sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism 1 hour ago:
System of a Down?
Here’s my attempt at an inverse:
Rammstein: Amerika (it’s wunderbar!)
Yeah, I’m sick of us too.
We are a third world country in a gucci belt, we are basically a failed state at this point.
Oh hey! David Bowie: I’m afraid of Americans.
Me to Dave, me too. RIP.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 5 hours ago:
Cool, I don’t care that its the industry standard, the industry standard is shit.
Adapt, Improvise, Overcome!
If a bunch of Boomers only know how to use Windows, and MS Office, its time for them to retire.
Its not that hard to switch daily drive office work to a stable linux distro, and libreoffice.
Yeah, it would be more difficult to switch over say, a full CRM solutiom, but uh, given how I’ve done exactly that at orgs I’ve worked at, uh, no, no, not impossible, quite doable actually.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 7 hours ago:
Well technically its not the same GDPR, but w/e.
Point is:
Much of what MSFT does isn’t GDPR compliant, or violates other data security and privacy laws in the EU, or just generally throws privacy and security by the wayside, as a matter of course.
crowell.com/…/cloud-gdpr-risks-highlighted-by-eur…
ppc.land/irish-court-approves-first-class-action-…
gadgetreview.com/microsofts-recall-fails-to-prote…
courthousenews.com/microsoft-must-face-privacy-cl…
If you think MSFT gives a shit about actual data security and privacy, you’re not following the just stream of lawsuits they just keep getting into, revolving these issues.
Yeah if that means 99% of orgs have bad policy, by relying on a company with a terrible record on all this, the, uh then uh yeah, 99% of orgs are choosing to have the ability to blame someone else for their own bad decisions, over making better decisions.
- Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism 8 hours ago:
I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
Shit’s really bad over here.
- Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism 11 hours ago:
No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.
So thus I will now nitpick you: ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
Hehe.
I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.
I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.
I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.
Further, obviously, almost all other countries police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures… we still widely use ‘lie detectors’ that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical ‘body language expert’ shit everywhere… and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation… because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 12 hours ago:
Yep I do realize that.
And I still have the same opinion.
You’re in the UK, so you’re not bound by GDPR… but a whole lot of places and orgs that are bound by GDPR realize that MSFT products indeed are a joke from a data security standpoint, and are actively transitioning to linux or at the very least FOSS software.
I am in the US.
I literally used to work for MSFT, a few of their different locations around Seattle.
They are a fucking insane mess, internally, organizationally.
I worked with people, old timers who’d just casually tell me:
‘Oh yeah back before Desert Storm, I was out in Saudi Arabia flashing the BIOS of computer hardware that was bound to be installed in Saddam’s C&C and Air Defense Radar networks, some months later when time came for the air sorties, somebody else just flipped a switch and down goes all their radars!’
Aka a supply chain attack.
Aka, unless your definition of ‘data security’ is ‘the NSA has all my data’, then MSFT products are rather dubious at providing data security.
- Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism 12 hours ago:
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 13 hours ago:
Huh, sounds like bad security and data integrity policies from whatever company, probably not very well run places to work for.
- Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism 20 hours ago:
Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.
Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.
Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.
They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.
If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they’d either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 21 hours ago:
Yet again, I trot out this phrase, as a response to yet another massive Windows fuckup/scandal:
… People are still using Windows?
- Comment on On Black Holes... 21 hours ago:
Black hole nested multiverse theory:
‘Inside’ of many black holes… there is a new ‘big bang’, and then another universe, which can form its own black holes, etc.
So… nope, not turtles all the way down, instead, singularities.
So then we are all inside a … progenitor universe’s black hole, and it is seemingly fundamentally impossible for anything above a subatomic scale to survive the transition… and thus it is also fundamentally impossible to know how long this uas been going on or how this all started.
More commonly known as Black Hole Cosmology.
- Comment on Now I finally get it 1 day ago:
Everybody must get stoned!
Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Woman.
- Comment on Now I finally get it 1 day ago:
For reference, here’s that verse, Matthew 5:18:
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Thats the KJV, here’s a bunch of other translations:
- Comment on They'd just appear out of nowhere 1 day ago:
Basically, lighting conditions have to be just right to … basically, allow you to actually see your own white blood cells, in your own eyes, against the … background/everything you are seeing.
