mctoasterson

@mctoasterson@reddthat.com

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Lemmy is a failed Reddit alternative

I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might’ve been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months....

mctoasterson,

This summarizes it pretty well. Two things can be true at once. Reddit sucks ass and I haven’t gone back since the API changes. Simultaneously, the default Lemmy experience is extremely offputting to all but certain subcultures. Not everyone is a antiwork activist, Arch Linux evangelist, open socialist, or actively transitioning. Totally fine that all these groups have their communities, but it gets kinda old seeing 90% of the feed filled with these topics.

Race to unseat New York progressive ‘most expensive House primary ever’ (www.theguardian.com)

The primary for New York’s 16th congressional district, which takes place on Tuesday, has drawn record-breaking spending, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and a crypto-currency Super Pac behind the lion’s share of the funding....

mctoasterson,

Most expensive? Oh I dunno, Tony Gonzales just had to spend like $10m to barely beat a YouTube memelord by less than 1000 votes.

mctoasterson,

Still a better UI experience than Vista

Palmer Luckey's FPGA Game Boy clone lands just in time for the holidays | TechSpot (www.techspot.com)

Former Oculus designer and founder of ModRetro, Palmer Luckey, is set to release a new retro handheld gaming device later this year, aiming to compete with the Analogue Pocket. This comes as great news for tech enthusiasts, as it adds another option in the FPGA-based market....

mctoasterson,

Or it is just an extremely common retro style motif dating to the 70s/80s, color coordinated with the base device color schemes, with no particular intended political meaning whatsoever.

Occam’s razor is a useful blade.

mctoasterson,

This apparently changed around the same time people stopped using “Give 'em the high hard one”.

mctoasterson,

No he won’t. He’s an idiot and it is a horrible idea.

mctoasterson,

I enjoyed a lot of the game objectives… Automating the farm, going to the bottom of the mine and the desert thing, completing the community center, courting a spouse etc.

A lot of the grindy bits weren’t as fun, such as missing some season-specific cutscene or event and not having the exact right item, the feeling of needing to speed grow certain crops at the beginning of each season, etc.

Overall it was a chill and positive experience. The music is awesome, character interactions not too laborious. This game plays great on SteamDeck and with proper settings it sips battery. For a long flight, I would pair this title with stuff like Animal Well, Dead Cells, and Cave Blazers.

mctoasterson,

Abigail is best girl

mctoasterson,

Meanwhile the poors have to settle for their 12 pack of RoseArt.

mctoasterson,

“I’m doing my part!”

mctoasterson,

“Looks like you’re masturbating. Get a bonus month of premium if you climax during an ad.”

mctoasterson,

Trespasser was a vibe in some ways. The clean screen and unique control scheme was innovative at the time. Granted it doesn’t hold up very well now, but there were some cool concepts at least.

mctoasterson,

By this diagram, the Hawaiian Puka Dog is sushi.

mctoasterson,

And you can also not log into Google Maps. It still lets you use map and navigation etc. But it is denied any explicit methods of identifying you and is left with only probabilistic methods (i.e. you are searching from the same network and therefore same public IP as another device that is known to Google as being associated with your account).

mctoasterson,

So in this “remake”, Joanna works for dataDyne and Carrington is the bad guy?

Either that or they fucked the description up royally.

mctoasterson,

There are one or two accounts on Lemmy who seem to show up in every privacy or graphene thread and shit-talk GOS.

I say if there is something wrong with GOS or the code itself, identify it and prove it. The founder may have been “problematic” or whatever, but it doesn’t sound like that person is even associated with the project anymore.

I have personally daily-driven GOS for a year. It has worked well for me. I use a lot of FOSS apps. I use some traditional Play Store apps and avoid logging into Google and I manage permissions closely. I’d say GOS gives you options. Maybe some people would like other customized degoogled OS better, and that is fine. Just… for the love of all that is sacred, don’t use vanilla Googled Android.

mctoasterson,

You are correct about the release year. If one were being pedantic I suppose it would be correct to say that thanks to multiplayer and mods, Half-Life was a popular PC game/engine all throughout the early 2000s. Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

mctoasterson,

This is insane. The new default in civil suits is just to go after whoever is tangentially related to the situation at hand who also happens to have money. Neither the manufacturer of the weapon nor Activision is liable. They sell legal products.

