AdmiralAsshat

More to the point...did we get any meaningful change out of Occupy Wall Street?

Thousands marched, the media was happy to dismiss them as loafers and losers, and...nothing happened.

I have a TCL QM8, which until recently I was using for its full smart-TV capabilities, and always feeling rather icky about all of the stuff it was sending. I would keep getting notifications about the microphone being turned on even when I had explicitly disabled it at every level.

I eventually got an NVIDIA Shield Pro, for which I:

1) Blew away the default launcher and installed Projectivity

2) adb disabled nearly all of the background Nvidia/Google services, following a guide

3) Removed all of the preinstalled streaming apps and added back the ones I use, opting for more privacy-respecting alternatives like Smarttube over YouTube standard.

Finally, I then factory reset my TCL TV and put its Google TV into "Basic" mode, which makes it a dumb TV for all intents and purposes. The TV itself is not allowed to connect to the internet anymore for any reason--everything goes through the set-top box.

The skeezy thing is the TV still tries very hard to get you to enable regular mode. Like if you try to launch ANY app of ANY kind, it will throw some pop-up about needing to connect to the internet to do so, and then flashing some fine print about how this will revert the TV to normal Google TV/Android TV mode. I had a guest in my house using the TV while I was in another room and suddenly asking me for my WiFi password, and when I went to see what was up, saw that they were halfway through opening the floodgates again before I stopped them.

As an SRE Engineer (RAS syndrome, I know), I was just having this talk with my supervisor.

My original career/learning path was for a traditional kind of SysAdmin role, because that's what I like. Doing Linux administration and such. Then our whole stack went AWS/cloud-native, so, ok. Seems like no one cares about someone who can actually SSH into a Linux server and figure out what the problem is--they want everything to be built into CloudFormation so that when a server is misbehaving you pull a switch to trapdoor it into oblivion and drop an identical one into its place, in the hope that this one works. I didn't relish the idea of moving away to the increasingly abstract, but alright, I can deal. Reformulating my learning path into being a Certified AWS Full-Stack Engineer or whatever.

As that was in progress, my company drank the AI kool-aid and went all in on AI. Now I honestly don't know what I should be training for. They've been pretty consistent on "No new staff, just AI", "You don't need X, you just need AI"--so I am honestly not even sure at this point if my company even wants me spending time diving more into the AWS stack, or if their attitude is "The AI knows everything--put all of your time into AI prompt engineering and just push whatever buttons the AI tells you to do."

The desired company skills continue to drift from my "personal" desired skills, but if this is an industry trend I'm not sure I have much of a choice, because I need my job.

How's the lawsuit going?

I assume the source code repo is still up somewhere, so I assume it's the domains that are being taken offline, not the code, and anyone can then trivially spin up their own instance.

I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.

I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.

Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.

Once upon a time, Plex started as a fork of XBMC/Kodi.

I'm still using Kodi. It still does everything I need it to do, user complaints about "dated UI" be damned.

About the only thing I wish it shipped was a built-in renamer utility to help organize the media to the naming scheme that Kodi expects in order to scrape metadata properly. Most of the leading third-party utilities for this are proprietary subscription apps, which is a huge shame when the core product is FLOSS.

It's not like no one saw this coming. Here's a comic from nine years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...

Let's not forget when police lobbed a flash grenade that landed in a baby's crib (WARNING: POSSIBLY DISTURBING PHOTOS):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui...

SmartTube is excellent for ad-free YouTube. I've seen others recommend TizenTube, which more closely follows the official YouTube app aesthetic, but to be honest, I prefer the more minimalist look of SmartTube. The fact that it can also play Shorts (where the official YT app tries to push them to your phone) is a nice bonus.

One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.

Sure. They even sell a sandwich version with cream: http://nibblesnscribbles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Lotu...

It's like eating a cinnamon-y, ginger-y oreo.

"I dunno about this GNU project, man. They seem like a bunch of radicals. Why do they have to impugn all proprietary software like that?"

You realize that it is their "radicalism" that gives us the Libreboot project to begin with, right?

Wrong Pixel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel

> Imported all 233 currently supported Chromebooks from the MrChromebox coreboot distro. Baytrail (Kip) tested - others need testing. Source-only in this release (must build from source, no binaries provided).

Nice. I think I loaded MrChromebox onto my Google Pixel some years ago. I should see if it can get Libreboot now.

> He felt kind of washed up. Miyazaki’s debut feature The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had flopped at the box office, and he viewed it as a rehash of his past projects. “I don’t think I added anything new,” he admitted. He saw his creations as stuck.

