MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 16 hours ago:
That's not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.
Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so... I mean, it's a thing.
Not saying you should, and it's definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 16 hours ago:
I'm currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just... remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can't be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can't get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the "can't hook it up to a keyboard and mouse" in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.
Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren't functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don't need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 22 hours ago:
I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don't need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you're trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you're running a hosting business, at which point it's not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 22 hours ago:
I mean... my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.
I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn't care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but... maybe not the best use of power.
I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That's feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.
- Comment on Frustrated users crowdfund a $2,000 fix for Lenovo Legion ‘speakers not working properly’ error — bug bounty posted, coder wins the cash by fixing complex audio annoyance in just a month 3 days ago:
No.
I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I'm not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.
This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren't trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than... you know, whether it's good or not, this wouldn't even be a discussion. In fact, half the "Windows sucks" angles these days are down to "Windows 11 doesn't support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware". Which, you know, is the exact problem I'm having here.
Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn't contradict my previous statements.
- Comment on Frustrated users crowdfund a $2,000 fix for Lenovo Legion ‘speakers not working properly’ error — bug bounty posted, coder wins the cash by fixing complex audio annoyance in just a month 1 week ago:
I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it's been killing me for months and I'm now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
- Comment on When Xfinity has an outage, I don’t pay for those days. The government’s been shut down for 39 days so can I pay 39 days less in taxes? 3 weeks ago:
The government isn't a subscription service or a company.
I can't deal with Americans' ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It's so annoying.
- Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel 1 month ago:
In that it's mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it's a good test for that sort of "just read the headline" response.
It's been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can't parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It's just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
I did not remember that and I still remember "Los pollos hermanos", so that tells you how weird that one is.
Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you're reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
Goddamn it.
NOW it's fixed.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
I mean... no, mine's a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.
This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.
He also, incidentally, couldn't speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. "Los Pollos Hermanos" as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, and I'm not joking about this, sometimes find myself having intrusive thoughts about it after all this time.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
You'd be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.
But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.
- Comment on OLAY! 1 month ago:
...
The ouroboros of bad pronutiation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.
I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.
- Comment on AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study 1 month ago:
Yeah, but... this isn't that.
You're literally saying "well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else".
We don't like that. That's not a thing we like to do.
And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I've seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.
They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different results.
I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register, the bar is low but they went for personal best anyway.
Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you're in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It's been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.
- Comment on AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study 1 month ago:
So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but...
...what's with people being mad about it?
I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I'm often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don't seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is... fine? It's not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn't think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn't completely automate most tasks in ways that weren't already available.
Which seems to be most of what's going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.
So what's all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don't like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What's going on there?
- Comment on soda 1 month ago:
I mean, I appreciate the gumption but, honestly? This mentality is probably why Americans can't have decent public services.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
I mean, convenience is a factor.
And while Steam doesn't typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You'd think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.
Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
It's come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it's driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it's super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I'm just out of the refund window and... hey, I like it so far, but I don't like it 160 bucks' worth.
Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I'm starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.
- Comment on Do boycotts work? 1 month ago:
Boycotts, yes.
"I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later" voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 1 month ago:
Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there's been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it's been extremely frustrating. I don't know if it's a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it's infuriating.
- Comment on A lot of media depict the United States as being invaded by fascists from the outside. Nobody thought fascism will come from within until now. 1 month ago:
Honestly, even at the time that entire "benefit of the doubt" garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It's nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.
I mean, I'd normally not assume an entire culture is entirely incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going "they're both the same" on this site right now.
Which reminds me I'm trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it's time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.
- Comment on A lot of media depict the United States as being invaded by fascists from the outside. Nobody thought fascism will come from within until now. 1 month ago:
I mean... yeah, but also I'm very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.
I'm not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn't "hindsigh", it's "I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers".
And for the record, we got fascists, too. We're just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don't have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.
I mean, Stephen Miller isn't even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn't a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.
- Comment on A lot of media depict the United States as being invaded by fascists from the outside. Nobody thought fascism will come from within until now. 1 month ago:
What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely externally, but... I mean, were you alive during the whole "war on terror" nonsense?
Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?