIATELY shut the game down and go watch it on Youtube.
I would have loved to be able to skip past most of the random trophies hidden everywhere and instead do the fun puzzles and the Deathstroke fight and so forth.
The “correct” answer is that hiding the “real” ending and having so much bloat is the real problem. But different games have different ideologies. I LOVE Souls games and had a blast with Elden Ring’s DLC. I ALSO remember the hilarity of watching all the chuds get angry and mock games media for saying it was hard… and then getting their proverbial shit pushed in by like 90% of the Shadow Land and wet themselves at the mere sight of the Messmer, let alone the harder bosses.
Which gets back to the ongoing discussion of creator intent versus accessibility.
My expectation is that, should this take off, it would mostly just lead to even more padding similar to what we see with open world bloat. But… yeah.
- Comment on Valve reconfirm the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller are due in 2026 2 weeks ago:
Steam Machine, and presumably Controller, will release.
The Machine is just an HTPC with MAYBE a bespoke mobo and cooler (to my knowledge, nobody got a close enough look to truly confirm that). If they were planning for a Q1 release, those would have been all but done by the time they were formally announced and they are living in a warehouse.
The issue is the off the shelf (well, bulk purchased) storage and memory. Which… is the issue for a lot of computing at all levels right now.
My guess? We will have VERY limited release provisioned Steam Machines. “We got 500 units at this price” then “We got 700 units at THIS price” a week later and so forth. And there will probably be a Bring Your Own Memory/Storage version with greater availability for those who have some stockpiled or want to gamble.
As for the controllers? Controllers are actually really cheap to manufacture. Their cost is the R&D that goes into them. But they are generally very high mark-up (for the platform holders) and used to help offset the cost of the console itself. Think “gold plated HDMI”. That is why there have been so many third party controllers over the decades.
But those ALSO are sitting in a warehouse. It is just a question of how Valve wants to use them to offset Steam Machines.
The Steam Frame? Pretty sure that is fucked. Because the memory and storage is going to be soldered on (or outright integrated onto the board to begin with). And, as someone who has owned two HMDs (a Windows MR and now a facebook quest some shit or another)… it was probably always going to be a failure.
- Comment on Meta's AI display glasses reportedly share intimate videos with human moderators 2 weeks ago:
Exactly. This obviously wasn’t a brain fart + typo.
The kink shaming of some people.
- Comment on Meta's AI display glasses reportedly share intimate videos with human moderators 2 weeks ago:
Believe it or not but not all sex starts with walking into the bahtroom, closing the door, disrobing, and hopping under the covers.
- Comment on The Nuremberg Trials 2.0 will see 'generative AI' used as an excuse in the same way some tried 'just following orders' as an excuse after WWII 2 weeks ago:
Considering that we have folk ALL over social media already using “they are just following orders” to excuse what the US military is already doing to our own fucking people…
But I also suggest reading up a lot more on what the Nuremburg Trials actually were (and weren’t). It is good that we kind of universally acknowledged “I was just following orders” is not an excuse for murder, rape, and genocide (… for about as long as we acknowledged nazis were the universal evil). But the reality is that it was a complete and utter shitshow with very few actual convictions. In large part because… war is a LOT more “air bud rules” than people realize. And most of the ceremonial high profile targets… actually had good lawyers.
Over dramatized youtube essay, but Jacob Geller has a really good video where he goes into this.
- Comment on California law to require operating systems to check your age 2 weeks ago:
If anyone actually looks through the legislature and the discourse around it:
It is not age verification like you need for pornhub. You aren’t giving a photocopy of your license to some org to verify you exist.
It is literally the same logic as “please enter your birthday to continue”. Just say you were born on jan 1 1900 or whatever. That will then be fetchable by the app/browser to send when a site requests it.
Which… seems like a really good system? It allows people who care about what their kids do to lock down their accounts. And it provides no meaningful PII for adults (or kids whose parents don’t care).
- Comment on "Cancel ChatGPT" movement goes mainstream after OpenAI closes deal with U.S. Department of War — as Anthropic refuses to surveil American citizens 3 weeks ago:
Like with ANY kind of science (and, like it or not, that is what “AI” research and products are), the money comes from governments. Real Genius is one of my all time favorite movies (and has influenced my life WAY more than it should) but… anyone with an advanced STEM degree can tell you that the reality is you 100% know where your money is coming from. And you are either a naive moron or you figure out why the US (or UK or FR or RU or CN or…) government is so interested in your work to rapidly generate connections between social media posts and your buddy’s really efficient graph search algorithm and…
I am all for shitting on openai/chatgpt for immediately bending over backwards for the us government. Let’s not pretend anthropic/claude are paragons of virtues and privacy.
