jqubed
@jqubed@lemmy.world
- Comment on Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit for PC Video Review 1 day ago:
A friend in high school was really into this game and got me into them. He was even creating a lot of custom skins for models. I played a lot of them until it turned into a more The Fast and the Furious-type game.
- Comment on Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80% 2 days ago:
I think this was one of the possible disasters that could happen in Sim City 2000
- Comment on What are the main differences between GPLv2, GPLv3, AGPL, and LGPL? 4 days ago:
I don’t really have answers for you, but you might find this website helpful
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 5 days ago:
I think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.
- Comment on GrapheneOS Under Threat: EU Age Verification And Google Changes Endanger Privacy-Focused Android 1 week ago:
I think in this case they’re referring to Chrome on iOS. Apple doesn’t allow any browser engine except WebKit on iOS so to many people that means Chrome and any other browser on iOS is really just Safari with a different interface. Pretty sure I saw something recently about the EU considering forcing Apple to allow other engines on iOS.
- Comment on 17k+ indexed adult games from itch.io on goony.dev 1 week ago:
This whole saga has been fascinating in that it has revealed an entire side of gaming I really didn’t know existed. I’m not looking very deeply into it, but just seeing how much exists and how many categories and classifications go into it is surprising, although I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised given how long I’ve been online.
- Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think IP addresses federate? I think only your instance admin can see your IP address. In any case, though, you should generally always assume that your up/down votes on any service are recorded and tied to your username. If you can come back later and change your vote, that vote is tied to your username. It may not be visible to other users, but the server admins can absolutely see what you’re doing.
Reddit might not make your votes publicly visible, but they’re absolutely tracking them and using that information to select what you see, including advertising. They might not directly share those votes with advertisers, but they almost certainly are sharing your interests based on your votes. And you should assume Reddit and others will comply if the government comes asking for what users liked a post the government opposes, or who downvoted a post praising a new government initiative.
It depends on your threat model, but your threat model might change. Freedom of speech might be curtailed by politicians even when that’s supposed to be unconstitutional. What might be safe to do online now might become unsafe in a year or two.
YSK: every action you take online, even as simple as an Upvote or Like, might be recorded and may come back to haunt you
- Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy 2 weeks ago:
It’s fundamentally a part of how Activity-Pub works. To send any action (on any AP platform) the action must be associated with a username, especially when it’s going to another server/instance. On Lemmy the voting information has always been visible to admins and I think mods, but hidden from ordinary users. If you use a different, compatible platform, though, it might be easily visible. I think Kbin/Mbin shows them to everyone, Friendica shows all votes, and I think Mastodon shows at least the upvotes as favorites/❤️s. You can also go someplace like Lemvotes to see votes.
For a while Piefed tried to get around this by sending up/down votes from alternate accounts on an instance that weren’t tied to any particular user, but I guess that caused its own problems so they stopped. Their option now is to simply prevent votes from federating to other instances, although that means vote totals may vary from one instance to another.
- Comment on Florida sues some of the biggest porn platforms, accusing them of not complying with the state's age verification law 2 weeks ago:
Not funny like a Woody Allen movie, funny like a Woody Allen marriage
- Comment on What are some games with absolutely fantastic soundtracks? 2 weeks ago:
Going through the lists everyone has posted I realized I’m surprised I haven’t seen anything from the Medal of Honor franchise posted. I only ever played Medal of Honor: Frontline because a roommate had it, but it was scored by Michael Giacchino, who also composed the scores for the original Medal of Honor, Medal of Honor: Underground, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Medal of Honor: Airborne. Giacchino won awards for the first four soundtracks in the series and it was his video game work that caught J. J. Abrams’s attention and led to him scoring Alias and Lost, starting his TV and movie career.
