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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • This definitely reeks of intentional stupidity and bernard and styro are both part of the group of maker youtubers who are openly doing whatever it takes for views.

    That said, this one is at least somewhat plausible. Someone cleans a part with a small amount and a scrub and figures that they’ll just burn it off because they are lazy and don’t care about residue ruining the weld. Whether that will be enough to be meaningfully harmful is an open question

    But I can’t think of any situation where you would need enough solvent to remove the rust AND not wipe a part down because it has been soaking for an hour before you took the wire brush to it. At which point this is mostly in the same realm of “only weld in well ventilated places and consider a respirator under that mask” which everyone should do but nobody does.


  • So I’m not ready to burn it all to the ground just yet. Mostly because chromium is still so much worse but also because, at least so far, I can disable that and I understand that “ai is money” for fundraising.

    But… anyone have any thoughts on the various forks like waterfox and the other one? I don’t mind grabbing the extensions I need on a new install but I DO need a way to be able to send tabs between devices. In theory that is something I can selfhost but I am not aware of a good solution.


  • Woo. Chud souls.

    Also figures the only way they could get on the keighelys was to pay for it.


    To elaborate a bit. Even ignoring the chud anti-transphobe shit the studio actively courted in the hopes of making asmongold-senpai love them (it failed?), it is just a really bad Souls game.

    The concept of the lantern to shift dimensions is REALLY cool. In practice? it just means that you go as far as you can in one realm, shift, and go as far as you can in the next. There is no real sense of inter-connectivity or navigability because the coherence between the shifted realms is so poor. You just get a new bonfire right before the boss.

    The idea of tying item descriptions to ability scores SEEMS interesting… except that it mostly means you can’t plan ahead because you genuinely have no idea what a skill does without going to the wiki. So… it defeats the purpose entirely and just penalizes those who try to actually play the game.

    And the combat balance is also real questionable. If you pick a “meta” weapon, you shred. Otherwise you are doing constant chip damage. Which, ironically, is a problem Lords of the Fallen 1 had… on new game plus. Not new game.

    All this game had going for it was that they wanted to glaze the chuds.




  • In the sense that we have dongles/docks, sure. In the sense of monitors with native USB-c input? These are still fairly rare as the accepted pattern is that your dock has an HDMI/DP port and you connect via that (which actually is a very good pattern for laptops).

    As for TVs? I am not seeing ANYTHING with usb c in for display. In large part because the vast majority of devices are going to rely on HDMI. As I said above.


    I’ll also add that many (most?) of those docks don’t solve this problem. The good ones are configured such that they can pass the handshake information through. I… genuinely don’t know if you can do HDCP over USBC->HDMI as I have never had reason to test it. Regardless, it would require both devices at the end of that chain to be able to resolve the handshakes to enable the right HDMI protocol which gets us back to the exact same problem we started with.

    And the less good docks can’t even pass those along. Hence why there is a semi-ongoing search for a good Switch dock among users and so forth.


  • Not that easy.

    To get HDMI 2.1 support for the Gabe Cube itself essentially requires kernel level patches. Which on a “normal” Linux device is possible (but ill advised) but on these atomic distros where even something like syncthing involves shenanigans to keep active week to week? Ain’t happening. Because HDMI is not just mapping data to pins and using the right codecs. There are a LOT of handshakes involved along the way (which is also the basis for HDCP which essentially all commercial streaming services utilize to some degree).

    There ARE methods (that I have personally used) to take a DP->HDMI dongle and flash a super sketchy Chinese (the best source for sketchy tech) firmware to effectively cheat the handshakes. It isn’t true HDMI 2.1 but it provides VRR and “good enough for 2025” HDR at 4k/120Hz. But… I would wager money that is violating at least one law or another.

    So expect a lot of those “This ini change fixes all of Windows 11. Just give money to my patreon for it” level fixes. And… idiots will believe it since you can use a dongle to already get like HDMI 2.05 or whatever with no extra effort. And there will likely be a LOT of super sketchy dongles on AliExpress that come pre-flashed that get people up to 2.09 (which is genuinely good enough for most people). But it is gonna be a cluster.

    And that is why all of us with AMD NUCs already knew what a clusterfuck this was going to be.


    There are also ways to fake the handshake in software. I personally did not try that but from what I have seen on message boards? It is VERY temporary (potentially having to redo every single time you change inputs on your TV/receiver) and it is unclear if the folk who think it works actually tested anything or just said “My script printed out ‘Handshake Successful’, it works with this game that doesn’t even output HDR!”


  • Ballparking but it will likely take closer to a decade than not for that to actually happen… and I am still not optimistic. And there are actually plenty of reasons to NOT want any kind of bi-directional data transfer between your device and the TV that gets updated to push more and more ads to you every single week.

    The reason HDMI is so successful is that the plug itself has not (meaningfully?) changed in closer to 20 years than not. You want to dig out that PS3 and play some Armored Core 4 on the brand new 8k TV you just bought? You can. With no need for extra converters (and that TV will gladly upscale and motion smooth everything…).

    Which has added benefits because “enthusiasts” tend to have an AV receiver in between.

    The only way USB C becomes a primary for televisions (since display port and usb c are arguably already the joint primary for computer monitors) is if EVERY other device migrates. Otherwise? Your new TV doesn’t work with the PS5 that Jimmy is still using to watch NFL every week.


  • De facto, no.

    Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.

    The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.

    What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.





  • Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?

    Well color me surprised.

    Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying “I need to reinstall your spyware” which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone’s storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.


  • Yeah… having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing… I actually side with them when they fire your ass.


    Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which… I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you “on call” then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.



  • There are layers to this.

    Yes, there is zero chance any of these investments are going to turn a profit.

    But research and technology is fundamentally built around developing capabilities for long term power (soft or hard). That is WHY governments invest so much into university groups and research divisions at companies to develop features of interest. You are never going to make back the money that funded hundreds of PhD students to develop a slightly more durable polymer compound. But you will benefit because you now have hundreds of new graduates aligned with fields of interest AND a slightly better grip on your military grade sybian.

    And, regardless of what people want to believe, AI genuinely does have some great uses (primarily pattern matching and human interfaces). And… those have very big implications both in terms of military capability and soft power where the entire world is dependent on one nation’s companies for basic functionality.

    Of course, the problem is that the “AI craze” isn’t really being driven by state governments at this point. It is being driven by the tech companies themselves and the politicians who profit off of them. Hence why we are so focused on insanely expensive search engine replacements and “AI powered toaster ovens” rather than developing the core technologies and capabilities that will make this more power efficient and more feasible for edge computing.

    And… when one of (if not ) the super powers is actively divesting itself of all soft power at an alarming rate… yeah.


  • That is a distinction without difference. It doesn’t matter what mechanism is used to collect those metrics. The fact is they are there

    And, at a glance: Forgejo/Codeberg definitely has stars and watches and fork tracking as well

    Which is all fundamentally the supply and demand aspects of consumerism. It is the idea that people can identify what there is a high demand for and work to provide a supply. Which is not at all a bad thing and extends far beyond capitalism.

    But it goes back to the previous poster’s comments about how they don’t like that netflix analyzes everything they do and greenlights projects based on that. That extends FAR beyond netflix and well into even open source projects.