- Comment on Four years after the last one, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2's enhanced editions have a new patch out in Steam beta 3 weeks ago:
Finally, dynamic language support should make it easier from here on out for Beamdog to add new translations to the games without the need for a full patch “on most store fronts”. Instead, the developers anticipate being able to drop in new languages “on an ad hoc basis”. Speaking of, patch 2.7 adds community-made Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, and Ukrainian translations to Baldur’s Gate 2, plus Hungarian and Japanese ones to Icewind Dale.
THIS worries me a lot. Either the language packs become DLC (good) or they are going to be streamed from somewhere and the game lasts as long as the content server does.
Still, awesome. People shit on the Beamdog releases because “I can just run this with these forty mods and hacked binaries and a syncthing server and…”. But they are incredibly competent remasters/ports.
Just a shame Icewind Dale 2 is still in the “forever lost” state source wise. The Twins were actually a really fun set of antagonists.
- Comment on Firefox 148.0 arrives with AI controls 3 weeks ago:
I mean… people using Firefox are doing it because of all the shit Google is shoving down chromium. Firefox has a LOT of room to fuck up before that is going to impact that demographic.
- Comment on Microsoft's throne room rejigging has seen Sarah Bond take the bullet for marketing strategy which was "failing internally", report claims 3 weeks ago:
Nah nah nah nah. THIS hit piece where apparently EVERYONE hated her and she is singlehandedly the cause of all the world’s problems is legit. Obviously.
Don’t get me wrong. She and Spencer are grade A assholes and should rest in piss for all the damage they did to the games industry and all the jobs that have been destroyed. But holy fuck is it depressing how quick The Internet is to leap on “Yeah. Absolutely everyone hated everything she did”.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 3 weeks ago:
Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.
But it also doesn’t change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.
Like… it doesn’t take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and…
I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn’t involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 3 weeks ago:
And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?
- Define “reputable VPN”? There is little to no meaningful third party auditing and mostly all we have to go on is if they are on the record for having "cooperated with law enforcement"
- The point is you need to actually understand what you are trusting who with. You want to watch AEW for cheap? Cool, whatever. You want to masturbate to porn without providing your ID? Maybe think about who is more likely to get a call from what orgs. And if you are doing something truly sensitive? That is when you need to learn a WHOLE lot more about what privacy and personal security actually are.
The point is that people just say “linus rogan had a promo code and this solves all my problems”.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 3 weeks ago:
Heh.
Our IT department is so incompetent that… let’s just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can’t rule out a full investigation.
Last year we had a “technical all hands” which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing “attacks” from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn’t sighed and said “how much of our staff are running VPNs?”. And then we had to explain what those are… to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.
STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn’t understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 3 weeks ago:
From what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).
I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.
And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 4 weeks ago:
You don’t need to watch the whole video. Mostly it just highlights why FreeCAD is VERY capable but not a great First CAD Tool.
And Fusion 360 is the best, period. But OnShape actually might be better for a purely FDM workflow. Most of Fusion, and FreeCAD, strengths are in being able to simulate stress and strain and having ways to design a part to incorporate the cuts that a CNC/Mill would be doing. And OnShape is fully browser based for good and for bad.
- Comment on The Wolf Among Us, The Last Express and more join the GOG Preservation Program 4 weeks ago:
One of the games is Police Quest: SWAT 2 which is just delightful.
Half of it is copaganda of the highest level as presented by one of the evilest cops to ever live (seriously…). Like… a LOT of the LAPD’s reputation for police brutality and corruption can be tiedt o him. But it was a solid, for its time, squad tactics game that I do wish more modern takes on the genre would adopt. Having a “slice the pie” button is just so nice.
But what makes SWAT 2 so good? There was the SWAT campaign where you go through a series of police calls relating to an evil terrorist cult. And there is the Terrorist campaign where you play as the cult and are taking people hostage, indoctrinating them, and otherwise attacking SWAT. And the best tactic to even out the campaign (because you are up against the poster children for militarized police over spending) is:
On the second mission you do a home invasion where you take a family hostage. Take a LOT of explosives with you. While you are leading the cops on, plant explosives on the walkway to the house. Let negotiations fizzle out and when the swat teams come to raid? Blow them the fuck up. Double tap any survivors. Wipes out the LAPD which translates to an insane amount of money to equip your crew for the rest of the missions.
Back in the day? SWAT 2 was one of those “if you know you know” games across the late stage usenet/early stage gamefaqs discussions.
I desperately need some kind of an Oral History on how the fuck that game got made.
Also, as a bonus: My dad was annoyed I was playing too much XCOM and JA2 (mostly once he figured out I used female mercs in that…). So he got me a nice manly game about how great cops are… and boy howdy did he whup my ass when he realized I was mostly playing the Terrorist side and popping cops left and right.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 4 weeks ago:
Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.
Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.
OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 4 weeks ago:
On a warm and dry day? Maybe?
But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren’t strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.
As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent… many that you print yourself.
It isn’t the same as a proper exhaust system but… ain’t nobody doing that.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 4 weeks ago:
You can still get an Ender 3 (essentially the end result of RepRap). Every vendor has their own.
