Not clicking on the link, but this is right up my alley. Would love to host something like that locally, some sort of convenient museum of emulated stuff.

My imperfect solution of downloading on PC over time and using the network transfer feature might still be better suited for the way my internet speed and quota works, but this is great for small updates and that kind of thing.

Everyone who has looked up useful stuff to print knows about Gridfinity, but boxes.py looks so cool! Reminds me a lot of an earlier era of computer software, when it seemed like half of all programs were made to help you do things off-screen, a lot more printing and scanning. Maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.

For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.

I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.

That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.

I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.

I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.

For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.

IIRC I played it a little and it was just mobile microtransaction hell after a certain point, no?

I think I’m subconsciously holding back going back into Skyrim until Inigo V3 is released.

At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.

Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.

AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.

I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the missile crow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.

The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

I have a whole ass case of assorted fine Lebanese wine for Natenyahu, stashed away in my family’s old home in the mountains.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t get to it before I do.

I feel like the dialogue in the last panel is unnecessary.

Et tu, Phoenix Jones?

Thing is, even with how bafflingly evil Google is, the one corporate service I could see myself paying for is the YouTube subscription. I use the phone app a lot, it would make sense for me.

The problem is that they’re notoriously ban-happy with paying VPN users, due to some of them using their exit countries to pay less for a service. Thing is, if I tried to pay for premium from a country I’d exit from, I’d be paying more compared to where I am. I’m perfectly content overpaying slightly for a few things online with this situation, I don’t buy much, I’m fine. I also don’t know where the line is. If I pay for my account with a card from my IRL location, using the pricing for said location, will I get my account suspended after I jump back on the VPN? It’s not like they’ll publicly announce a clear breakdown of what is and isn’t okay.

Google knowing I use a public VPN on Google services is not an issue for me. I don’t do anything sketchy, I really just want an uncensored internet out of the eye of my ISP.

Something something Overton window.

It’s the most popular sporting event on the planet in a country with 300 million people, this is nothing like the Club World Cup that was held this year. The lack of tourists might not be a problem, save for maybe atmosphere.

This chart, with the huge ticket prices, is why the US was chosen.

I think they used to allow them outright before, or at least were very lax.

RIP that one CLI Discord client. That had all I wanted out of Discord for 90% of the time I have the app open.

That’s… concerning.

I definitely don’t expect to find solid resources on the Q fallout in the Middle East. But getting to grips with the actual magical political mechanics that millions of people now believe in? That’s what I want. Everyone around me is using the words “deep state” now, it’s not funny at all.

I think YouTube would nuke my recommendation algorithm from orbit if I commit an hour every week to this guy’s videos. But I’m glad there’s light being shed from that perspective.

I know there was a short podcast series that goes through the cliff notes of the whole thing’s history by Jake Hanrahan some time ago but this stuff has evolved so much since that was recorded like two years ago. That’s more of what I’m interested in, a more journalistic look structured for someone who is a complete outsider.

Your guy is talking from an American Christian perspective, and American Christianity is basically an alien cult to me (I hope nobody takes offense to this, but Christianity here is much more… grand and ancient and focused on bringing people together and not deeply horrifying?). Like you joke about the rapture but American Christians invent a new rapture every other week, while our guys’ rapture is set in stone to be in the indefinite future, and anyone in my society claiming to have a date for a rapture would be referred to a psychiatrist by the clergy. I typically have more bad things than good to say about the church but comparing to what you guys have makes me feel like it’s not so bad at all.

I think the average person is seriously underestimating the horrific damage to people’s mental models of the world this movement? Cult? Politico-occultist messianic dispensationalism? Virulent cognitohazard thing is unleashing on humanity.

I always wonder if it’s worth trying to find good resources on what’s going on or if it’s just a way to completely lose your mind.

These ideas are trickling down into peoples’ worldviews right here in Lebanon and it’s getting harder to track. It’s the ultimate big tent conspiracy theory, and it’s supercharging decades of concerning currents in my own society.

Is there a straightforward sane place to read up or listen about this stuff from an outsider’s perspective?

That’s a shame. Never had any of their household appliances so I wouldn’t know. I’m mostly thinking about power tools, auto parts, and like those laser distance things.

I hate paying 5x for a German-made Bosch spare part for my car when I’m tired of the AliExpress quality lottery but I have to admit it’s one of the few hardware manufacturers I still think pretty highly of. They make Dremels too, right? I imported one of those at an extortionate price and haven’t regretted a single penny, reminds me of how old durable tools were built to actually last.

When I was a kid and you picked up something with a (for example) Sony logo on it, you know you were holding something that was at least relatively well made. Nowadays pretty much every single company gives me marrow-sucking quality-be-damned vibes. And come to think of it Bosch was not one of the companies I saw that way.

Disgusting how they’re treating their workers (who I’m assuming are damn good at their job given how highly I think of Bosch’s stuff), but someone still needs to be doing that job.