nyan
@nyan@lemmy.cafe
- Comment on DRAM shortage fuels fake GPU scams as China-based fraudsters exploit the supply crisis — RTX 4080 GPU sold at cut price was actually an RTX 3060 mobile chip with fake VRAM 1 day ago:
Someone too lazy to update their listings to reflect a rising sticker price (or not wishing to do so for other reasons) isn’t too good to be true. If they’re an established business selling new-in-box items at more than the wholesale price they would have paid (around 50% of the lowest sticker price the good’s ever been sold at isn’t a bad estimate), then you may have found a genuinely good deal.
It’s when someone starts selling at below their cost (unless it’s obviously to clear out old inventory or the like) that things get suspicious.
- Comment on DRAM shortage fuels fake GPU scams as China-based fraudsters exploit the supply crisis — RTX 4080 GPU sold at cut price was actually an RTX 3060 mobile chip with fake VRAM 1 day ago:
You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.
Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.
- Comment on [Episode] Gnosia - Episode 14 discussion 1 day ago:
Thing is, if Yuri says outright that one of the humans aboard is (in effect) a pathological liar, Yuri will probably be accused of being a gnosia making an inept attempt to sow dissent. It might not even be the ACF making that accusation, because it’s such an outlandish thing to say. If Yuri is voted out, then they’ve failed Yuriko’s test.
As for Kukrushka, if she really is the Guardian Angel (there’s nothing that says she isn’t the ACF and lying about the other, technically), she might have chosen to protect Jonas on the first round, due to emotional attachment or something—we still don’t know what’s going on with those two.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2026, Week 04] 2 days ago:
Maybe it’s just confirmation bias on my part, but it just seems like these kinds of shows are more likely to actively receive bad reviews than be ignored, which is what happens to most of the stuff that I would judge as truly bad. Compare, for instance, Hell Mode, an utterly cliched isekai that’s also currently running and which I would say was more deserving of bad reviews, because its creator wouldn’t recognize an original idea if it bit them—not one word’s been said about it. Even Beheneko, which was an unapologetic brainless boobfest held together by a thin surface skin of plot, didn’t draw as many bad reviews here as Sentenced to be a Hero.
Upon reflection, the answer might simply be that the people who are giving this one bad reviews watch a lot less trash than I do and therefore have a differently calibrated evaluation scale.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2026, Week 04] 2 days ago:
Sentenced to Be a Hero the characters are frankly a drag
I find it interesting to see multiple members of this community - myself included - shit on its first episode despite how well-received it was among the broader anime community. Looks like we are just not the target demographic.
Dark/edgy fantasy doesn’t seem to be very popular around here, it’s true. Makes me feel a bit isolated sometimes, as someone who does like those kinds of shows. 😅
- Comment on [Episode] Fate/strange Fake - Episode 3 discussion 3 days ago:
I find myself more curious about Caster’s identity than Saber’s. Saber I can at least make a guess at, based on his “Loxley” remark, but Caster is a total blank.
- Comment on First-In-Human Trial Of CRISPR Gene-Editing Therapy Safely Lowered Cholesterol, Triglycerides 1 week ago:
I suspect they’re making an unwarranted assumption that the experimental patient ended up with high cholesterol due to excessive consumption of animal products (rather than, say, a genetic defect that would cause them to overproduce it regardless of diet) and applying some typical vegan arguments regarding livestock farming. No need to listen to them.
- Comment on [Episode] Gnosia - Episode 13 discussion 1 week ago:
She also seemed to have a lot of information she was withholding, why?
Maybe it’s just Yuriko’s personality? She seems to enjoy acting superior.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2026, Week 03] 1 week ago:
For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen it, although it was quite some time ago. My feelings about it at the time were mixed—it was interesting in many ways, but there were also aspects of it that I could have done without, and unfortunately it’s mostly the bits I could have done without (like that one torture scene) that have stuck with me.