So my guess would be that in the summer, where you are, the … ambient light of the sky is too bright, it overwhelms this effect, but in the winter, maybe its mote generally humid, or the light is coming through more atmosphere , at morr oblique angles, and is thus less intense.
- Comment on They'd just appear out of nowhere 1 day ago:
The dots are white blood cells moving in the capillaries in front of the retina of the eye.
From the wiki page.
So, yeah, it makes sense that very similar or even just the same effect can be intensified by all those things you mention, they all alter the motion of blood in your eyes.
As to a big chunk moving?
I am not an eye expert, but I would intuitively think that yes, a big splotch moving could be the retina itself moving… but it could also potentially be something like a clot in one of those capillaries breaking loose… which is probably still bad, but maybe not necessarily as bad?
- Comment on They'd just appear out of nowhere 1 day ago:
I mean, now maybe, lol, but I noticed this as a middle schooler, and I was in pretty good shape back then… and I still have the exact same experience to this day, in the right lighting conditions, if I can just sit or stand still and look at a mostly cloudless sky.
- Comment on Anyone else guilty of this? 1 day ago:
You do realize that is/was extremely uncommon, right?
Not to argue against your nerddom, I’m sure you are, and of course nerds have been nerding for quite a long time, but uh, you won the time and place birth lottery to be a Boomer born into prime recruiting territory for Silicon Valley, IBM probably directly paid for that class.
Programming, actual courses in writing code… beyond maybe basic HTML… were basically unheard of in US public k-12 schools untill like, the late 2000s at best, more like 2010s.
You were in the right place at the right time to be able to recieve formal nerd training in a public high school in the 70s.
- Comment on They'd just appear out of nowhere 1 day ago:
I believe this is another related, simililar, yet technically different phenomenon, with different causal mechanisms, but yes, lets keep adding to the list, lol.
Also, brb, you’ll never believe this, apparently my pizza delivery guy’s name is ‘Hiro Protagonist’, he’s almost here, and I gotta ask him what is up with that name.
- Comment on They'd just appear out of nowhere 1 day ago:
Slightly different but similar and related:
- Comment on Anyone else guilty of this? 2 days ago:
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork… yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost… I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I’ve been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
… But I’ve had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game’s dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo… I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for… 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as ‘old men yelling at clouds’… when we’ve been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
- Comment on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy 3 days ago:
In general, yes, payment processors have in the past essentially ‘debanked’ specific people or businesses.
To the best of my knowledge, this has never before occured to … something on the scale of the worlds largest digital marketplace for a particular kind of product.
I do not disagree.with you that the current status of things is bullshit, that there have been instances of usually very small businesses getting thrown off…
But the outright scale of dictating Steam around is … almost as insane as dictating Walmart around.
Up untill this point, yeah, I am again not aware of any prior ‘enforcement action’ of this magnitude, and… the way corporate America works is that if you are bringing enough money to the table, you get some leeway on this kind of thing, you handle it behind closed doors, in a fairly involved way.
The way MC, Visa, PayPal have gone about this represents a huge breach of those unspoken norms, a massive, flagrant, naked power grab.
What I am trying to say is not that this system has ever been fine, flawless, or good… what I am trying to say is that this is akin to engaging the nuclesr option, its a thing that would be entirely reasonable for someone like Valve to … not assume they’d need to worry about this…
… precisely because the alternative actually is for Valve to develop basically its own PayPal, which would be a fairly large loss of business for other, former partnered payment processors.
Apparently the calculus of the situation has changed, in their minds, such that the payprocs seem to no longer fear Valve playing its nuclear option as a response to their own, seem to no longer value Steam as a marketplace.
Either that, or they have massively miscalculated.
- Comment on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy 3 days ago:
Lemme put it this way.
Valve did not prepare for unforseen consequences.
I don’t think anyone really thought that what is happening right now was a likely thing that would happen, going back 20 years.
Payment processors had never had a problem with this before, and then blam.
Its… dubious to frame this as if this foundational business infrastructure that had never before shown any cracks or signs of wear… should just have been reasonably expected to suddenly shatter into a thousand pieces at some point.
Sure, yes, they could have been more forward looking, but you’re already talking about one of the most innovative and forward looking companies in gaming.
- Comment on Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says 3 days ago:
Damn, all that is great info and much of it is news to me as a PC centric gamer person!
Like, I’m starring this for myself, for future reference.
