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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • They specifically state that they won’t use your data for commercial purposes. Until the company merges or gets bought I guess.

    Which you won’t hear about until after all the existing data has been scraped off the servers. The company, if bought, will be bought for the value of their data stores and whatever corporation purchases them will specifically want to keep the news quiet until after they’ve gotten their value out of the data store. Therefore this is a non-starter as you may as well just hand the info to Dropbox today.



  • While you may be correct I think you’re still missing the point. CLI is for super nerds. While you and I may know how to use it, the average person doesn’t, and is unlikely to put in the effort to learn. That is the innovation that Apple made in bringing computing to the mainstream. It was precisely because people didn’t have to learn how to navigate the CLI environment and instead got an easy point-and-click interface that computers caught on with the public at large, and that gained Apple an absolute ton of cash money and noteriety.



  • Your phone has to be informed somehow, from the internet, that it has data to present as a notification. The fact that you got a notification at 3:32 and then again at 3:35 is trackable data, pretty much no matter what anyone does with it, encrypted or not. Doubly so if someone has MITM attacked your data stream. They may not know what the notification contains or even what app it was sent to, but the act of transmitting and then receiving this data packet over cell network or internet is a trackable event. And I don’t really know what Apple could even do about that beyond attempting to build Internet 2 solely for the purposes of keeping the cops out of it, which is unlikely at best.




  • Now every skiddie can do it.

    And this is the real, serious problem. Most people are pretty unlikely to stop a state sponsored spy operation no matter how careful they are. It’s barely worth worrying about unless you know for a fact you’re being tapped and that you will be killed about it, and even if you do know this the state can pull some space age bullshit out of their asses that doesn’t yet have a counter. Top secret military industrial research goes into maintaining that exact advantage every year, if they really want to get you, you will get got. But if Joey Dickbeater and his school friends can just point a mic at your window and then upload it to the Pass-o-Gram to decode it, you have a real problem. It’s like when TikTok kids figured out they can steal Kias with usb keys - if every teenager in America knows how to steal your car, its lifetime is going to be measured in minutes. Same with passwords.

    Sounds like it’s time to buy a bunch of random cherry switches and randomize them across my keyboard…



  • Unfortunately the actions of the man who owns a rocket ship company, an electric car company, and a social media company are, by definition, technology news.

    Everyone wants to bitch about how much Muskrat is in the news, well then, maybe don't let him buy every company you want to get news on.

    "This isn't tech news" it literally is. I hate the fucker as much as the next guy but keeping an eye on his actions is necessary. Letting him run wild with the public turning a blind eye is a recipe for much, much, MUCH more disaster than has already been caused.

    This particular article? Yeah I can't give a shit about Stephen King wishing Twitter had it's old name back. This article is worthless. But news about, for example, Musk buying Twitter, or Musk changing the name of Twitter, or Musk undermining all ability to determine fact from fiction by changing Twitter verification, is extremely important information for your average user.



  • Maybe I'm just missing something here but I can't think of what part of discord's UI could be considered convoluted. It's a list of servers with a list of channels in them. You also have a list of DMs. End of story. Everything you need is right there in front of you.

    It's miles better than any IRC client I ever used, which is the most direct comparison between Discord and "the good old days" of the internet. And I liked IRC a lot.

    I understand having issues with Discord's corporate backing or having issues with how it's difficult to find files or specific posts. Because it isn't a forum, it was never really intended for that. But I think it's a bit disingenuous to say the UI is complex, convoluted and impractical, because it's actually none of those things. Discord has done its best to keep up with people misusing their platform as a forum, as they should, because that's what the userbase wants (even if they're using the product "wrong"). But the core functionality of what it's supposed to do is wide open right in front of you and is highly intuitive.

    Do correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm curious to hear what people have to say about this. There's always a possibility that I'm some savant who is the only person in the world to intuitively grok Discord. But I very much doubt that.



  • I had no idea, lmao. Do you mean Somari? That’s all I can find when searching for it, seems like these days someone has hacked the original Somari rom into a pretty solid recreation of Sonic The Hedgehog. But the original is, by all accounts, extremely bootleg.

    Thats actually pretty cool, not gonna lie. Having an earlier introduction to bootleg gaming and rom hacks might have pushed my life path in a very different direction.


  • Second that. They don’t call 'em Nintendo Hard for nothing.

    Hell, I’ve been playing Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts for damn near 25 years now off and on, and I still can’t beat that mfer without save states. And that’s a whole gaming generation ahead of this one, where the console actually supported saves, and games didn’t really have to be as hard anymore to make back their money.


  • Early Kirby games in general seemed pretty easy coming off the Super Mario Bros games. I had Kirby’s Dreamland on the Gameboy and I remember thinking about how Kirby could just inflate and float over half the enemies in the first half of the game. It got a little more technical later on but I don’t think I ever really struggled to beat the game, even when very young.

    In fact, growing up on the hard knocks of SMB led to some spirited conversations with my friends about Sonic the Hedgehog, as well. In Sonic as long as you have a single ring in your pocket you’re immortal, and if you get hit just pick the ring back up. In Mario, if you get hit, you just fuckin’ die. Maybe with one extra chance if you had a mushroom, but you don’t get that second chance back until you find a new one. Now as an adult I realize the design spaces of the two games were different - Mario was actually intended to be a reasonably difficult platformer, where Sonic was arguably less about the precision platforming and more about just having fun going fast as fuck, boi. But as a kid you better believe I took every available opportunity to call Sonic fans casuals. It made me lots of friends, as you may imagine.




  • I remember back in the day when I had apple devices where they would push updates for devices long past their capability to actually run the updated software. Rather than refuse the update or get a pruned patch with security fixes only, it would force updates and bloat your phone and grind it into unresponsive unusability after a few years.

    I hear that’s not so much the case anymore, so that’s nice. But I remember. The main reason I upgraded my phone was because of that, the hardware was great, but I could hardly use the software anymore even after clean installs.

    My point being, I guess, extended support is great if managed properly but it can also become a bludgeon with which to drive you toward the new generations of devices.


  • That’s a bit more of a stretch, but barely. It’s in the same spirit, yes.

    Please do note that I’m not necessarily agreeing with the ruling here, only trying to draw a more accurate analogy. The problem with equating those two though - the tor node ruling vs gun manufacturers being liable for deaths - fundamentally comes down to a few facts, that guns are sold with the intention of killing people, that guns are sold by corporations with lots of money and power, and that governments don’t want tor in the hands of citizens. Tor node keepers are easy to prosecute in many countries, as individuals hosting software that is frequently used for illegal action. Gun manufacturers are not.