- Comment on AI-generated isekai novel that won a literary contest Grand Prize and Reader’s Choice award has its book publication and manga adaptation cancelled 1 week ago:
Well, all the entrants could have been AI-generated isekai novels.
- Comment on How Did TVs Get So Cheap? - by Brian Potter 1 week ago:
There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.
In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.
- Comment on Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog 2 weeks ago:
According to records obtained by the group, “it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.”
This does not give me a great impression of the literacy level of American police officers. Another good reason to stay out of that country.
- Comment on Microsoft kills official way to activate windows without internet 2 weeks ago:
If you have no internet but want your music as a file, that’s how you go about it.
- Comment on How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history 3 weeks ago:
They picked the wrong history, in my not so humble opinion. The AI situation looks more like the dot-com bubble, recycled.
- Comment on Anime Fall Season and 2025 Year-End Discussion [2026, Week 1] 3 weeks ago:
Time for this season’s silly awards!
- Most thorough product placement: Shuumatsu Touring. I really hope Honda paid them well for that episode.
- Most disappointing: To Your Eternity. Not that it was bad, exactly, but it wasn’t up to the standards of the previous seasons. I’ve come to the conclusion that much of the problem is Mizuha and the heavy focus on her. While her situation is interesting, she is not an appealing character, and I really don’t want to spend any more time with her. Hopefully the second cours will return the primary focus to Fushi. (I also could have done without the rope bondage bit, which seemed to come out of left field in a manner more appropriate to Golden Kamuy.)
- Stupidest smart person award: Towasa from Towa no Yuugure. Apparently she not only knew nothing about human nature, she also lacked fundamental knowledge about computer programming. All non-trivial software has bugs, and directly hooking up a human brain to the Internet with no method to block it again afterwards is so stupidly risky that I can’t even.
- Biggest bait-and-switch: Towa no Yuugure again. The first couple of episodes are set up to look like plucky-band-of-misfits-against-SF-dystopia, but instead we end up getting SF relationship drama. If that was what they wanted to do, they should have toned down the evil-dystopia scenes.
- Where-can-I-get-some-of-what-they-were-smoking award: Sanda. The last thing I saw that managed to be both this batshit and this thoughtful was maybe Sarazanmai (and that was from Kunihiko Ikuhara, who’s always that way). Come for the bizarre premise, stay for the fact that this thing is surprisingly good.
- Best dragon award: May I Ask for One Final Thing? narrowly beat out the dragon from Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! begging for royal moodle. (Sorry, Bee, you’re just not dragonlike enough, and they tried too hard to make you cute. Gap moe works better with dragons.)
- Most unexpectedly entertaining: Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! for a narrow win over a quite large field of candidates. (A Wild Last Boss Appears! might have won if I hadn’t given it a higher evaluation than the other based on pre-airing summaries.) Having the central plot be a romance is a tough sell for me in general, but this time it worked.
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My Christmas rewatch for this year was Suisei no Gargantia (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet). It still holds up pretty well for the most part—the Gundam + Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind + Waterworld setting comes together (even though from that description, it really shouldn’t), and the character arcs, including the mecha’s, work. The thing that doesn’t hold up is the visuals. There is way too much 3D water that does not blend with the rest of the artwork at all, proving that sometimes trying to be more realistic causes problems rather than solving them.
- Comment on Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto? 3 weeks ago:
Lacking government regulation in the largest markets, proper separation will never be enforced, because it isn’t to the manufacturers’ benefits. And that probably isn’t going to happen until hacked infotainment systems kill enough people to draw attention, unfortunately.
- Comment on Can machines suffer? 3 weeks ago:
Animals, including humans, have sensors for pain (nerve endings), and a series of routines in our brains to process the sensory data and treat it as an unpleasant stimulus. These are not optional systems, but innate ones.
Machines not only lack the required sensor systems and processing routines, they can’t even interpret a stimulus as unpleasant. They can’t feel pain. If you need proof of that, hit a computer with a sledgehammer. I guarantee it won’t complain, or even notice before you damage it beyond functioning.
