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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: November 6th, 2024

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  • Did I offend you or something? Does your dad work for Nintendo? 🙄

    It’s a figure of speech. But let me really spell it out for you and any other fucking slowpokes in the back of the class

    I’m not impressed with the hardware or the software that they showed today. They should show more than 8 seconds of a game that looks marginally better than Mario Kart 8 (a game I bought and enjoyed 11 years ago on the Wii U) if they want to impress me and sell me on a piece of hardware that is incrementally better than the Switch they sold me 8 year ago. Hopefully they have something that will impress me when they do another presentation in April, but if not that’s cool who gives a fuck man.



  • Well, it’s a bigger, better Switch alright…

    A little bit underwhelming hardware-wise. Extra joycon L/R don’t seem like they’ll factor in much in most singleplayer docked or handheld settings. (I guess those aren’t new buttons… .) The mouse thing (if that’s what they’re showing) is somewhat interesting and helps to keep touch controls relevant when docked. Top USB port, sure. Backwards compatibility is great news. Screen is…?

    As always with Nintendo I think it comes down to the games. Mario Kart 9 hasn’t blown me away just yet, but we’ve barely seen anything at all so…

    To be continued in April, i guess.









  • Do you think Palestine sprung into existence on October 7?

    No. I think most people know that Israel and Palestine were both established by the League of Nations back in the 40s post the fall of the Ottoman Empire, after which they proceeded to start fighting each other for fucking decades of pointless holy wars.

    I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the discussion at hand, however.

    Why does every discussion of Israel being genocidal colonizers come down to an incident that happened decades after their oppression of Palestine began?

    Uh, are we not currently in a thread specifically talking about an October 7th game or…?


  • Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

    Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

    I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol





  • This is a slippery slope argument.

    The “problem” re TikTok is that they are a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government who have managed to get a closed source black box app on millions of Americans phones that servers as about the most perfect avenue for social/political manipulation as any adversary could dream of.

    The solution to that problem that was offered to TikTok more than a year ago was to simply sell to an American company (and thus a company that could in theory be held somewhat accountable, but probably not if we’re being honest) for doing bad things here in the USA. ByteDance would have made billions of dollars selling the American version of TikTok, but they knowingly chose the other option, which was to face a ban at the end of this year.

    FWIW, American companies cannot operator or sell product in China without going through a Chinese company, and social media platforms like Facebook are banned in China, so in my opinion some degree of reciprocity here is at least warranted.


  • TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.

    As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don’t play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?

    Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it’s the truth.

    I wouldn’t install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I’d install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.



  • It’s not “censorship” to ban a product like TikTok any more than it’s censorship to ban any other product. TikTok had the opportunity to sell to an American company (the same way all products on the Chinese market are forced to go through Chinese companies) and, for reasons that only they can explain, they chose not to do that. They would have made billions of dollars selling, but perhaps money isn’t their primary concern…

    At any rate, we absolutely need to have a separate conversation about all social media in terms of privacy and data rights (though it’ll never happen under Republicans), but that doesn’t mean TikTok is free to continue being a completely opaque and unaccountable backdoor to the Chinese government.


  • Mark my words: generative “AI” is the tech bubble of all tech bubbles.

    It’s an infinite supply of “content” in a world of finite demand. While fast, it is incredibly inefficient at creating anything, often including things with dubious quality at best. And finally, there seems to be very little consumer interest in paid-for, commercial generative AI services. A niche group of people are happy to use generative AI while it’s available for free, but once companies start charging for access to services and datasets, the number of people who are interested in paying for it will obviously be significantly smaller.

    Last I checked there was more than a TRILLION dollars of investment into generative AI across the US economy, with practically zero evidence of genuinely profitable business models that could ever lead to any return on investment. The entire thing is a giant money pit, and I don’t see any way in which someone doesn’t get left holding the $1,000,000,000,000 generative AI bag.