What would be more just, is a mechanism for pilfering the shooters organs and selling them on the open market, collecting his life insurance, and then dividing that combined spoil among the victims.

mctoasterson,

Temu bodykits be like

mctoasterson,

This history of Russia shows a willingness to throw bodies into the meatgrinder to achieve military objectives. While there are trained and professional forces fighting on the Russian side of this conflict, the lines have also been populated with conscripts, political dissidents, ethnic minorities, prisoners, and any other “human resources” that Putin doesn’t mind sacrificing. I doubt he is worried about troop strength.

mctoasterson,

Gusteau was the first Angel.

mctoasterson,

Just look at the number of normies who use Apple, Samsung, or vanilla Pixels as their daily driver. Unless you have a degoogled Android, all the major flagship devices are essentially surveillance and advertising powerhouses. People have embraced the willful ignorance part of this bargain. They think they need whatever proprietary garbage is offered by Apple, to the point that even their own privacy is too ethereal a concept to regret mortgaging it away in the tradeoff.

mctoasterson,

Quantum foam has been a mainstream thought for some time. It is referenced extensively in Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline in which a sort of multiverse time travel is achieved by scientists using some vague method based on quantum science.

A cyberattack forces a big US health system to divert ambulances and take records offline (abcnews.go.com)

A cyberattack on the Ascension health system operating in 19 states across the U.S. forced some of its 140 hospitals to divert ambulances, caused patients to postpone medical tests and blocked online access to patient records...

mctoasterson,

Even if they have to revert to paper charts for 2 months and pay outside consultants and their own IT overtime to wipe and restore every last piece of hardware they own, they should avoid paying any ransom. Paying these ransoms just incentivizes even more attacks.

mctoasterson,

Let’s just check the walk-in freezer now.

…annnd I’m in Blackreach

mctoasterson,

How is the “infinite” battery working? Does average exposure to sunlight seem to be enough to keep it running?

mctoasterson,

Does the legislation also include penalties for Samsung for preinstalling TikTok on my fucking Smart TV and making the app non-removable ?

mctoasterson,

Yeah this change is dumb. Now I wanna wait until these drop to $1.99 on a Steam sale or something. I own all the original games. Why censor them (other than muling stupidity)? The camp and sex appeal is part of the franchise. Removing it doesn’t bring more fans in.

Open source e reader (lemmy.ml)

I recently got a Sony prs 600 e reader from 2009. The battery is at the end of its life (It lasts about 3 days with heavy reading, and a couple weeks without reading). No backlight, no Wi-Fi, just an SD card that I can load epub files and small PDFs. The screen is slow and the contrast isn’t the best. The “touch screen” is...

mctoasterson,

Another option- Kindle paperwhite or even an old Gen 1 / gen 2 Kindle keyboard or other e-ink model. The old models can be battery swapped with only a guitar pick and a Philips screwdriver.

DNS ad blocker like PiHole, to block all the ads and telemetry while connected to WiFi. Keep WiFi off if not actively transferring books, as it wastes battery.

Sideload all your own books via whispernet free WiFi transfer or just plain USB.

Get free books from Gutenberg/Libgen/IRC/Usenet.

This is very workable and results in being able to read almost whatever you want for $0/year.

mctoasterson,

Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS is looking like a good long term choice right now.

Redlib: Open-source, privacy-focused frontend for Reddit without Reddit's ads, trackers, and bloat. A fork of Libreddit. (safereddit.com)

The purpose of this post is not to endorse the use of Reddit (https://tosdr.org/en/service/194), but rather to inform users of a privacy-friendly approach in case they need to utilize the platform....

mctoasterson,

Is there a way to consume these instances in an app like Infinity?

mctoasterson,

I will gladly review one of these if they wanna send me one.

mctoasterson,

This was amazing. I remember having LAN parties first with UT99 then with Counter-strike and UT2K4.

