But, being real, after 5 blades, all the satires jumped to unrealistic numbers and more extreme silliness. It was like the various comedy writers figured out that the various razor companies would be glad to slap one more on there, and sell it as an entirely new thing that needed a new handle as well. So they said (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and went hard.

Are you telling me the Gillette Facefuckerupper of legend isn’t real?

(The Wenger Giant was a real novelty product. Yes I hate consumerism yes I hate “collector” culture but it tickles my brain just right to imagine that I’ll be able to snag one someday. They’re really expensive rarities now and serve no practical purpose but they do reveal that stodgy old Swiss executives can still have a sense of humor. Until then, the trusty no-name gas station multi tool is perfectly usable.)

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.

The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.

Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.

I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

I’ve always been curious about this stuff and I know I need to make some effort soon, ever since we moved our home recordings from VHS to DVD some 15-20 years ago.

My understanding is that SSDs are also likely to lose data when unpowered for a long time, which is why they haven’t been recommended to me for external backup drives.

“Spinning rust” is much cheaper than I thought, even if I have to pay 200$ in shipping to get a bunch of massive used server drives here. And it seems to not have that problem, with the downside of either needing to be completely powered off or wasting a bit of power when it’s not active. I’m still not sure where the HDD parking technology is at.

Of course ripping all the physical media would also be nice. A lot of the original discs I have (most of my discs are straight shitty copies with one file, yay third world) have things like special features and multiple audio tracks, things like that. I wonder how those should be organized.

It’s so ubiquitous that for about a second I thought wait what I thought that was the good one until I remembered that I’ve been using qBittorrent for a decade.

For a time, it just was the client.

This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.

That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.

That second paragraph reads like a genuine slop-tier YouTube short you’d hear someone blasting next to you at half volume in public.

Narrated by an unnaturally upbeat and grating TTS voice, of course.

Never got into Splatoon but it looked like great fun and kind of perfect for low-stakes competition.

Fucks sake Nintendo

I think the table turning is in terms of what constitutes “content”, ostensibly the reason you’re on their service.

Standard tables: you sign up to this website to see stuff posted by people and pages you want to see, you can post your own if you wish

New and improved AI tables: bend over and enjoy the warmth of the slop cannon interspersed with Enhanced Consumer AI Personalized Advertising Experiences™

The user abuse was always part of the process no doubt.

The souls games weren’t on sale, but I’ve passed the message along about the mods. I think he’s taking a break after pushing those games to the absolute limit but I’m glad something like that exists.

Avant-garde is my jam, it’s just hard to convince people who aren’t into that kind of game to play. I love the Cosmo D games, for example, but I know most of my friends wouldn’t enjoy them if I recommended them.

I went with Ultrakill! I might get it myself. I think older style graphics boomer shooters are a core part of the current wave of PC games.

Unfortunately he’s never been able to get into Outer Wilds despite it being one of my favorite games that I always shill. I’ll still push for him to play it.

Absolutely, but at least for the type of builds I was looking at, which were all gaming machines, Asrock kind of seemed like the more unpredictable budget option.

I think my home server build will eventually be based on a used Asrock industrial mainboard. I’ve heard nothing but good feedback.

I remember them being a bit of a small upstart company years ago when I started paying attention to computer stuff.

I wish there was a clearer explanation or nomenclature for this. With things like cables and converters everything always seems to have a black box layer.

I don’t understand why there are so many PD profiles either. Maybe Cat-1 USB-C, Cat-2 USB-C, etc? Maybe just having a smaller set of voltage-defined profiles that have a safe maximum current rating? Maybe that’s already how it is? I don’t know

If it makes you feel better/worse, the subscription is shared across multiple games. I was playing a bunch of Microsoft Jigsaw at one point (don’t ask), and while you could play as much as you’d like for free, the fact that they squeezed ads into it to extort you (or more likely, clueless older people) really cheapened the whole thing.

They had a lot of pretty photos which were probably not free, but come on, this is Microsoft, they have the money. I think this should’ve been bundled with Windows for free. I truly think a lot of people might even look back on it fondly the way they do with a lot of the older bundled-in games. We will take for granted how much the default option with any sort of technology around us has an impact on us as kids. Maybe not everyone, but not everyone loved pinball or inkball.

Actual textbook enshittification: what was once a space for a nice default thing to fall back on if you were bored and had their operating system has now become an “opportunity” to “generate more business.” Very sad. Computers are impossibly wonderful machines, everyone who has access to one should be able to enjoy a few basic things, packed in, for free - with no strings attached (looking at you candy crush).

I’m sure there’s a nice free or paid jigsaw game made with love out there that could satisfy that itch I felt that one week in 2020. Hm.

Edit: I have now redownloaded Microsoft Jigsaw and might just expand this comment into a full post/rant about the state of modern consumer software through the lens of Microsoft’s current casual games suite

I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.

Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.

When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.

Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.

Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?