umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
A candy that plays music while you eat it
This is the sort of misapplication of technology that traumatised me as a kid, dammit
- Comment on The most bizarre tech announced so far at CES 2026 1 week ago:
Ultrasonic chef’s knife
3 years ago I wrote a cyberpunk novel for NaNoWriMo. In it, one of the hoodlums was waving around a “compu-knife”. A knife that you have to pair to a smartphone app over Bluetooth, or it won’t work.
All together now: Cyberpunk was meant to be a warning, not just an aesthetic.
(I know, I know, the article doesn’t say the knife needs to be paired to an app. I feel lucky about guessing it does though)
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!
Dear lazyweb (or lazystodon or lazyverse), are there dead simple scripts for periodic backup? You know, something you just authorise to act as a client and then stick into a crontab to run daily/weekly and it’ll keep a local copy of your stuff. Preferably something you can just install via pip or gem or (oh please gods no) npm.
- Comment on I'm there! 2 weeks ago:
I would totally go to a camp that involved turtle weighing. Any activity involving turtles, really! They’re so shelly aww
- Comment on Intro to Pico-8? 2 weeks ago:
This is kind of a side note, but in addition to Pico-8 I also recommend checking out TIC-80. Has an Android build on F-Droid.
It is a platform very similar to Pico-8, but it also has integration to the website where people post their projects. Just type “surf” to browse and download and play games automatically.
- Comment on "When did video games become so violent and scary?" -Wreck-It Ralph 2 weeks ago:
I’m so sorry about this thread and everything. I was drunk and I had no idea what I was doing and I really shouldn’t post some stuff when I’m drunk.
- Comment on "When did video games become so violent and scary?" -Wreck-It Ralph 2 weeks ago:
This place? Retro gaming community? Here? Now? What are you talking about?
- Comment on "When did video games become so violent and scary?" -Wreck-It Ralph 2 weeks ago:
None of this makes any sense. Why are you voluntarily talking to me like that? What the fuck provoked any of this?
I assume you know where your basement is. Go back there. Wait for the signal.
- Comment on "When did video games become so violent and scary?" -Wreck-It Ralph 2 weeks ago:
In the 90s they put random English phrases instead of translating.
Buuullllcrap. Sure, the translations of many games didn’t “match” the original, strictest literary sense, but a whole lot of cultural references just didn’t translate well, and they also had to work with platform limitations. Had to do with what they did.
Come on now. Prove it. Give me the original Japanese line from POCKET MONSTERS (apologies for slight mispronounciation, I’m drunk, I swear I won’t do this soon). Let us compare it to the official English translations. Let us see how RANDOM it got.
GIVE US THE CAVALCADE OF BAD TRANSLATIONS YOU PROMISED.
The fact that everything alive must someday die, isn’t really that dark in Eastern cultures/religions.
Obviously not. Everyone’s still traumatised by Marowak shit. And Lt. Surge’s undiscussed war history. What was he doing.
you still don’t understand what they’re saying.
Okay, what were they saying.
WHY DID THE COMMENT SECTION TURN TO THIS
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 27 comments
- Comment on Trump, 79, Rants Incoherently About Robots and AI 3 weeks ago:
Boomers in the 1980s: “Those damn robots took our darn jorbs”
Trump in 2025: “We’re giving these jorbs to the robots”
- Comment on Santa rounds up migrants for ICE in Trump administration’s Christmas-themed AI video 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 4 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Comment on "...I can give you 5 more." "You're a madwoman!" 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 5 weeks 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 5 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 5 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 5 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? 1 month ago:
My first instances were mastodon.lol and kbin.social. Guess I was unlucky.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 1 month 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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’ 2 months 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 2 months 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.
