narc0tic_bird

@narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GeoGuessr is making its way to Steam next month after almost 12 years of sticking it out as a browser game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, GeoGuessr is an extreme example as Google basically did 95% of the work for them. Having to image large chunks of the world would mean a huge investment and I highly doubt GeoGuessr would even exist without Google Maps.

  If Google would double their API pricing tomorrow there’s very little GeoGuessr can do except maybe switch to Apple Maps (they offer an API, not sure they offer one for their “street view” data though).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple sued for false advertising over Apple Intelligence.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nope, I enabled it weeks ago. YMMV of course but from everything I read, heard and experienced, the software quality is abysmal relative to what I could expect from an iPhone (or other Apple device) before.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple sued for false advertising over Apple Intelligence.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Maps was them underestimating how much work it is to create good map material. The functionality was fine from the beginning if I recall correctly.

  Apple Intelligence is them panicking because the rest of the industry started putting more ML/AI features on their smartphones and they weren’t just late to the party, they apparently barely even started working on it.

  They put their own twist on it with “Private Cloud Compute” (make of that what you will, the theoretical tech behind it is an interesting read though), and they also want to process many features entirely on-device (again in the name of privacy, but to be fair Gemini Nano also runs on-device).

  Then they realized that running somewhat complex ML models on device requires memory and that’s where they always cheaped out on their products, so when they announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC in summer (with new iPhones only being announced in September) they had ONE iPhone model that could even run Apple Intelligence: the iPhone 15 Pro. So you could’ve bought an iPhone 15 (non “Pro”) the day before and every single feature they announced aside from tinted home screen icons or whatever wouldn’t work on your brand new device.

  They announced a whole bunch of features, the biggest one probably being a new Siri that has a “deep understanding” of the appointments, email, photos, messages etc. on device. This has now been delayed to iOS 19 or whatever.

  The other (smaller) features have been drip-fed over the iOS 18.x releases. Also, Apple Intelligence works in the EU starting with the iOS 18.4 beta. They said that it was delayed because of EU regulations but I think it was just a convenient alibi and it just wasn’t ready earlier on their part.

  I live in the EU, own a 16 Pro (so the “latest and greatest” iPhone) and installed the 18.4 beta to check Apple Intelligence out. And let me tell you “beta” is an understatement. I enabled Apple Intelligence and it said it needed to download models and that the phone should be connected to a charger. I did that and monitored network traffic in my router. Once major network activity stopped I checked but nothing. Waited for another 1-2 hours, nothing. Disconnected from the charger and then several hours later my phone shows a notification that Apple Intelligence was now ready.

  So, what’s there? Hard to say exactly but it summarizes emails but only some of them and I can’t make out a pattern. The quality of the summaries has been okay for me, but often times not much more useful than the subject line.

  You can hold down the camera button to open something resembling Google Lens, but the functionality seems to be limited to “send what I see to Google Images” or “ask ChatGPT about this image”.

  I’m not sure if notification summaries are in Apple Intelligence already because I never got any summaries (I also think it’s pretty useless as most notifications are already a summary of something).

  Then there’s an image generator (“Playground”) but it’s very limited. It is kind of neat to quickly put a portrait of yourself in a couple of different settings though.

  There’s also an emoji generator called “Genmoji” and sure it kind of produces okay results, but my iPhone tends to completely shit itself when I use it, slowing to a crawl and killing background apps presumably because it’s running out of memory. They (pretend to) want to do the most ML stuff locally out of everyone but but the least amount of RAM in their devices (8 GB in the 16 Pro, 16 GB in the Pixel 9 Pro).

  I switched to iPhone (from an Android device) in 2016 with the original iPhone SE (with A9 SoC), had an 8, 11 Pro, 13 Pro and now 16 Pro. They’ve all been a good to great experience including the latest software features, but iOS 18 on the 16 Pro isn’t it. Even if I turn off Apple Intelligence completely, iOS 18 is pretty messy: the icon tinting sometimes gets stuck so when switching light/dark mode some icons stay in the other mode, only fixed by restarting the device; Igot more random resprings than with any other iOS version; the front camera sometimes takes 10+ seconds to start working and then has a 1 second shutter lag from time to time, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assassin's Creed Shadows Drops To 40 FPS At 720P On The Next-Gen Nvidia RTX 5070Ti⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Make it uses 32-Bit PhysX /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).

  Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).

  TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.

  I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.

  I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.

  Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It would probably take a lot of information to its grave, but the more known “servers” would probably get crawled by archive teams.

  Also - assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access - all new information would be easier to access.

  When Discord started, they marketed it primarily as a voice chat software for gaming. I remember them marketing it as “superior audio quality to TeamSpeak” or similar wording (which by the way wasn’t the case). It obviously has chat, video chat and screen sharing conveniently built in which TeamSpeak is only starting to add now in 2025 with the TS6 beta (they seem kind of lost atm).

  I always preferred the decentralized nature of TeamSpeak and Mumble though and at least from my own experience, TS tends to work better with fewer connection issues and better autogain and voice leveling.

  I don’t like the fact that most people happily gave up decentralized voice chat for a centralized alternative and we still use TeamSpeak in most of my circles to this day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life isn't easy if your last name is 'Null' as it still breaks database entries the world over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe your app is based on WordPress :'D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Minecraft server hardware benchmarks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  World simulation (ticks) is single-threaded, but things like world generation are multithreaded. I’d recommend Paper as server software as it’s more performant out of the box (vs. vanilla) and configurable (ex. how many threads world generation is allowed to use).

  If you host multiple worlds I recommend spinning up a Paper instance for each world separately and connect them with Velocity.

