BromSwolligans

@BromSwolligans@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I care. I have Ring because it was the fastest way to get cameras on my property after trouble with neighbors. I found out how liberal they are with user data and handing it over to law enforcement but I couldn’t justify the expense in upgrading. For me this isn’t a bridge too far in a moral sense but more like a powerful reminder I’ve been lax in my responsibility. I’m pricing out some Reolink cameras I can host locally at home and put on a private subnet I can just VPN into. I’ll have to buy the kit piecemeal because I don’t have a lot of money to toss around but I am firmly committed to getting off Ring cameras in light of this news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason I’m a Clicks convert isn’t the typing. I only use the keyboard for that half the time. The reason is it opens up keyboard shortcuts which make the ordinarily horrible experience of doing anything on a smartphone much better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosting in 2025 isn't about privacy anymore - it's about building resistance infrastructure⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for doing that. I was typing the original comment from my phone, in a hurry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosting in 2025 isn't about privacy anymore - it's about building resistance infrastructure⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this is not one size fits all, but I switched to a Seiko watch like a year ago and I’ve been so much happier. I can weigh myself on my scale, take my blood pressure with a $40 Braun device from the pharmacy, and everything else I can intuit: I know for a fact when I’m not walking enough, when I feel bloated and over-salted, when I haven’t slept long enough, when I get winded going up stairs, etc.

  Again I’m not saying health stats aren’t or shouldn’t be important for you, but I do think the Web 2.0 / smart-everything era got us all so hooked on the constant feed of data points from all aspects of our lives that we came to feel things were required that really aren’t.

  If you’re diabetic, or have a heart condition, or the in and only way you will ever exercise is if you can gamify it or whatever, then of course, try to find a health tracking solution that minimizes the sale of your data to brokers or whatever (if that is even possible). But for many average people who’ve just gotten used to health tracking, I gotta say, take a walk on the wild side and try going without.

  I can’t put a price or a good enough description on how much happier I am to have one less thing sending me notifications and pulling my poor, abused attention all throughout the day…one less entire category of stats to keep up with, micro-manage, get anxious over. I’ve still got my Apple Watch if I ever absolutely need it but so far I haven’t needed it at all. I do not miss health data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosting in 2025 isn't about privacy anymore - it's about building resistance infrastructure⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is (“if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle” is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don’t wanna run those things, you’ll have learned enough to host anything else you want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Man! I think I even noticed that when I installed by my thought was, “this software is so modest and inconsequential, I bet the AI integration is inconsequential too and will stay out of my way.” So far that is the case. I think there’s a ‘ribbon’ tab at the top for AI? Haven’t clicked it. It’s probably just bullshit that will overwrite my authorial voice like the inside of a vacuum cleaner quick start guide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I couldn’t effect the same workflow on LO as I was in PowerPoint but I pivoted to ONLYOFFICE and it is excellent. Let’s say 90% of the ease of use of PP (haven’t tried its other modules yet), for free (or did I pay a small fee? Either way, better than a lifelong renter status), and with no AI. My presentation is kinda micro-slide-y so there’s a high volume of non-dense slides; once I got into the 200s I noticed OO would bog down on me but restarting the software would clear that up instantly. The only real gripe (and it’s the same with LO) is that it doesn’t support ‘sections’ so I can’t group and collapse my slides for ease of navigation. No big deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My time with Anbernic's RG477V⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This was a really nice write-up, and I’ve poked around your site some, because it’s so inviting to do so. It reminds me of the last really wonderful time on the Internet before the start of the dark ages, where people were figuring out how to bring some usability and visual class to their websites, but not everything on earth had moved to platforms like social media and microblogging sites. Bravo to you for being one of the beacons that we can still turn this thing around.

  While poking around I found your review of the AYANEO Pocket AIR Mini, which I look forward to reading presently (since I just ordered one like two days ago after my Anbernic RG 35XX H went belly-up on me).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 463 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You gotta throw some sick shaders on there fam 😎

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  lol I forgot they were making a browser. But, like…yes, absolutely, that’s how it’s meant to work. Hey, look forward to this, though: according to Microsoft’s newest statement, all Windows 11 computers will be the same soon, only, it’s the entire computer! “With your permission”, of course ;3

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel, as Trump expands control over private sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wasn’t government cross-pollinating with industry a relevant component in 20th century definitions of fascism?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Nintendo locked down the Switch 2’s USB-C port and broke third-party docking⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s rich, from a company that stops making or never makes enough its first-party accessories. Ask anyone interested in getting an Ethernet adapter for Switch, or a first-party Gamecube adapter more than like 8 months after those products launched. Get on Amazon and try to buy an official Switch dock from Nintendo; there is no official outlet for them there, so you’re either buying pre-owned, or a lookalike knockoff, or an explicit knockoff, or something that MIGHT be real but it’s from a weird seller, at a suspiciously low price, with some random text in the item name. Christ, get on Gamestop’s website! They only have refurbs and pre-owned ones. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. Nintendo cannot be trusted to make their own shit and trying to stop third parties from doing what they won’t is peak anti-consumer behavior. A classic Nintendo Move™.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding is to coding what microwaving is to cooking.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I’ve got a colleague who used to be in “LD” classes when they were young and they’ve come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don’t judge that and that isn’t what I’m describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can’t string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn’t interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or “cook up” long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.

  I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn’t the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren’t), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don’t respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I’m a complete fucking idiot who either won’t notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because “aren’t we all just doing it this way now?”

  The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling “argument” I’ve seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it’s the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire risks⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is wild. I mean, it isn’t surprising conceptually, but like…I got my first ever Amazon recall notice about this, and it is for something I surely bought between 2016 and 2018. Thing’s just sitting in my basement wishing it was getting charged and used. I guess I’ll need to run it to the dump.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean. Yeah. When Goldeneye came out for the N64 it was like $90 and that was in nintiesbux. We got real used to standardized pricing when discs came around but it’s true that you can’t have it both ways. Now, there’s a reasonable argument to be had over whether Mario Kart World and GTA6 are both gonna be worth >$80. I bought Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey for whatever they retailed for. Was that $70? I can’t remember. But I had more fun and put more hours that year into Hollow Knight, which cost me $15 and kept dumping free DLC for like a year or so afterward. The price was great. The DLC was free. But it also didn’t cost like $2bln or whatever dumbass cost they’re saying GTA6 cost to make.

  I didn’t ask them to make it that stupid big and expensive. But some fans did. They’re in that Smash Bros situation where they aren’t allowed not to top the previous entry in terms of scope. So it is what it is.

  Should all games be $80-90? Of course not. Should games that cost a billion or more to develop and promise hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay cost $80-90? I think it’s embarrassing and immature to suggest otherwise. Even if you just go back to 2006 and the $60 standard, and adjust that for inflation, you end up at $95. So this isn’t really an argument any serious person should be having when we talk about whether the most expensive game ever made should cost functionally less than its Xbox 360 forerunner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Advice on enjoying your life⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just downloaded to Kindle. Thanks for reminding me.