• 21 Posts
  • 2.46K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 20th, 2023

help-circle


  • Multiple layers to this:

    Setting up a Pi (form factor) device is pretty trivial these days. Retroarch has Retropie and if you don’t care about trans rights, that is a great choice. I think there are a few “flash and play” distros that rely on ES-DE which is way better anyway since it actually encourages using the “real” emulators instead of kludged repacks.

    That said? Raspberry Pis in general are REALLY expensive these days and that has led to a general scaling up of the competitors. I… have a lot of complaints with Russ’s format and focus but https://www.youtube.com/@RetroGameCorps is basically exactly about cheap kinda sketchy “straight out of the box” “retro consoles” that sound like exactly what you are looking for.


  • Curious what you are referring to.

    Because I am referring to when this exact same thing happened to them. Christofacists went after the payment processors who cut off business with Pornhub over claims of CSAM and revenge porn with lots of fabricated victim stories to get the public on their side. Most studies showed that Pornhub had considerably less of both than facebook or twitter (and this was like early 2020s so not even the current hellscape of musknet). But Pornhub did comply and actually instituted REALLY good checks and rules regarding uploads (basically consent forms for ALL participants in a video) and… still can’t accept credit cards.

    Did I miss something else regarding why they now only accept bank orders and cryptocurrency?


  • The canary was when the exact same thing happened (with much greater impact) to pornhub.

    Nobody cared. and Pornhub Corp STILL can’t use credit cards and are dependent on bank orders and cryptocurrency.

    And I can’t see a lot of developers going out of their way to prioritize this. Because it is easy to say you are sex positive. It is another thing to actually stand with smut and risk getting attacked by all the same groups.

    Also, you know what else is a de facto monopoly? Steam! (cue all the usual suspects). You know what people will never stop whining about? Games not having Steam versions.

    So yeah. Gamers Rise Up?


  • It depends how it was printed.

    As a SUPER simplified basic: Any 3d print consists of walls/perimeters and infill. The walls are the exterior surfaces of the print. The infill is what is inside. And the vast majority of prints tend to be sparse infills. So rather than solid plastic beneath those walls, you mostly just have air and a mesh structure of some form.

    So if the wall is thick enough (generally referred to as “number of walls”)? Sure. If it isn’t? You’ll just see the void inside the shell itself and make things much worse.

    What is generally done to reduce “3d printed texture” is a mixture of smaller print layers (so the ridges are much thinner), printing with more walls, and actually lightly melting the exterior surface (either through chemicals or heat).

    VKB are probably the kings of the mid-range sicko HOTAS market and I am like 90% certain they 3d print the shell of their sticks for the Gladiator (?). But they do such a good job that I genuinely can’t be certain. Whereas the vast majority of ploopy builds… aren’t that.



  • Theoretically, you can mold it to fit your hand but the tolerances and mountings make that a hassle.

    As for the print itself? Most people just do a quick print and have the telltale ridges from layers. But you can futz with settings to improve the smoothness or just finish the print itself. At which point it is not going to be as smooth as injection molding but it will be more “different” than “bad”.




  • Yeah. The I’m A Mac crowd had the same problem… god damn it, two or three decades ago.

    As market share increases, platforms become a much bigger target for malware. And a lot of the “I don’t need to run virus scans” crowds learn the hard way.

    Its the same with open source. Obviously NOBODY around here would parrot this bullshit, but there is the idea that because something is FOSS it is safe. Code is only as safe as code review and there have been a few high profile cases of social engineering to get malicious code past even fairly rigorous review. Let alone “Well, that script is FOSS so somebody probably reviewed it” that we see so often.


    1. No it won’t. People aren’t going to change their bank because their debit card doesn’t like a company
    2. It wouldn’t change anything. Take a look at said debit card. Notice how it is probably either Visa or Mastercard (Discover if you’re nasty (ain’t nobody use American Express)). THOSE are the companies that matter
    3. Don’t use your debit card for online purchases. Get a credit card. The fees are the same on the vendor end and you get much better protections AND cash back

    And its always worth remembering what happened with Pornhub back in 2022. I genuinely don’t care what anyone thinks (or were told to think by the tates of the world…) about porn. “Special Interest Groups” largely speareheaded by right wing fascists built up a narrative that Pornhub was nothing but revenge porn (not wrong) and child porn (still way less than facebook or twitter. And I am talking 2022 twitter, not mechahitler twitter) which led to credit card companies immediately cutting it off and the company wiping almost its entire video library almost literally overnight.

    And while I do think that was a net good, it is worth remembering where it came from and the implications of christofacists pressuring Visa et al to boycott a company for you.

    So this is mostly Valve saying “We aren’t going to fight this fight and it is on you”. Which… considering how the usual response to a journalist fighting for the truth is “UGH! HOW FUCKING DARE YOU LINK TO PAYWALLED CONTENT!!!”… I don’t blame Gabe The Knife Collecting Libertarian at all.





  • No. They don’t need to generate data to train on data. There is PLENTY of white supremacist hate shit out there.

    The issue is one of labeling and weighting. Which is a pretty solved problem. It isn’t 100% solved and there will be isolated cases but “grok” breaks under even the most cursory of poking.

    Don’t believe me? Go look at the crowd who can convert any image or text generating model into porn/smut/liveleak in nothing flat. Or, for a less horrifying version of that, how concepts like RAG and the like to take generalized models and heavily weight them toward what you actually care about.

    Nah. This, like most things musk, just highlights how grossly incompetent basically all of his companies are. Even spacex mostly just coasts on being the only ones allowed to work on stuff (RIP NASA and, to a lesser extent, JPL) and then poaching the talent from everyone else to keep them from showing that.



  • Just to be clear: if someone has actively shown growth then I am all for them moving past shit (obviously the amount of growth required depends on the level of shitty before but). James Gunn being kind of the poster child for that where he was an edgelord dipshit when he was younger. But every time that comes up, almost everyone around him makes it clear that he has grown significantly and he owns up to it every time.

    Like… look at idubbz. I, and many others, aren’t sure if we can ever actually “forgive” him considering how much abuse we received because of people directly quoting his hate. But he also (at least briefly. Not sure what he has done since) made it a big point of actually APOLOGIZING. And… getting a lot of shit and hatred from other youtubers who refuse to apologize for their shittiness for whatever reason (shoutout to moistcritical for breaking his apolitical stance to aggressively insist Ian didn’t need to apologize for slurs and bigotry…).

    Contrast that with “he said the N word a lot a few years back but hasn’t done it recently” with no indication beyond that.



  • There are two layers to that.

    The first is how to develop skills. And you do that the exact same way everyone before you did it: you actually do the work. Calculators are awesome but you still learn how to do long division and the like because it gives you insight into how to approximate things. Same with sims/solvers versus actually solving PDEs.

    The other is… if your boss wants you to feed everything into an LLM then you won’t have a job much longer. So you can either look for a new one or work toward more advanced tickets/tasks. Make it clear that LLMs have limitations and that some stuff will need a proper coder and that YOU are that proper coder.