(They can, of course, make us feel pain. I just spent the last hour trying to get a udev rule to work . . .)
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I’m sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn’t want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.
- Comment on What is the longest anime episode of all time? 4 weeks ago:
I vaguely remember that I did not watch the anime adaptation of Atelier Ryza because the first episode was 3x (4x?) normal length, which should be >60 min.
- Comment on How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant 4 weeks ago:
Attempting to defeat browser fingerprinting (you can never be 100% sure you’ve defeated everything) without TOR is kind of an advanced subject, yeah, and one of which I have only shallow knowledge. A lot of it is Javascript-dependent, so allowing Javascript only on a whitelist basis should help (but is too tedious for a lot of people). Deliberately pissing in the pool by varying prominent identifiers like the User-Agent string should help. Canvas poisoning. Specialist browser extensions, some of which may be more effective than others. Running the blandest default-settings browser possible in the blandest possible default-settings environment (a container or live media inside a VM) could conceivably cause you to vanish into the noise, but may be highly inconvenient.
It’s worth considering who is likely to be interested in going to the trouble of browser fingerprinting in the first place. Small players have little use for the information and aren’t likely to accumulate enough to sell it for much money. So the problems are going to come from ad networks, large digital networks like Google and Meta/Facebook, possibly CDNs and service providers like Shopify if they think it’s worth their while, maybe some governments, and completely dishonest scam sites that think any money is good. Some of these can be avoided altogether if you work at it.
- Comment on How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant 4 weeks ago:
It does, however, make a certain level of anonymity at least possible as long as you scrub your cookies regularly, never log into the same accounts over the VPN that you were using without it, and never buy anything over the VPN.
In the end, you have to sit down and ask yourself what information you’re trying to protect from whom, and how much trouble protecting it is worth. You don’t want your nosy cousin who works at your ISP to know you look at furry porn, well, a VPN should be good enough for that (provided you don’t use the ISP’s DNS). If you’re trying to conceal your actions from a nation-state-level observer, you’ve got a lot more work to do.
- Comment on Winter Anime Season Preview Discussion and Thread Requests [2025, Week 52] 4 weeks ago:
It could still be 3-2-2-2-2-2-overpriced special, though. I suppose we’ll see.
- Comment on Winter Anime Season Preview Discussion and Thread Requests [2025, Week 52] 4 weeks ago:
Is Gnosia continuing? Livechart doesn’t seem to think so. (If it is, I’m going to have even more work to do sorting out my schedule.)
Things I know I’ll be sampling that no one seems to have mentioned yet:
- Golden Kamuy
- Fate/Strange Fake (finally!)
- A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation (first volume of the manga was mildly entertaining)
- Kaya-chan isn’t Scary (from the description, it should at least be different)
- Comment on Did Microsoft do anything right in 2025? Wins, fails, and WTF moments 4 weeks ago:
I disagree. Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines and reinforced the idea that lazy site owners don’t have to test against more than one browser. That’s a loss for the Web as a whole.
- Comment on “Everything has become shallower.” Tokyo Godfathers, Lain producer says the Japanese corporate mindset is why 90% of anime just adapts existing works - AUTOMATON WEST 4 weeks ago:
I am falling, I am fading
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I think the main problem would be the controls. I mean, you could put a tiny bridle on the rat to steer, but how do you shoot? Pull the tail? (How you avoid being bitten while pulling the rat’s tail is a separate issue.)
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
It’s a step up from fish playing pokemon, anyway.
- Comment on No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog 5 weeks ago:
It is, but it’s so divergent these days that 90% of Mozilla patches won’t even apply to the codebase (and presumably vice-versa). My conclusion is that Pale Moon and Goanna are capable of surviving if Firefox development ceases.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 51] 5 weeks ago:
Not a Western thing, an Anglophone thing. English normally doesn’t end words with the “eh” sound, but French often does, and French words that get adopted into English tend to go through a similar sound change—for instance, “parfait” is pronounced “pahr-feh” (more or less) in French, but “par-fey” in English.