  Ryzen 7000 should have better single-threaded performance than your i5-9500 but as it’s a VM ymmv depending on whether Sparked Host overprovisions their machines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Docker Hub limiting unauthenticated users to 10 pulls per hour⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Couple of years, yeah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Docker Hub limiting unauthenticated users to 10 pulls per hour⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They run their own registry at lscr.io. You can essentially prefix all your existing linuxserver image names with lscr.io/ to pull them from there instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can type 60-70 WPM on the virtual keyboard of my phone without autocorrect. While that’s nowhere near the speed of me using a regular-sized physical keyboard, I can’t type that fast on a physical phone-sized keyboard like a Blackberry one.

  I know quite a few people miss these physical smartphone keyboards, but I’d argue they were never all that great. YMMV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If it uses known VPN servers as exit nodes (which seems to be what it does), then no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Makes me wonder how many people are subscribed to Kagi without using it. Then why would you have a subscription in the first place?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I used this primarily on a Palm (with Palm OS, not webOS).

  I think it was v4 that introduced the view with the full desktop website zoomed out where you could then zoom in to an area.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree, unless it’s straight up paid software which I usually don’t mind paying for if it’s good and I need it. Although arguably uBlock Origin is so close to perfection that I can’t imagine how a paid ad blocker would hold up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So…Red Dead Redemption infringes two of these three patents?

  • Throwing an object (lasso) to capture a target
  • Player character being able to ride on another character (horse)

  Is Nintendo afraid because Rockstar can actually afford the lawsuit?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Verge raises a partial paywall: ‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’ | Semafor⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure how sustainable this model is. Especially when a reader browses via a link aggregator and therefore reads news articles on many different websites. I doubt most people want/can afford a subscription on dozens of different news outlets, as that’ll quickly add up to a triple-digit monthly bill.

  Something like Flattr, but maybe non-optional, would be better. Pay a fixed monthly fee and split the payment between all sites you read articles on (maybe based on how many, or reading time or whatever).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are anyone else's texts getting delayed after the RCS switch?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  SMS, iMessage and now RCS have been working well for me and I’ve been (primarily) using iPhones for the past 8 years now.

  The Messages app shows what type of message (iMessage/SMS/RCS) you’re about to send in the text field and displays which (sent or received) messages are what as well.

  One thing I could see going wrong is that a given phone number is registered with iMessage and it hasn’t been disabled after switching to an Android phone for example.

  Another thing is that if it’s using RCS, some carriers don’t seem to work too well with it as of now. iOS seems to have implemented the base standard, while Google added proprietary extensions to said “standard” in Android, like end-to-end encryption. I never had issues sending or receiving RCS messages from/to Android devices, but there might be some hiccups for some people as RCS - even though it’s called a “standard” - isn’t really standardized.

  Not sure what’s so insane from Apple’s side about any of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any tips for setting up a Mac? A 15+ years Linux user needs help⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your company should provide you with an Apple ID (or “Apple Account” as it’s apparently called now), no…? If they didn’t but one is required, ask them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Citron is yet one more Switch emulator appearing online⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yuzu is also a citrus fruit, so it at least makes sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for “AI”, but the majority is just buzzword marketing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Healthiest way to charge Lithium Ion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically, wired charging degrades the battery less than wireless charging, mainly because of the excessive heat generated by the latter. The same way slower wired charging generates less heat. Lower and upper charging limits also help (the tighter the better).

  But I personally don’t bother with it. In my experience, battery degradation and longevity mostly comes down to the “battery lottery”, comparable to the “silicon lottery” where some CPUs overclock/undervolt better than others. I’ve had phone batteries mostly charged with a slow wired charger degrade earlier and more compared to almost exclusively wireless charging others. No battery is an exact verbatim copy of another one. Heck, I had a 2 month old battery die on me after just ~20 cycles once. It happens.

  Sure, on average you might get a bit more life out of your batteries, but in my opinion it’s not worth it.

  The way I see it with charging limits is that sure, your battery might degrade 5% more over the span of 2 years when always charging it to 100% (all numbers here are just wild estimates and, again, depend on your individual battery). But when you limit charging to 80% for example, you get 20% less capacity from the get go. Unless of course you know exactly on what days you need 100% charge and plan your charging ahead of time that way.

  Something I personally could never be bothered with. I want to use my device without having to think about it. If that means having to swap out the battery one year earlier, then so be it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about Darkpatterns.games, a website that rates mobile games on their "Dark patterns"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The list of “Healthy Games” is a great resource to have!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-powered weapons scanners used in NYC subway found zero guns in one month test⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The article links an article from March '24 talking about the introduction of these devices that contains this part:

  The scanner that Adams and police officials introduced during Thursday’s news conference in a lower Manhattan station came from Evolv, a publicly traded company that has been accused of doctoring the results of software testing to make its scanners appear more effective than they are.

  So they could never be trusted but were still allowed to proceed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bitwarden keeps working just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Can’t you store them in a cache that keeps images that have been accessed in the last 48 hours (or whatever) and deletes others? Should someone request these images after that, cache them again for 48 hours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If the apps wouldn’t be slow React Native or whatever “multiplatform framework” crapware, then I’d actually say that well designed, native Swift UI (iOS) or Material (Android) apps can enhance the user experience for a lot of services that are otherwise offered via website. Native integrations with shortcuts, widgets, fully supporting accessibility features of the OS etc.

  The problem is most apps are just low-effort web app conversions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI assisted Notepad is a thing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple quietly deletes nearly a hundred VPNs that allowed Russians to get around censorship⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I’m not trying to imply otherwise.