Also, if you enjoy soundtracks, you might like StreamingSoundtracks.com. It’s been around since 2001 and features soundtracks from movies, tv shows, and video games. It’s a free streaming radio service with the playlist queued by listeners along with limits on how frequently any track can be played, so you won’t hear repeats very often. A manager at a past job played it most days. One year someone took advantage of the “No repeats” rules and played all the horror tracks throughout October so that on Halloween there were basically no horror tracks available, angering many when they realized what had happened. I found it one of the more impressively planned and executed pranks I’ve personally witnessed.
- Comment on What are some games with absolutely fantastic soundtracks? 2 weeks ago:
I really like SimCity 3000’s jazz soundtrack. That was the first time I remember playing a game where the soundtrack was released separately.
Honorable mention goes to DX-Ball 2, which introduced me to a lot of electronic music and the concept of module/tracker music. The game by default came with just 4 .mod songs but on the website you could download additional files from the same creator, or add other .mod files from other sources to a folder and they’d appear in the game. First shareware game I ever bought, and paid by sending a money order through the mail because I was too young to have a credit card.
- Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise 3 weeks ago:
I think it made so much money at the box office because it was so visually stunning (for the time) and no one had made a movie like that at that point. It was very much a movie everyone said to go watch on the big screen in 3D, ideally IMAX 3D. I never did and only watched it on a DVD borrowed from my wife’s friend 6 or 7 years ago, and came away less impressed. Like, it’s fine, but the movie itself isn’t exactly the greatest story ever told, and the visuals, while groundbreaking at the time, are now pretty standard.
- Comment on Making the most of a totally dead cabinet corner? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know how practical it would be to expand the cabinet, but if you can extend it into the empty space there are companies that make hinged units that can rotate back into an empty space like that, then pull all the way out for relatively easy access. Maybe store some less-used pots and pans in there.
- Comment on Fediverse Report #127 - an overview of all the fediverse clients 3 weeks ago:
It looks like you’ve missed Aria for Misskey, which was updated as recently as yesterday
- Comment on Getting 'laid off' probably sounds pretty sexy to someone who doesn't know what it actually means 4 weeks ago:
Probably better than a rushed layover
- Comment on Commit culinary crimes in management sim The Diner At The End Of The Galaxy 4 weeks ago:
From a studio that also released a winemaking sim called Terroir. Seems like an interesting outfit!
- Comment on Getting 'laid off' probably sounds pretty sexy to someone who doesn't know what it actually means 4 weeks ago:
Being laid-up also not so great
- Comment on We all sleep alone soundly; Maybe the key to a happy marriage is separate beds 4 weeks ago:
My wife puts her hands on her chest which has her elbows out to the side, so I understand the challenge. We can usually make a queen work but a king is so much better. Last time we travelled we wound up in a double, which was awful for both of us!
- Comment on We all sleep alone soundly; Maybe the key to a happy marriage is separate beds 4 weeks ago:
I guess in a sense we do that. When we bought our bed we were also able to get adjustable bases, so we went with a split king, which is just two XL-twin beds pushed together (this has the same dimensions as a king). That way we could each adjust our side independent of each other but still cuddle up when we wanted. There’s often a small gap in the middle that can grow and be annoying, though.
- Comment on We all sleep alone soundly; Maybe the key to a happy marriage is separate beds 4 weeks ago:
We keep it relatively cool, but that was something we both did already before our relationship. It was actually something I asked about very early, because I grew up as the only person who preferred it cool to sleep while my parents and siblings preferred it warm. She thought it was really forward until I explained, but didn’t really understand until our first vacation with my parents.
In the summer when the AC is running we cool it to 66°F/18.89°C. In the winter we heat to 63°F/17.22°C.
- Comment on Tomb Raider video game composer jailed for Covid loan fraud 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on We all sleep alone soundly; Maybe the key to a happy marriage is separate beds 4 weeks ago:
I guess I’m in the minority that I have a harder time sleeping without my spouse than with. I realized about six months in that I’d rapidly developed some sort of dependence where I would fall asleep quickly if I spooned her. She had surgery in January and spent several weeks in the guest room so she could avoid the stairs, so we’ve tried being apart. It is nice if you have the space/budget for a king bed, though, to spread out from each other some.
