Right? Don’t believe the lies of the Numenorean deep state. You’re being brainwashed by Elven space lasers! Can you really trust a man who would marry an Elf? It’s an abomination.

Sauron lives! The King’s Men will rise up, throw down the Elves, their Dunedain lap dogs, and claim Valinor in His name.

All praise be to Morgoth and his Chief Lieutenant Sauron! Hail the Great Eye!

Find out more on my blog.

I think a lot of the criticism of DISCO is overblown. It’s definitely a fun watch, but it never really feels like Star Trek. It feels like an action sci-fi show wearing a heavy coat of Star Trek paint.

It was good once I accepted it for what it is and stopped expecting it to be something like what I generally expect Star Trek to be.

There have been several shows that I’ve watched on CR that have been made a lot better by being able to read the comments section. Either because it’s One Piece and there’s always one guy giving you the timestamp to skip the recap or because the series I’m watching is actually pretty bad and a bunch of people are making jokes at the shows expense.

It’s been rare that I’ve seen someone on CR be overly negative or toxic without getting shutdown fast. It’s usually pretty wholesome and fun.

At least for desktop computers, you have the power switch on the back of the PSU. Assuming your PSU is actually ATX compliant and not some proprietary or otherwise non-standard bullshit.

That switch is inline with the AC input and will kill power to the device completely.

If you go that route, and assuming you’re in the US, I’d recommend looking for a government civilian job rather than a contractor position. The pay will be slightly lower, but you’ll have pretty steady pay increases year-to-year, the benefits will almost certainly be better, and you’ll have better job security.

The major downside will be that you’ll likely wind up working for/with a bunch of people who are just trying to keep their heads down and coast until retirement. A major upside will be that you’ll almost certainly be able to retire comfortably.

I would say the potential for misuse, while definitely present, is outweighed by the potential benefits.

A creep watching you from their basement is less likely to act on their dangerous impulses.

An overcrowded bar, poses a lot of risks in itself and the ability to determine how crowded the bar is without having to be physically present can mitigate your exposure to those risks.

In a crowded bar you have a higher risk of being drugged or assaulted because security and staff will likely be distracted or simply unable to notice and intervene. Also, in the event of an emergency that requires you to be able exit quickly, such as a fire or earthquake not only will it be much more difficult to leave it’s also more likely that people will panic and exasperate the problem.

Is a camera with a public live feed the best way to achieve that? No, probably not. But it’s simple, cheap, and gets the job done.

A bar is also a public venue. In a public place you have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, while in most circumstances it’s unreasonable to expect that you’re being recorded, it’s equally unreasonable to expect that you’re not.

I’m generally in favor of privacy, but a bar is public place. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Unless they’re putting cameras in the bathrooms, I don’t see how this is an issue. They likely already have security cameras that are recording, this just makes some of those publicly viewable. Other than an additional layer of convenience, how is this any different from walking into a bar, seeing it’s packed, and leaving.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of any recommendation or advertising algorithm using personal information of any kind. Though I can understand why location would be needed for advertising: in order to ensure ads for regional services are not shown outside of that region.

The kinds of data that I think should be used:
-Recommendations:
-Like history
-Watch (or view) history - specifically (and only) if I click on a post or watch more than some reasonable percentage of a video that would indicate I watched the entirety of the video.

-Advertisements:
-Location (based solely on IP)
-The content currently being viewed, based on a general categorization of the content. If I’m watching a video about technology I don’t need to be seeing ads for financial services.

So, not graphic, just verbose.

pegging -v

Barclay, stop pissing the holosuite!

The 2 live crew bowl cut.

I’m currently using this. It doesn’t appear to have a way to auto import a list of subscriptions. But it fits all of OPs other requests. It also has a jellyfin add on to import the videos into a library there with title and thumbnail.

The funny thing is that, contrary to how they act in their roles as Captain, Kirk was a studious nerd and a bit of teacher’s pet at the academy while Picard was a hard-partying drunk who not only participated in, but started bar fights.

Kirk would do his best to defend you in a bar fight and then would punish you after the fact, according to Star Fleet rules.

Picard would try to stop the bar fight from happening to begin with, would break it up if it escalated, but probably wouldn’t defend you specifically unless you had a good reason for being in the fight. He would only punish you if you were in the wrong and then it would probably be something more creative, more immediately punishing, and less impactful (career-wise), then Star Fleet’s regulations prescribe.

If it’s been more than 30 or 60 days (can’t remember which) you will be unable to sign in if you don’t have an active internet connection. I found that out in 2022 when I had to travel for work (90 days in a fairly remote area) and the only internet connection I had was at the worksite on a company computer.

That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.

It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.

As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.

I like to be able to sing along to songs when I’m alone in the car, so even if I don’t understand the meaning of the words, I like to know the words.

I also enjoy word play, and Du Hast has some of that. So knowing the bit of trivia about ‘Hast’ and ‘Hasst’ being homophones in German and meaning ‘have’ and ‘hate’ respectively, and the main portion of the lyrics being wedding vows adds a layer of enjoyment to the song for me.

The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.

So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world’s largest vendor of malware on the planet?

I haven’t tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.

They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.

So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).

It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.