I had no idea n3ds homebrew OS had gotten to the point you can run an FTP server on it, I knew PS3 had gotten to that point, but still, damn!
Yeah I mention the Nintendo vs Valve thing because… well, lately, there has been a lot of online screaming centered around the Switch 2 and a lot of Nintendo’s business practices, a whole lot of Nintendo fans on Xwitter just fucking hate Deck users, its been a whole genre of harvestable slop for youtubers for months now.
Wasn’t trying to imply you personally partook in any of that, I just wanted to exemplify that… level headed people from basically somewhat different fanbases/knowledge sets/ tech backgrounds can in fact have level headed discussions, without becoming tribalistic.
Always proud to see someone else pursuing their own useful specialized skill set, always ready to learn from someone who isn’t obviously blowing smoke up my ass, haha!
Anyway yeah, I am currently in the process of building a huge rom lib for my Deck… so far I’ve filled up about 350 gb of a 512gb sd card… internet archive still has a fuckton of working, downloadable collections, I’m grabbing as much as I can before we get an even harder crackdown.
- Comment on Anyone else guilty of this? 3 days ago:
Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.
Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.
Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.
I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, … basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps… done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.
- Comment on Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says 3 days ago:
Damn, yeah, thats like ~3x more MHz, that is quite a jump from the earlier version!
And yeah, no argument whatsoever that even a big 3DS can fit in a pocket, whereas a Deck is… roughly as transportable as a laptop, its gonna need a case or bag or go into a backpack.
And also again no argument that the dual screen thing is a very neat configuration with a lot of potential use cases.
See, I think there are a lot of points going toward a hacked/modded 3DS of some kind vs a Deck… unlike for a Switch/2 vs a Deck.
A 3DS is actually significantly cheaper, has all that real portable form factor stuff going for it, and sure it cant top out as high as a Deck in performance terms, but if you don’t want or need that, or prioritize the pure portability more, or you just prefer stylus type games or slightly older/pocket games… its definitely a solid choice.
You are basicslly getting your max bang for buck at a lower price point / different priority situation, and… having built a lot of custom PCs… yeah, its all about finding those sweet spots of sorts of tiers of capability at the lowest price point.
Either way, glad that you are repurposing instead of consuming next product!
Nintendo fans and Valve fans do not have to hate each other, lol.
- Comment on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy 3 days ago:
What you are saying is basically:
Steam should just have immediately invented its own PayPal, its own payment processing system, that works everywhere.
I mean… I do think this is something they could actually do, but its kind of nuts to just frame this as if they could have just flipped a switch and such a system would exist, blamo.
No, this would be a huge undertaking, which would, as many other Valve projects and concepts, take time.
You can’t just instantly implement what you seem to think you can. None this works that way, at all.
- Comment on Anyone else guilty of this? 3 days ago:
Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games.
So basically, actual ‘nerds’ are rasing another generation of ‘nerds’, except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They’ll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs… have no clue about.
Oh, they’ll also likely just be generally more literate.
- Comment on Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says 3 days ago:
From what I understand, with the 3DS, you had to get roughly ‘Version 1’ of those before they changed the actual hardware to make… basically ‘rooting’ it more difficult… or maybe I’m thinking of the Switch?
Either way, what I’m trying to say is basically ‘thats impressive’ if you were the one to actually uh… cough, install the sea shanties.
I went the easier route and just have a Steam Deck, and yep, they are perfect for emulating basically everything up to roughly current gen - 2… and most stuff within the last two gens can be made to run on it in some way…
… I was doinking about with the 3DS remaster of OoT earlier, and was actually very surprised to find that with my setup, the touchscreen… just worked as a 3DS touchscreen, I didn’t even think to intentionally configure it, accidentally poked the screen and oh well there ya go, lol.
Anyway, yep, we are absolutely gonna see a uh ‘return to tradition’ so to speak, as many high budget high fidelity modern games… basically suck, and are outrageously expensive.
As to a stylus as mouse for DOSBox and SCUMVM… i don’t know what the actual software configuration solution would look like there, but if the touch screen is high enough dpi dense… then it should at least conceptually work, as most of the games from that era that use a mouse are like, point and click adventures.
- Comment on Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says 3 days ago:
I predict an increase in market demand for sea shanties.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 3 days ago:
Fucking Doc Brown could power a goddamn time machine with this many jiggawatts, fuck I hate being stuck in this timeline.