CerebralHawks

So you also like it? You disagree with everything I said… including the part where I said I don’t like it? It sounds like you just want to be antagonistic. I’m not the future — being mean to me on social media won’t stop the future from happening. It just makes you slightly less of a good person.

The reason streaming boxes are the future in gaming is the same reason they are in movies and music. In movies and music, the common players don’t support physical media anymore — they’re too small. How do you get a tape, CD, or vinyl record into an iPhone? You stream it. Same with games. Even now, vs 20 years ago, physical releases are getting rarer and rarer. This generation, Xbox and PlayStation have digital-only models, and a lot of games are digital-only.

The compression is a trade-off and it exists in movie and music streaming as well. Latency will be mitigated by more servers.

And it’s actually already here. There are “Smart” TVs out there that play Xbox games. Via Cloud Gaming. I know guys out in the sticks who do cloud gaming. The myth that it’s only going to work in NYC, LA, and Chicago hasn’t ever been true. Seems like every town has servers now. And the fiber and cable running everywhere is good enough to solve most of the latency. Of course, there will always be latency… hell, I can’t catch fish in Animal Crossing if I’m using a wired controller, I have to take the damn Switch out of the dock and play handheld, but if I do that, I can catch the 5-star rarity fish every time, first try.

You don’t have to like it. I sure don’t. But, how’s refusing to accept things you don’t like working out for you? You wish us a good president yet, or do you actually like the one we have (in the US)? Your wishes in tech are about as effective… same as mine.

This would be fine if Xbox Cloud Gaming were available on Switch and PlayStation.

Honestly the future is dumb streaming boxes. I don’t like it but there it is.

Sony is behind the curve. If Nintendo is their only competition, PlayStation 5 will see another price increase and PlayStation 6, if it happens, will price itself out of the market. Nintendo gamers don’t care.

Sony should have made their own GamePass years ago, and as a peace offering, Microsoft and Sony should have offered each other’s streaming service. That would extend hardware out another year or two as people have access to more games.

Sorry, I misunderstood — you were offering to buy me one? Because if we’re spending your money, then I’m willing to consider your opinion on why I need one in my life.

Because if it’s my money we’re spending, your opinion on where my money goes isn’t worth the time you took to type them out. Nor is the opinion of the other 8 billion people in my life. If someone wants to buy me one, maybe I’ll see the utility. But from where I sit, it’s not worth spending money on to duplicate a feature I presently enjoy on the devices I already own.

So… you gonna put up an Amazon gift card or… what?

Why TF do Kindles and the like even need to exist? I read on my iPhone while the audiobook is playing. I want a smaller phone and maybe an iPad mini for reading/media.

I mean, I get it. “Reading without the distractions.” But Do Not Disturb and self control are a thing and have never been a problem for me. I can either enable DND, or I can swipe away emails (or deal with them and come back) as they come in. This isn’t rocket science. And my iPhone drops to 1Hz so while it’s not eInk, it’s good enough. I love the dark mode but black on sepia is more natural.

Reminds me of when the Klan we’re on Jerry Springer and someone tried to unmask them and that seemed to be the absolute worst thing in the world to them. Letting people see them for who they really are.

Not hateful people — not just Klan, or Reddit mods for that matter — operate more openly. It seems the one hateful group still terrified of exposure is child predators. Release the damn Epstein files! No, I don’t think Reddit mods are on it. They do defend child predators on Reddit, but Epstein only rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful, not the pseudo powerful.

I’m not saying Washington/the US is better than China. But, the devil you know. Also, the devil we know (the west) has probably lied to us in a few ways about China. I remember as a kid I believed children in China were starving. I also remember hearing that they kill female babies (and often not humanely) because of their one child policy. My dream when I was a kid was to save all those girls and educate them and teach them basic fighting skills… may have been like a Charlies Angels kind of thing going on in my head.

I suppose I should have updated my information before saying that… last I checked, there weren’t, but I don’t know how old that information is.

TikTok was run by a fascist regime: China. It’s just, most Americans are not of much interest to Beijing. Their intelligence probably wants to know what is trendy in America so it can better appeal to us and influence our elections to serve their interests, but Beijing is probably not concerned at all with you or I as individuals. But if they can get us to vote for a candidate they support by showing us the parts of that candidate that we agree with, we can be used as a tool by Beijing. Now Washington wants that power.