- Comment on We all sleep alone soundly; Maybe the key to a happy marriage is separate beds 4 weeks ago:
The royals often weren’t marrying for love either, though, so I’m sure separate rooms helped with keeping some distance from someone they might not actually like and also made it easier to entertain their paramours.
- Comment on Stellantis abandons hydrogen fuel cell development 5 weeks ago:
I get annoyed when articles talk about one of hydrogen’s problems being a lack of infrastructure to deliver the fuel. Of course there’s not today since there’s no demand for it. If the cars start to develop as a market then the infrastructure would be built as well. The same thing has happened with electric cars. But it would take some entity investing in the infrastructure and being willing to wait years to see a return on the investment.
Of course, hydrogen has a lot of other problems that mean it’s probably not viable. Lack of infrastructure is just a weak argument against it.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 5 weeks ago:
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff.
This is exactly it. I used to work for a manufacturer that made devices they would often need to repair. They would bill non-warranty labor at $100/hour, plus the cost of parts. Their products were primarily used by professionals, so that was fine when it was being done to repair something that cost between $700-$4,000 new, especially for people who were making money using the product. When they launched a product at a $500 MSRP, though, it started to get harder, and even more so when competition forced them to lower the price to $400. When I left they were about to launch a product targeted at amateurs, originally aiming for a $200 price. It was actually being built by a Chinese competitor, with our software guys contributing to the system and putting our logo on it. Spending $100 labor to repair a $200 device was going to be a tough sell, and when I left the plan for warranty “repairs” was to just give the customer a replacement unit and scrap the defective one. And I’m sure the repair labor rate was going up; they had a hard time hiring qualified technicians at the rate they wanted to pay, and most of the department had quit/moved to new roles when I left, so they were surely having to increase pay and the rate they billed.
When something’s being built on an assembly line mostly by machine and/or low-cost Asian labor, it’s harder for a company to justify paying a skilled technician’s labor in a western country when that makes the cost of repair close to the cost of a new unit.
- Comment on BulletVPN Closes Down, Pulling The Rug on Lifetime Subscriptions 5 weeks ago:
Stop buying lifetime subscriptions to services! They’re not sustainable!
- Comment on anything but metric 5 weeks ago:
!anythingbutmetric@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source 1 month ago:
It would be a big, expensive case, and as there are well-funded organisations that rely on the precedent not being set against them in both directions, both sides would get interested third parties funding their legal fees. No one wants that, so Nintendo stick to claiming emulators are illegal on their website
I would assume particularly that no one who has big interests there wants it to go to court because once there’s a ruling and a precedent is set it becomes much harder to change if you’re on the losing side. So, for example, if game publishers lost and it was clearly ruled legal that consumers have a right to make software work with hardware that the software was never intended for, that would make it much harder for publishers to fight emulators without some additional problem like trademark infringement. The advice I’ve heard is unless you can be absolutely certain how a judge will rule, you want to avoid going to court because strange and unexpected things can happen in a courtroom that can be very bad for you.
- Comment on came across some family heirlooms today, hahaha! 1 month ago:
You would’ve had to pay for the call itself, but probably only if you had to make a long-distance call. I think by that time local numbers were pretty universally unlimited minutes, but long distance was 25¢/minute or more. I was too young to be buying phone service myself, then, but remember TV ads promoting 25¢ or 10¢ or something like that as a good deal. Around 2003 when I was first living on my own I used to buy prepaid calling cards to call home and those got me as low as 3¢/minute, and that was a bargain.
- Comment on came across some family heirlooms today, hahaha! 1 month ago:
I seem to remember our first disks/discs coming in with 5 free hours. That might’ve even been included with a Packard Bell we bought.
