umbraroze
@umbraroze@lemmy.world
- Comment on Skill issue 4 weeks ago:
I remember the last time I got messaged by some misogynist dipshit, way back in Halo 5, blaming me for losing the game. …When he was the worst performing player in the team. I just stared at the post game report and wondered how the heck the dude even managed to get a ranking as low as he did.
- Comment on C64 Retro Battlestation 4 weeks ago:
I always preferred the C64C style keyboard where the graphics characters were in the top of the keycaps. This is my C64G (old breadbin style chassis but with C64C style colouring and keycaps):
Quick summary: You get the left graphics character with the Commodore key (bottom left corner), and the right character with Shift key. By pressing Commodore+Shift, you swap between upper case + graphics characters mode and the upper case + lower case mode, applying to the entire screen (so you can’t actually use the right graphics characters in that mode).
Fun thing: To switch to another text colour you press Ctrl + number keys, with 8 colours available there, just as in the VIC-20. However, there’s also another set of colours available with Commodore + number keys, for another 8 colours. I guess with Jack Tramiel’s penny pinching, they didn’t bother to mark those on the keys when making the next gen system.
- Comment on Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains 5 weeks ago:
That must have been frustrating when the user base responded “but I already got my Blåhaj”
- Comment on OneNote to perish alongside Windows 10. 5 weeks ago:
Frankly they should have nuked “OneNote for Windows 10” long ago and quietly replaced it with the Office version. Or better yet, not launch a separate version to begin with under the same name. But this is Microsoft, having multiple apps with the same name is just the norm.
- Comment on Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” 5 weeks ago:
AI business is owned by a tiny group of technobros, who have no concern for what they have to do to get the results they want (“fuck the copyright, especially fuck the natural resources”) who want to be personally seen as the saviours of humanity (despite not being the ones who invented and implemented the actual tech) and, like all big wig biz boys, they want all the money.
I don’t have problems with AI tech in the principle, but I hate the current business direction and what the AI business encourages people to do and use the tech for.
- Comment on Eat it 5 weeks ago:
In Finland we have this one liquorice candy that looks like chalk. The school children yearn for the chalk. It’s normal.
- Comment on Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives. 5 weeks ago:
I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”
Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 5 weeks ago:
Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”
- Comment on SHUT UP ABOUT NICOLE 5 weeks ago:
I’ve only received the spam once. I guess I do not qualify as an active Fediverse user. 😒
- Comment on What Fediverse services do you use? 1 month ago:
Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy and Bookwyrm. They all seem to cover most of my social media needs which (in all other cases beside Lemmy) can be described as shouting in the void and being happy if someone else is there too.
- Comment on Spent half an hour on it. Felt good. 1 month ago:
I never got such a survey. Guess they figured that bunch of people would cancel the subscription in the month before an announced price hike.
- Comment on Spent half an hour on it. Felt good. 1 month ago:
SQL is an Old Language of Ancient Power. You have to write the keywords in all caps.
(Fortran is basically the same, but it’s rarer. Lisp is too, but you don’t need to capitalise everything, as the Ancient Power is contained in the parentheses.)
- Comment on I am from a different millenia 2 months ago:
“…and ripping that CD was annoying, because you then had an over long last track with the secret song, and you had to split the tracks manually and come up with tags on your own, or…”
(Seriously, the only reason I listened rarely to the last song in Halo CE soundtrack was because of this.)
- Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands. 2 months ago:
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.
Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now.
- Comment on Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books 2 months ago:
Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.
For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.
Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.
- Comment on Why was there a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad on X? 2 months ago:
Well, duh, where else would a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad be?
- Comment on Laws only matter if you're not rich. 2 months ago:
There’s actually a bunch of journals that have Open Access (making the articles available for free, usually under Creative Commons licenses). That at least eliminates the cost for the readers.
However, that’s not a guarantee the OA journals don’t collect publication fees, or even that the fees would be smaller than on non-OA journals. Fees range from “just trying to keep the lights on” to “same ol’ grift, but ostensibly nicer to the reader”.
Also, starting a new journal is always a bit of a tricky process in that you obviously want the people to trust in the journal and starting from total zero makes it harder. There have been a bunch of journals that were outright scams and OA obviously won’t fix that.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 2 months ago:
I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there’s no reason not to support the format.
MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I’ve been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven’t ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)
- Comment on Tutle 3 months ago:
Turtlie! Ancient shellmaster! Aww.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 5 months ago:
Anyone remember the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover?
“I don’t know what this ‘microservice’ nonsense is, I’m gonna remove it”
“…Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system”
“Ur fired lol”
…Expect more of that.
- Comment on It's fire... Maybe concerning but fire still 5 months ago:
Why hello! 🙋🏻♀️
I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 is currently 100% for its 20th anniversary 5 months ago:
[old woman memories mode]
I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.
I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.
And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.
- Comment on critical latex mod 5 months ago:
Does PDF actually allow some objects to be invisible on screen but visible on print? Because that’d be cool.
It’s 2225. Archaeologists discover yet another long forgotten university library storage facility. Inside, they find stacks of Elsevier journals that have never been opened. They then find puzzling coffee stains that somehow appear to be result of the printing process, and conclude that the cultural significance of these markings was probably lost to the ages.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020. Almost 4 years later, what is your opinion on it? 5 months ago:
A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.
Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)
- Comment on Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says. 5 months ago:
I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 6 months ago:
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?
…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