I don’t like it either way.

Eh, I’ll “have at” TikTok for being shit because historically, it has been. It’s driven by memes and trash.

That said, over the past couple years I’ve heard lots of good things. “BookTok” and other -Tok’s being communities within the service — I admit I don’t know how it is because I’ve never used it — but also, the rapid decline of YouTube has made me seriously consider getting on TikTok just to have something different. My resolve to be anti-TikTok has greatly reduced over the last couple years, as an “old guy” who does not like “social media”.

So yeah, credit where it’s due.

I’d love for the Fediverse to have a strong alternative, but again, the costs of running a video server that is anywhere close to being “widely used”…

Honestly I just thought it was funny they got rid of the cracker and the barrel.

Through the course of the controversy, I learned that the “cracker” was the Uncle Herschel mentioned in the menu a few times. He’s a character of theirs, something of a mascot, though a much subtler one than most other restaurant mascots. He’s in the art but his name isn’t widely advertised. A couple menu items have his name in them (e.g. Uncle Herschel’s Breakfast), but the name is not connected to the mascot in the logo.

Oh, I also thought it was funny that they said they changed the logo to be more inclusive (I guess of people who don’t look like Uncle Herschel), but they still don’t operate in California due to that state’s progressive policies, so they can shove their “inclusive” talk. Actions speak louder than words. They do hire women, and people of color, which is a great start for a restaurant so steeped in “Southern values,” but you can’t say nobody is excluded from the table while excluding an entire state based on the politics of its government. That’s just as dumb as rock groups refusing to play whichever Southern state did a stupid thing most recently.

TikTok was never good. Have at it.

Though, he is always free to start his own MAGA-themed video service, much like he did with Truth Social. I think the problem is — and if he doesn’t know it, he’s been advised, with crayons and hand puppets — that running a server serving video is orders of magnitude more expensive than running a server hosting a text-based social network.

YouTube is completely broken on my Apple TV — the last platform I have which actually does display ads. When the app loads, I get a black screen. When I tap on a video (click on it? on the remote?) it goes black, stutters through an ad, stutters through the next one, then stutters through the video for a couple seconds. Sometimes I have to start the video over. If I were running an ad blocker, I would expect static like this… but I’m not. I don’t have a PiHole. The Apple TV has direct, unfiltered access to my WiFi. The ads are showing, but the app is just… broken. On my computers (Macs) I get a perfect experience, because I use Firefox with uBlock Origin like a sane person who knows what they’re doing.

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I wonder what spyware they’d be willing to put in their phones in the US for the regime in charge.

Also, if I bought a Samsung phone while a dictator is in charge and it gets the update and I get the spyware — hypothetically speaking here — and by the time a progressive is in office, they’re pushing updates that remove it, but my phone is outside the update period, how would I go about removing it? Just buy a new one at cost? Seems like that’s something they’d let you do for free, though.

They should never automate the pope.

An AI chatbot that knows the Bible front to back would be a good idea though, as it can help church members after hours and whatnot. The problem is, this proposed AI would also know all the loopholes and straight up plot holes in the Bible and would be jailbroken by atheists in seconds to essentially admit the Bible is a work of fiction. I mean, just using facts, if the AI has access to different versions of the Bible and other apocryphal texts, it should be able to work out what was changed and when. And the Bible says you’re not supposed to change it, but I don’t see any Christians rushing to learn Aramaic (the language Christ would have spoken, or rather, the language spoken at the time Christ was alleged to have lived). Even in more recent centuries (but before the time of anyone alive today), the Bible was in Latin and only priests were allowed to know what it said. But even Latin was a translation — an interpretation.

How is “installing Linux” not easy? Download Ubuntu and run it. They make it easy.

You mean Arch? You mean something where you have to build it yourself and use the command line? That’s not necessary to run Linux. Or to say you ran Linux. Sure, it might be more efficient, or it might be better at some things. But I have to ask where your goal post is if you say installing Linux is not easy. Ubuntu makes it easy and I imagine most of them do as well.

