umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Santa rounds up migrants for ICE in Trump administration’s Christmas-themed AI video 1 day ago:
For years, the conservatives only had one joke (attack helicopter). Looks like they found another now (we’re deporting anyone we want, now laugh dammit)
- Comment on What is the cheapest console to get and collect for that still holds up? 2 days ago:
Why do anything? Isn’t existence pointless?
Nintendo is making downloading ROMs mildly annoying.
Meanwhile, ripping discs yourself, ensuring checksums match with Redump, compressing them to RVZ and keeping the collection straight in Dolphin is kinda fun. And best of all, Nintendo can’t do shit about it.
- Comment on What is the cheapest console to get and collect for that still holds up? 2 days ago:
I would suggest getting a Wii, but not for playing the games. Softmod it (pretty trivial) and install CleanRip.
Then just start collecting Wii and GameCube games, rip them to USB/SD card, and play them on PC with Dolphin. Use just about any PC compatible controller for GameCube games, and you can pair the Wii controller over Bluetooth for Wii games.
Last I checked Wiis are pretty cheap, and the GC and Wii library has a lot of real gems.
- Comment on It sure is, babe! 3 days ago:
Especially in case of physical media. “Hey, here’s a cool game/movie/recording. Now slap it in a box and never use it again.”
(well, ROM/optical and other media that doesn’t wear away, anyway - if it’s a floppy, that’s going to probably degrade anyway, might as well slap it in a box)
- Submitted 5 days ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Comment on "...I can give you 5 more." "You're a madwoman!" 5 days ago:
Forever ago, Steam added like 1 minute of playtime on games I literally installed once and never played, so I was a little bit apprehensive. Anyway, I figured that was in the past now. I was also encouraged to do this after noticing that Steam’s cloud save was more than happy to just fetch save data from games I’ve literally not touched for 10 years.
- Submitted 5 days ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 1 week ago:
I don’t hate AI (specifically LLMs and image diffusion thingy) as a technology. I don’t hate people who use AI (most of the time).
I do hate almost every part of AI business, though. Most of the AI stuff is hyped by the most useless “luminaries” of the tech sector who know a good profitable grift when they see one. They have zero regard for the legal and social and environmental implications of their work. They don’t give a damn about the problems they are causing.
And that’s the great tragedy, really: It’s a whole lot of interesting technology with a lot of great potential applications. And the industry is getting run to the ground by idiots, while chasing an economic bubble that’s going to end disastrously. It’s going to end up with a tech cycle kind of similar to nuclear power: a few prominent disasters, a whole lot of public resentment and backlash, and it’ll take decades until we can start having sensible conversations about it again. If only we would have had a little bit of moderation to begin with!
The only upside AI business has had was that at least it has pretended to give a damn about open source and open access to data, but at this point it’s painfully obvious that to AI companies this is just a smoke screen to avoid getting sued over copyright concerns - they’d lock up everything as proprietary trade secrets if they could have their way.
As a software developer, I was first super excited about genAI stuff because it obviously cut down the time needed to consult references. Now, a lot of tech bosses tell coders to use AI tools even in cases that’s making everyone less productive.
As an artist and a writer I find it incredibly sad that genAI didn’t hit the brakes a few years ago. I’ve been saying this for decades: I love a good computerised bullshit generator. Algorithmically generated nonsense is interesting. Great source of inspiration for your ossified brain cells, fertile grounds for improvement. Now, however, the AI generated stuff pretends to be as human-like as possible, it’s doing a terrible job at it. Tech bros are half-assedly marketing it as a “tool” for artists, while the studio bosses who buy the tech chuckle at that and know they found a replacement for the artists. (Want to make genAI tools for artists? Keep the output patently unusable out of the box.)
- Comment on Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI 2 weeks ago:
Times New Roman is wayyyy too classy for Trump Administration. They should switch to Comic Sans MS.
…Oh no, I’m re-heating font jokes that people older than me found funny decades ago. What has this present political climate reduced us to?
- Comment on hl shirt 2 weeks ago:
Physical copies of Half-Life 2 are probably, dunno, considered unholy artefacts or something. (The very first versions of Steam were not fondly remembered)
- Comment on Make me feel like a man 2 weeks ago:
I’m a trans girl, and this shit is the only thing that has even mildly piqued my testosterones in recent years:
- Comment on How many instances have you been orphaned from? 3 weeks ago:
My first instances were mastodon.lol and kbin.social. Guess I was unlucky.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 3 weeks ago:
Tortoise: “I’m not a goddamn rock! You pooped on me for the last time! …Not so tough these days, eh, dinosaur?”
But seriously, not surprising. I heard that many tortoises, while herbivorous, will just happily munch all snails that rest on the greens. (For nutrition. And also to demonstrate superiour speed!)
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
My father had an Acer laptop. It broke.
One of my friends had an Acer laptop. It broke.
I think my father had a 486SX Acer laptop which worked wayyyy past its reasonable age, but it’s in the closet and the hinges look crumbly and I kinda fear that if I touch it it will be atomised.
