a1studmuffin

This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

I see this at my local supermarket chains after they received pressure to reduce plastic usage. The exact same plastic bags are in use, except now they have printed on them “REUSABLE PLASTIC BAG”. Such a predictable outcome.

It really shouldn’t be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say “you agree you can’t sue us in future for anything ever”.

What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.

Everyone loves the free market until it works against them.

The accompanying photo is on brand.

Ok I’ll admit, the first thought that went through my head:

100 tonnes of gold! That must weigh a lot!

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

Stop the boats (please)

I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.

Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.

The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.

Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.

I don’t know about you, but if I must leak my private data like a sieve to use the internet, I’d much rather that data go to a government that isn’t governing me!

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

I’ll level with you… I’ve never used Matrix either. 🤣 But all the cool kids around these parts recommend it, and I fundamentally agree with the cause of the project and saw they had the WeChat bridge, so thought I’d mention it.

Ah, that’s interesting and makes sense. So I guess your best option (if you must use WeChat) is to use the international version of the app with as many permissions disabled as possible.

Or maybe look at the Matrix WeChat bridge? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/wechat/

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

God damn, meanwhile in Australia our top tax bracket is AUD190K (USD122K) @ 45%!

If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!

The Xiaomi SU7 is a perfect example. Xiaomi took 3 years from concept to their very first car. That in itself is insanely impressive, let alone the fact it’s a great EV with a tonne of self-driving capability to rival Tesla, and comes in far cheaper. Watch the YouTube video about Xiaomi’s SU7 factory, it’s very impressive.

Meanwhile Apple decided to pull the plug on their first car. It’s pretty telling of the situation.