I’m one of those creatures that flattens out fizzy drinks before drinking xD

Air-up water bottles. When I bought mine it claimed to be a better water bottle all-around.

Its primary gimmick of tricking the brain into tasting the scent works well, I did drink a lot more water without needing actual flavouring. The fact that I could (unofficially) 3D print my own reusable flavouring pods to be a little more eco-friendly was a nice surprise and the reason I decided to try it.

The “better bottle” part is utter horse crap. It leaks when tipped over, even when tightly closed. Their marketing team went as far as adding “sip, don’t tip” to the instructions instead of making the cap properly seal.

Drinking from it was a chore as there was no water pressure and the constant bubbling (lets be real, its more like wet fart) noises made it impossible to use in silent settings.

I ended up going back to reusing a disposable bottle until it leaks even though the thought and feeling of something flavourless being in my mouth is revolting (its a sensory thing).

FOSS and FLOSS are political by default.

To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.

Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not milquetoast mastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?

I use a combination of PiHole via a VPN to my home server and Orion browser.

Its greatly improved my experience.

They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore.

That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.

Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.

You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.

(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)

Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.

I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.

There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.

Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.

Money. They are buying up IP instead of making it on their own merit.

I’m interested in your use of the Arc card for media transcoding. What one did you get and how would you say it compares to a GTX 960? The one in my server died and I stuck a spare 2060 in there a while back and am looking to downgrade to something sensible.

Most of my media is 1080p x264 with some 4k HEVC (and growing) if that helps.

I admit that I am a bit biased. During the 8-10 years I tanked my startup by going all-in on Microsoft Store apps because I absolutely loved my Windows Phones and was convinced that they were the future, especially when Continuum was announced (and it actually worked!).

The disenchantment started when Microsoft forced developers to rewrite their apps for Windows 10 after already having forced the mobile devs to do it from 7 to 8. The hatred ramped up when they killed support for the Lumia 950XL 6 months after launch. I freaking loved that phone.

It pissed me off so much that I went to Apple lmao talk about cutting off my nose to spite my face.

You forgot Vista before 7. The list didn’t “break down” because Vista was the steaming pile of shit in between.

8 sucked, 8.1 was good at least in my opinion. 10 was when I fucked off to Linux land permanently after using it on and off for 15 years and have never been happier.

Over-explaining is my biggest issue. I’m entirely self taught and the trash quality of certain softwares with non-descriptive variable and function names sort of steered me towards clearly naming things (sometimes verbosely). That has the unfortunate side effect of repetition when documenting and it comes across as sarcastic or condescending when proofreading.

Its far easier to have a machine do it than to second-guess every sentence.

You mentioned a llamafile, is that offline? I’m using GPT-4 at the moment because my partner has a subscription. If so, I maaaay have to check it out ^^

I use it to generate code documentation because I’m incapable of documenting things without sounding like a condescending ass. Paste in a function, tell it to produce docstrings and doctests, then edit the hell out of it to sound more human and use actual data in the tests.

Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.

The Playstation overshadowed it again lol

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

What a pathetic response. I am interpreting this as:

We will fold whenever we get a legal request, real or not.

To users on .world, I strongly recommend scrubbing your posts, deleting your account, and then going to a different instance. These admins have proven that they WILL buckle to legal pressure no matter what - that means also giving up user data upon request. Your data is completely accessible by admins. That includes your private messages and unpublished pictures.

Off the top of my head I can think of a few scenarios:

• Being LGBTQIA+ in a country where its illegal to be
• Consuming content from websites not approved by the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
• Disparaging the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
• Activism discussion (eg. extinction rebellion, antifa, the auntie network)
• Right to repair in countries where its illegal to circumvent device DRM to perform repairs

I’ve deleted my account there because that TOS and so-called privacy policy are complete and utter trash.

Yikes and a big hell no! Reject, uninstall, and review bomb that fucker into oblivion.

I use Proton, business tier. My only gripe is that addresses can’t be deleted without contacting support, or so I’ve read. I can’t find a delete button on any of my addresses, but can find the button to buy more address slots.

Using custom domains and a catch-all pointing to certain labels is my workaround.

Out-Run on ios for exercising

https://github.com/timfraedrich/OutRun

deleted by creator

Sorry to say, you’ve mistakenly made one hell of a generalisation on that last sentence. Other than that one stinky turd, the rest is spot-on.

The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise…

I’ve been on the piracy scene since 2001 and was a moderator for one of the largest dreamcast piracy forums once upon a time. The core members of that forum are still together on Discord and we all buy things wherever possible. Gabe Newell is correct in that piracy is a service problem.

Steam cut my games piracy down to zero for the longest time (501 games, 414 DLC) because it was more convenient and had frequent sales. Other companies that decided to pull away from Steam and conspire with publishers regarding timed exclusives on a platform that doesn’t want me as a customer (Epic). As a result, anything that is an Epic exclusive is pirated indiscriminately and seeded for several weeks. I don’t even play any of them. Download, seed for a week, delete, rinse and repeat on the next exclusive. The same goes for anything with Denuvo DRM.

GOG has DRM free games, there’s a site where they are all available for download, and I’ve discovered quite a few gems that way. Those gems got purchased on Steam because GOG also doesn’t want me as a customer, even though I had decent library and bought several games at launch on there. I’m refusing to use a third party launcher to install games from there because once again, its a service problem.

Netflix cut my video piracy to zero between 2011 and 2020. When I moved across the world, I brought only my clothes, laptop, and storage drives. Everything I wanted to watch was available on Netflix or YouTube. Once Netflix started losing shows like Futurama, Parks & Rec, and even Sons of Anarchy, I went straight back to piracy and haven’t looked back. Netflix only continued to get my money because my partner insisted on doing things legally. By the time she had enough in October 2023, we were paying for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Ziggo, YouTube, Curiosity Stream, and HBO. At the moment, only Curiosity remains.

Adding up the 3 “services” we consume content from the most (not including the ones we watch one show here and there on) added up to €497 per year. My piracy costs €472 per year not including electricity, which is used anyway since the server also hosts a boat load of microservices like NextCloud which replaces yet another subscription storage. It’s costing me €72 to rent a seedbox, and €400 at the upper-end for a large NAS drive one time per year.

It’s a service problem and I don’t think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The “managers” in charge are.

I’m expecting to hike my rate of piracy in 2024 as I continue to take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.