Me, I’ve used Asus laptops since 2011, and these things are only slightly less resistant to nuclear explosions than Thinkpads
- Comment on The car of the guy who insists that you have a terminal case of TDS 5 weeks ago:
You just know the owner plastered the car with words like Joy, Knowledge, Self-control and Virtue because deep down they know they have none of those qualities and hope that this ritual will manifest them.
- Comment on You can do anything at Zombocom 5 weeks ago:
That’s not Zombo COM1:, that’s the serial port, the one above it. This is Zombo VGA.
- Comment on Day 477 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 month ago:
Oh crap. Reminds me that for some reason or other (Mostly just time issues I guess, and because dualbooting Windows was pain I guess) I never completed Max Payne 2. As a giant fan of the first game I loved it.
Wonder if I need to go dig out the discs. Wait wait what, I already have them on Steam? How? When did I get them? Never mind. Hope these aren’t a massive headache to get running
- Comment on An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ 1 month ago:
“We’re building the Eschaton Immanentising Machine, from the famous theological treatise ‘Don’t Immanentise the Eschaton’”
(Also, using LLMs sounds a lot less efficient than the exhaustive search described in The Nine Billion Names of God)
- Comment on Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings 1 month ago:
One of my recent software projects has an “ignore” list feature, but I guess I have to update the terminology to “include/exclude” if that means chuds will stay away.
- Comment on US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment 1 month ago:
Come to think of it, the Covenant have a lot in common with American brand millennial Evangelists. Leaning really hard on immanentising the eschaton.
- Comment on Study Claims 4K/8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes 1 month ago:
Heh, I’m getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I’ve actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.
(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn’t need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)
- Comment on Apple Reportedly Moving Ahead With Ads in Maps App 1 month ago:
Funny thing, over here, OSM actually got weird rural stuff for a couple of rural towns I visited frequently about a year before Google Maps (and other proprietary services) was usable there. I think it had to do with some open-data drop from the government.
And seeing the services grow side by side also kind of gave away what their priorities were. Google: putting the local businesses and services on the map. OSM: document every single cool and convenient foot and bike trail.
- Comment on Banana 2 months ago:
They’re completely safe what comes to Potassium-40 radioactivity! You need to eat a massive amount of them to even reach the point where you experience radiation sickness. Actually, you might experience excessive potassium toxicity levels first. (Or you might not! Human bodies are equipped to get rid of excess potassium.) Or, you know, you might experience the problems of stuffing too much stuff down your gullet. There’s only so much stuff you can fit in your stomach at one time.
- Comment on DirecTV screensavers will show AI-generated ads with your face in 2026 2 months ago:
I’m fed up with the streaming services, so I’m getting back to my big pile of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.
I was randomly reminded of the “BD-Live” thing that I tried long ago. One of the most janky joyless things I had ever seen. Some marketing person had decided to do a marketing thing for movie promos and trailers and had forgotten that the thing was to be visited by actual people.
This sounds like it was cooked up by the same people. Looks like marketing people building a Thing.
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 2 months ago:
Like I said, the AI companies are not on the same side. The AI companies in the fight for their own selfish reasons. They’re eventually just going to make the copyright situation even more byzantine. They also make the copyright reform/abolition people look bad.
It’s like if I say I’m an Anarchist and then I have to constantly say “well actually I don’t advocate for looting and vandalism nonsense, those dipshits don’t know shit about Anarchism”. Do you know how hard it is to advocate for more reasonable copyright policy reflecting modern times, when the current big crisis in the mind of artists and creators are the dipshit companies blatantly violating the law?
- Comment on oh no! reddit gives up on totally not NFTs! 2 months ago:
I used to use Reddit, and I remember when collectible avatars were introduced.
The experience paraphrased:
“Hey, click here to claim a free collectible avatar!” *open in new tab* “Here it is! However, you first need to set up crypto wallet—” *close tab*
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 2 months ago:
AI companies are not on the side of copyright reform or abolition. They just want an exception for themselves. They very much believe in trade secrets. They probably want copyright to eventually cover the current grey areas so that they can stop pretending they give a damn about open models.
It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.
- Comment on International Shitpost Wednesday! 2 months ago:
Turtle robot! 🐢🤖 Cutest robots of them all. Very programmer friendly. Very artistic.
- Comment on oh no! reddit gives up on totally not NFTs! 2 months ago:
Lemmy (and Piefed) have avatars and bio, and Piefed also has the custom fields thing that Mastodon has, but not all clients show this stuff. Voyager is probably the best Lemmy/Piefed client that basically has no support for profile details.
One of the things that bug me about Fediverse is that the amount of profile features varies so much between the services and it’s kinda inconsistent too.
- Comment on Sunlight special 2 months ago:
I see no problems with cooking meals with sunlight. (…as we say here in the solarpunk instance)
However, I do see the practical limitations what comes to attempting to cook meals with sunlight in the UK. I have heard the weather is often not favourable.