Or maybe I’ve just been using computers so long I take what I know for granted. I dunno, it’s easy for me.

I was a Mac user for maybe two months when a beta came out. With ease, I created a new partition, downloaded the beta, and ran a beta (of macOS Sonoma) in the partition. I dual booted on a MacBook Air, my first Mac, which I’d only had a couple months. Okay now granted, Mac is easy mode most of the time, but they made it real easy. Though I fully understand “the average user” wouldn’t know where to start, let alone have the thought that that could be done.

So, maybe I am the weird one. But it’s just normal to me. Just how I am.

A lot of tech has gotten better.

I mean, except Windows. Obviously.

Or I should say Microsoft. I booted up my Xbox yesterday to play Cyberpunk and was greeted with a full-screen ad for Borderlands 4.

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I doubt it’ll go anywhere, and I’m not sure it should.

Do we want tougher moderation on social media? Does social media need to be policed?

Most social networks have report tools. They also have blocks.

If someone is rude to you online — honestly, happens all the time. People have a bad day or whatever. I’ve said something, not even meaning to, that set someone off and they’ve stalked me across communities. Even in the last few weeks I’ve been on Lemmy. But, if someone is consistently negative toward you, you can block them. You can also ignore them. You could even call them out on their bullshit and then ignore them, and that’s what I did. Maybe it wasn’t the best course of action, this guy’s probably got a girlfriend or maybe a kid he’s beating up when he doesn’t get his way with people online. But I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I feel when people talk to me any kind of way. The way they act could be because of any number of things. The way they were raised, the way they’ve been treated, maybe they burned their hand cooking and they’re just mad at the world right this second and they say something rude. I got no control over any of that whatsoever. What I do have control over is how their words make me feel and how I react.

Maybe that’s something kids can’t just pick up, but maybe it’s something they should learn. Bullies aren’t going to go away. People aren’t going to stop having bad days. But if they’re taking it out on people through social media, they aren’t a physical threat to you — they can be safely ignored.

Adding a bunch of extra moderators and safety features and all that won’t change things. It won’t make people behave better. We can’t make them do that. We can try. Maybe AI can be used to detect hostile posts and tell people they can’t use the network for an hour, tell them to go touch grass or something… but they’ll just hop on over to another network and do the same shit there. And there will be so many false positives. So I think we should just ignore hostility. On something like this, you can downvote it. If it’s the same person, the network may even show you that you’ve downvoted this person multiple times, and you can then decide to block them. But maybe they’re helping someone in another community. Block them and move on. It’s faster and it works better.

My what is literally commenting? My phone? My computer?

And yes, I’m aware a lot of highly technical people use Linux. This whole “next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop” is silly. We can talk for days about what highly specialised platforms use Linux. It doesn’t matter until Boomers are using it and not questioning. Which they have been for years since Android is mobile Linux.

Desktop anything is down, statistically, worldwide. I’ve been using computers for over 40 years. When I started, only nerds and geeks used them. The cool kids only used them when they had to, in computer/typing class… which was an elective when I was in school. It was never required. At some point, computers became cool. Then smartphones came out, and all of a sudden everyone’s running Linux (Android) or UNIX (iOS), only they don’t know it. They don’t need to know it. And now computers are suddenly not cool anymore, because it’s all about smartphones these days.

So it’s not a push for Linux (the kernel, Linux is a kernel, not an OS, Android, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora Core, Mint, Ubuntu and others are distributions that bundle the Linux kernel with other stuff), it’s a push for Linux on the desktop. But even that’s not good enough, it’s gotta be the command line. And Boomers are never gonna use the command line. Neither are kids. It’s a moving target that will never be reached. The original idea? Give Linux a market share? We did that 15 years ago. The only reason Windows has any market share left is some schools and businesses and governments use them. *nix has been the majority for over a decade now. But it’s never been “the year of Linux on the desktop.” *nix has been in the palm of everyone’s hands since 2007 (iPhone; Android was 2008, so close enough for Linux specifically). And 2008 was 17 years ago. Next year, there will be kids old enough to vote (in the US) who, for their entire lives, have existed in a world where *nix dominated.