That said? If you buy a printer in 2025 (let alone 2026) and it does not have an integrated enclosure, you are opening yourself up to a world of hurt. The price difference isn’t that much anymore and even just having a box to hold the waste heat in solves like 90% of print problems.
Bambu are, above and beyond, the best bang for your buck. They ALSO are ahead of the curve on locking things down to support only their networked slicers. Which… is a huge concern with stuff like this.
Personally? I love the Qidi printers. I have a Q1 something or another and convinced a friend to get a different model. They use a semi-open fork of Klipper so you can theoretically make something work when it is abandoned. Which is good because the various CoreXY printers are no longer all based on the same standard so part kits aren’t (easily) interchangeable. And, of course, you can use Orcaslicer or whatever else you want.
Keep in mind that is all FDM. For Resin (SLA?), the ship has already sailed and people are genuinely happy to run slicers with literal fucking ads in them. Assuming the vendor doesn’t lock them out of even that garbage.
- Comment on Oh no, Intel is moving customer support to AI 4 weeks ago:
Assuming you get a hold of a human:
Be nice to them. Be assertive but also be nice. That will get them to go off script if they are allowed to or escalate you if they aren’t.
If you treat them like “monkeys who aren’t allowed to go off script”? They will GLADLY repeat the same questions over and over and make your life a living hell. Because with customer support? Their metrics often benefit from you getting angry and hanging up.
- Comment on Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too 4 weeks ago:
Yes and no.
Let’s focus solely on pricing first. www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&… is a good resource for that (dot gov so… grain of salt). In 1998, the “retail gasoline price” was 1.072 $/gallon. That is approximately $2.11 in 2025 dollars according to a random website. But whatever metric that site is using says 3.224 $/gallon.
Because, yes, under pure microeconomics, it is all about supply and demand. But that just isn’t reality. Instead we have prices skyrocket because of economic/geopolitical turmoil… and then The Companies use that to experiment to figure out what the new price floor should be. Prices go down, but not that much.
Now let’s talk about bubbles. Two of the biggest bubbles in the past 30 or so years have been the Dot Com Bubble and The Housing Bubble. Both were quite brutal on the economy and working professionals and that is why houses are worth jack all now and nobody has a website.
Wait… That isn’t right?
Because take the dot com bubble in particular. Yes, a LOT of web based companies were deeply stupid. But the fundamental concept of “order it online” is a very good one that, ironically, benefits more rural people more than anything else. Yes, it continues to ravage brick and mortar and contributed a lot to the destruction of “Mom and Pop” stores. But also… how often do you actually need to touch a product before you buy it? Incredibly valuable when you do, but you are likely to get MUCH better data from a youtube review than from trying to feel how clicky a button is while the sales associate keeps telling you that you need a gold plated HDMI cable to go with that stereo.
And… Amazon and Google essentially became the megacorps they are because of it.
Which is what we are expecting for The AI Bubble. Most of those “AI Assistants” are going to crash and burn because they are insanely expensive frontends to the same voice assistants we have had for closer to twenty years than not. Search engines may or may not stay in their current form. Generative AI is anyone’s guess (and mostly about legislature) but you can bet there will still be a cottage industry for sex pests.
But much of what is driving the data center boom… isn’t that. It is the kind of machine learning we were doing 10-20 years ago and is mostly about pattern matching. AKA “Big Data”. Companies will realize that they can’t fire their entire fraud investigation and cybersecurity teams. But they can very much only hire a fraction of their previous workforce and have them interpret/validate the “AI” results. Same with coding.
And, regardless, if there is an economy/world there is going to be social media and ecommerce and media. All of which benefit from lots of servers.
So I do disagree that this is the cheapest they will ever be again. But I also suspect we are looking at a baseline closer to late 2025 than 2023/2024.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 4 weeks ago:
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 4 weeks ago:
I assume you are a hardcore “The God of Capitalism Will Prevail” person but… that isn’t how it works.
Youtube is an insanely expensive service to operate. That is why basically every other attempt failed miserably. Google is able to offset the cost due to their datacenter requirements as well as being able to sell those targeted ads. Even for google it is highly suspected to be a loss leader.
It is like people forgot that microsoft/azure tried to make their own twitch… and it failed horribly even though it had definitively better tech.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 4 weeks ago:
Sorry, are you saying you want youtube to be a private site that is subscription only?
Because, if you think this is a gotcha, you probably won’t have a good time. And the site itself would die as creators would have no market to really target.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 4 weeks ago:
Sounds like updating firefox and/or ublock will get past most of it.
Personally? I am not as opposed to google making life harder for people who want to run an adblocker, considering that is the site’s revenue (specifically the targeted ads based on user data). But I actually pay for youtube premium and have been having to refresh every video between clicking and watching it and that is just fucking stupid.
Although, it also means that shorts no longer autoplay. So when I actually want to watch a short that a channel I like put up, I only see THAT short rather than however many others before I click away.