He's awfully hard on himself. Castle of Cagliostro is, by all accounts, a fantastic movie that rises well above its source material. And it has an immortal legacy as an influence on several major Western animation studios.

Miyamoto's talent has always been in his relentless technical execution and polish. Particularly with the move to 3D, every modern platformer and adventure game owes its basic camera and control to Mario 64. Every modern action game owes its lock-on system (the ability to target individual enemies and move/strafe in relation to the target) to the Z-targeting system from Zelda: OoT.

Just received the following email from Microsoft:

>Over the coming months1, we'll be introducing updates to your Microsoft 365 subscription. Nothing changes today, and we'll email you with more details before each change takes effect.

>

>What's coming:

>

> Copilot benefits for you: You'll get access to Copilot in your productivity apps and advanced AI features, with a shared AI usage allowance2 for everyone on your plan. Your plan owner can also manage access to Copilot for younger family members.

> More flexible cloud storage: Your cloud storage allowance will change from 1 TB per person to 2 TB of shared storage so everyone on the plan can use the free space while keeping their own accounts and files private. In select markets, we're also adding 5 TB of bonus storage at no cost, for 7 TB in total. This change will apply after your first renewal after May 2nd, 2027. Learn more about these upcoming changes.

> What you need to do: Nothing today. Your files and your account stay private to you. We'll email you with more details before each change takes effect.

>

>Thank you for being a Microsoft 365 subscriber,

>Microsoft 365 Team

More info here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/changes-to-micr...

> Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscriptions include 2 TB of shared cloud storage, and Microsoft 365 Pro includes 5 TB. The primary subscriber and up to five additional members draw from the same shared storage pool. Storage add-ons purchased by subscription members are automatically added to the shared pool. Eligible family members' free storage grants also contribute to the shared pool.

So my family plan used to give each member 1TB each (5TB total)...that will now drop to 2 TB, for "added flexibility". Gee, thanks, Microsoft!

> "President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement, first published by Reuters.

Can't think of a more flagrant and succinct declaration that the US believes itself "above the law."

Smarttube on Android TV's works exceptionally well, too. I've seen people recommend Tizentube over it because it's nearly indistinguishable from the standard YouTube app, but with adblocking--but I actually prefer the more minimalist UI of Smarttube.

It is, although I think it can be applied more broadly without corrupting Gabe's original point.

For example, I can think of numerous instances in which people get pushed to piracy by, ironically, anti-piracy DRM software (e.g. Denuvo), which causes such inconvenience and performance degradation to the end-user that even if you have legitimately purchased the game, you will have a much better experience playing a cracked, DRM-free version of the game.

That would be a case where--for example--GOG might put forth their DRM-free versions of games as an example of how to successfully counter the "service" problem.

> He was saying that piracy can be reduced by making the product easily available. When it was easier to download a pirated version from home than to drive to the store and back and unwrap a physical CD, piracy was easier.

Could've sworn the original context was that he was referring to Russian piracy, where many of the games were not available there legally at the time, leaving piracy as the only recourse.

> I don't even know what the serial port was actually meant for.

The rarely-used Playstation Link cable, ostensibly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Link_Cable

Never used it myself, but it allowed a really weird first-person multiplayer mode in Bushido Blade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obFMn_u3U4

Google: What are you gonna do? Sue us?

Truly we live in a golden period where any of the major console vendor's controllers can be reasonably well-supported on Steam and Linux. My own Gaming PC's main companion is a spare Switch Pro Controller that I took out of rotation due to a stick-drift issue but then repaired.

Unrelated, but in the same vein of "pirating the pirates": the modern "quality of life" improvements that are so often praised alongside modern videogame remakes/remasters of classic games are rather shamelessly cribbed from emulators.

1) "Save Anywhere": Emulator save states

2) 2x/4x/10x "fast forward" mode: Emulator frameskip. Most modern emulators have a "rewind" feature, too, but legit games tend not to use it since it can trivialize the difficulty.

3) Briefly turn on EXP/Money/No random encounters: Features from cheat engines, which technically precede emulation and go back to GameShark and Game Genie before it...but cheat engines are universally built-into emulators these days, making them easier to use. Turning on EXP multipliers to "skip the grind" is definitely an emulation-heavy thing for those going through old JRPGs.

4) "Randomizers" : Pulled from rom hacks.

> Unfortunately holding the PS5 controller gives me crippling pain in my wrists and it also doesn't have any games I care about

Juice might not be worth the squeeze, but have you tried one of their Access controllers?

https://www.amazon.com/Access-Controller-PlayStation-5-Gamin...