DarthYoshiBoy
@DarthYoshiBoy@kbin.social
- Comment on Tesla must face fraud suit for claiming its cars could fully drive themselves 6 months ago:
Not for all the money in the world could you convince me to touch him, let alone what you propose.
- Comment on How RCS on iPhone Will Make Texting Better for Everyone 6 months ago:
The best that the SMS protocol can tell you is whether the message was delivered and even that isn't a requirement. SMS has delivery receipts, it does not have read receipts.
- Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram 6 months ago:
I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it.
My apologies if I implied that you did, that was not my intent.
But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. [...] I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.
Sorry, that was my point though, without the tracking, you're not getting YouTube, or most of Google's services as we know them. The Google secret sauce is that they know enough about their users to curate an experience per user. That's largely why competitors to Google services rarely take off, the competitors lack enough individual user knowledge to make an experience that is better than what Google can offer for most users.
The services more or less are what they are because of the breadth of what and how Google knows to shape the experience for an individual, and that's why Workspace accounts still track what they do. Google would be providing their paying customers with a lesser experience if they genericized everything you're interacting with in those content related services due to a lack of learned data and behaviors per user. Which is probably not what the average user wants if I had to guess?
Heck, even paid YouTube Premium still needs your tracking data or it's just going to show you whatever popular rage bait is trending day to day with the general public? Or maybe just an unfiltered firehose of all the hours of nonsense that is uploaded every minute to the platform? I guess you could treat it as a whitebox video hosting site, but where does the money come from if YouTube can't make guarantees to advertisers that their ads will be seen by people who might care about the ad, and how do the content creators make money if YouTube can't get advertisers on board, and who is making interesting content if they have to pay to host it themselves because advertisers aren't paying that cost for them? I think my point is that if you pull the tracking and user knowledge out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing just crashes down.
- Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram 6 months ago:
I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It's why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don't care about.
An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they're targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I'm not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they're not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I'd consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.
I think there's a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I'll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don't sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they'd be killing the golden goose. So long as they're contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I'm good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I'm running Firefox/uBlock.
That said, if you don't want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won't get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn't hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that's what you'd get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn't worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?
- Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram 7 months ago:
if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.
It's called Google Workspace and it's decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it's pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don't track your preferences so they don't have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.
I've been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it's shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.
- Comment on Apple changes App Store rules to allow retro game emulators globally | TechCrunch 7 months ago:
- Comment on Apple changes App Store rules to allow retro game emulators globally | TechCrunch 7 months ago:
Dolphin requires JIT compilation and that is still verboten under these new guidelines.
Further, the rule change says that these apps are allowed to "Download" ROMs, it doesn't say that they can just play anything they want, it in fact says that they have to provide an index of everything their software might run and where it is downloaded from. The rules are not going to allow emulators as we know and love them. It says specifically that the software offered under the guidelines must be offered via In App Purchases, so in all,
A) Emulators can exist
B) They can download ROMs
C) You have to comply with all applicable laws while you offer an emulator that allows people to download ROMs ಠ_ಠ
D) "Software offered in apps under this rule must: use in-app purchase in order to offer digital goods or services to end users."
Which in whole means that they've allowed (for example) Sega to offer an Emulator app that will run ROMs of games that Sega owns, but they have to sell the ROMs to you individually via IAPs.
Feel free to read their guidelines at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#third-party-software, because there isn't any way in my reading to interpret those rules as allowing something like Higan to exist on the app store, the new rules are such a narrow carve out that it's hard to imagine that anyone is able to provide an emulator for iOS any time soon. They've opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn't need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it's business as usual for Apple.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 8 months ago:
My 2016 Nissan Leaf is 4400lbs, which is more than my larger (but still not that big) 2016 Mazda CX-5 at ~3500lbs. Both manage to fit my family of 5, but the Leaf is far less accommodating and it weighs a good deal more. Small EVs are still pretty substantial. A Kia EV6 which is roughly the same size as my CX-5 weighs 5500lbs. You add a lot to a vehicle when you add an EV battery.