Those LANs were peak gaming for me.

mctoasterson,

I live in suburbia in the US and I can walk to 3 different grocery stores from my house. If I go to the warehouse store, I will drive. Between telework, walking, and avoiding unnecessary trips to various places, I try to drive less than 1 mile per day.

Density kinda sucks to live in, but we can all make more effort to waste less energy.

mctoasterson,

Its an average. Some days I don’t drive at all. Some days I have to bring a family member several miles to an appointment, or get something bulky from a store that I can’t feasibly move without a vehicle.

mctoasterson,

Animal Well is the project that is associated with videogamedunkey. I will give it a shot for that reason.

mctoasterson,

This. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how careful you are if your boomer parents got curious about whether they’re really 1/32 Cherokee or not. Now the data brokers and glowies effectively have a profile on you by association.

Also remember in most western nations the cops don’t need a warrant to steal your trash from your bins and profile your DNA, or follow you for days and wait for you to drop a cigarette butt or use a straw at a restaurant.

mctoasterson,

The Mooninites were the first angels

mctoasterson,

I’m less worried about this scenario: “We are investigating one specific person whom we have probable cause to believe committed a specific crime. Oh look, he has a Gmail account. Let’s subpoena his video searches with a valid warrant.”

I’m extremely troubled by this scenario: “We don’t like people who search for videos on guns/surfing/cats/whatever. Let’s subpoena a list of those people and start investigating them on no other basis.”

mctoasterson,

I don’t like the concept of basic internet usage becoming a “know your customer” situation. If they advance this crap, they are just setting up future framework for a social credit score system. It should be very telling that your privacy is an expendable commodity to both major parties.

mctoasterson,

This. It is worth a few hundred bucks to get a separate “normie” phone and run all your Googled apps on there. It may not even need a sim or a data plan… Just use it on WiFi at home or office. This doesn’t need to be a flagship device… Just something “good enough”.

Then run all your personal stuff on your other degoogled phone. This is the one with your sim and primary number. Don’t do any work or Google crap on there.

mctoasterson,

Things like cellebrite and pegasus are rapidly evolving tools based on specific zero day vulns that are known only to (and jealously guarded by) the respective tools devs. No one would have any meaningful way of validating whether Graphene is secure against those specific attack vectors or not unless they did test it, but “trust me bro” on the part of a dev doesn’t inspire confidence. I would assume any zero day vuln in AOSP is very likely present in most derivative systems based on it.

mctoasterson,

…and TikTok will still have horrible data privacy and domestic spying capabilities, it will just be owned by US Big Tech instead of Chinese Big Tech.

mctoasterson,

I dunno, my rich uncle is a boomer and back in the 90s he was one of the only people I knew who could afford a gucci PC and every big box FPS game. So it kinda makes sense from that perspective.

mctoasterson,

Its called “basement strategy”. You try your best to disappear and make it a referendum on your competitor instead.

See also, 2020 and 2024 US Presidential elections.

Are there tools that exist to anonymize writing styles?

I feel like with the rise of AI something that anonymizes writing styles should exist. For example it could look for differences in American versus British spelling like color versus colour or contextual things like soccer versus football and make edits accordingly. ChatGPT could be fed a prompt that says “Rewrite the...

mctoasterson,

Yes. I would use the privacy focused ones (there are several in Fdroid). If your threat model includes anonymity against state actor, such that they will be attempting to trace your writing style, you can be certain they could and would also just subpoena google for matching translation requests. It would be a lot easier to back into identifying you that way.

mctoasterson,

Depending on the country, you may be in the same legal status if you just buy a physical copy and then download a copy of the same edition. (Caveat - I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.)

Google won a case on appeal in 2015 concerning their book scanning and digitization project. The result of that case, in the US at least, is that you are protected in scanning a book you own for fair use and other legal purposes and can even give a copy to a friend (for purposes of education and other fair use) but if you mass distribute that copy then you may run afoul of copyright law.

mctoasterson,

Not only does it still exist, there are YouTubers and Twitch streamers who make a living on only DayZ content.

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