- Comment on Nintendo Is Telling Game Publishers Switch 2 Will Be Delayed 8 months ago:
I'd recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren't Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you'll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.
That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they'll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.
iFixIt has the process for doing the work: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113182 and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Right+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113185
- Comment on Dude, where’s my self-driving car? The many, many missed deadlines for a fully autonomous vehicular future. 9 months ago:
- Comment on Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review: a looter shooter in need of rescuing 9 months ago:
They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.
I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don't think there's any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn't shape it up into a product worthy of attention.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 9 months ago:
How the fuck this headset weighs over 600 grams?
Because plastic isn't a premium material. Apple users expect fancy alloys with glass everywhere, Apple can't very well show up with a plastic headset and ask $3500 for it, they need all that extra weight to convince people that they're getting a premium
VRARSPACIAL COMPUTING device that is unlike anything ever done before. It's all part of the grift.I'm a reformed VR enthusiast and I have got to say that it's all a hell of a gimmick, but it's just a really neat gimmick. Without any hard-light tech or something to make stuff that you can actually interact with it's all just Wii-mote waggle style nonsense that abstracts things that should be button presses into complex motions constrained by physical reality that our computers/keyboards/mice/controllers allow us to escape.
- Comment on X appears to be juicing MrBeast's views as Elon Musk tries to woo the YouTuber to the platform 9 months ago:
If Mr. Donaldson really wanted to know how much X was gonna give it to him he should have made a video about how Elon is a tiny man-child with an inferiority complex grown out of his inability to satisfy any woman and how Teslas are cheap made in China garbage piles that are handily bested by any other EV on the market in any metric. Only then, I MIGHT believe any revenue numbers he got from such a video, but I think what this article shows is happening is exactly how I'd expect things to go for any other video.
Elon is clearly gonna pull a Facebook and juice the numbers to lure people away from other platforms as long as he can in hopes of growing into something bigger than YouTube. I'd believe Elon's numbers as much as I believe he owns a lovely bridge on Kepler-442b that he wants to sell me at an amazing loss.
- Comment on Visions of Mana - Game Overview | Xbox Dev Direct 2024 9 months ago:
Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it's not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can't imagine why you'd choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that'd put this back at the head of the pack.
- Comment on Visions of Mana - Game Overview | Xbox Dev Direct 2024 9 months ago:
Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they're doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.
- Comment on Visions of Mana - Game Overview | Xbox Dev Direct 2024 9 months ago:
So much talk about "what makes a Mana game" in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I've been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.
Call me crazy, but the series hasn't been great (it's still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they'd get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.
- Comment on The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending 10 months ago:
I'm just going to copy/paste my comments from the last article 2 days ago that was saying this same thing:
This is the
secondthird article in the last month I've found here on the Fediverse pronouncing the death of self checkout and honestly I just don't see it. Most of the stores around me have only just recently expanded their self-checkout areas and I vastly prefer using it unless I've got more than 25 items.I'd honestly probably stop going to a store that decided to not allow me to check out on my own. Small talk and having to make a minimum wage worker suffer through it is just not something I want when I'm running to the store for a gallon of milk. I vastly prefer being able to throw in some earbuds, get my shopping, check out, and get out to having to interact with anyone while I'm just trying get my shit.
- Comment on Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' 10 months ago:
You get your ISPs email address, and you could have your Google address, what else?
I host my own email. I have literally billions of email addresses available if I want them and getting billions more only costs however much I can get a new domain registration for, which isn't often more than $10. I already own a dozen domains or more and I can have any username I want at any of those domains for any email at no additional cost.
Now I'm not some dickhead harassing people online or spamming discord servers, but I will admit that Wendy's once had a deal where you could get a free frosty for creating a new account and I had free frosty coupons for weeks before they realized that email only verification for unique users was a losing proposition and they switched to requiring that new accounts attach a phone number.
Email verification only works if you've got nothing to lose. As soon as there's anything on the line, you'd better look for something more concrete like a phone number, a credit card, or a government ID. Personally I'm more comfortable with Discord having one of those pieces of info before the other two, but that's just me, you do you.