I think Breaking Bad belongs in the middle one with Futurama because I don’t think it required intelligence to be entertained.

My first watch through was purely a “watch Hal do some crazy shit” where the action entertained and everything else was just an annoyance. I just didn’t care about the moral implications or whatever message the show was trying to make, I was happy watching an “outsider enters dangerous world he knows little about and fucks shit up”.

Second watch through I stopped seeing him as Hal and disliked him before the end of the first episode. If anything, he was more like Malcolm (book smart but otherwise dumb and entitled).

Though maybe that’s more just about BB being entertaining even if you aren’t the target audience.

Yeah, all the word policing kinda feels like a psyop because it’s stirring up a lot of conflict without any real benefit. Controlling what words are ok doesn’t make people respect the ones hurt by the words, and ultimately it’s the disrespect that causes the hurt, the words are just the manifestation of that.

Like with disabled people, pretty much every word used to describe them has become an insult and any new word will just suffer the same fate pretty much the same day it gets popularized.

But the argument itself is polarizing, though in a way that makes the other side shut up about it until they can find like minded people. And might end up joining MAGA because they think it’s about trolling people policing language and words like “woke” end up having very different meanings to the different groups (one side sees it as a respect for all regardless of background or capabilities, the other sees it as a drive for censorship) to the point where people supporting the other side seem “evil”, which then means that as MAGAs wake up and see it is about more than just policing words, their opponents are more likely to tell them to fuck off than.

And that’s not even mentioning the people who take the stance “my racism/sexism is ok because it’s against the race/gender with more power”, and the people who treat non-malicious acknowledgement of differences between genders/races/cultures the same as malicious ones and no fucking wonder there’s strong opposition.

Yeah, my company could offer me a fully covered trip with extra free time to explore or have fun in the US and my answer would still be no.

Try a live USB, lets you boot into a linux flavour without needing to install it (plus has handy buttons to start a real install if you desire).

I procrastinated moving to linux for pretty much the same reason. I hated windows more and more with each passing day but wasn’t excited about the part of the learning curve where I was even less effective using linux than I was at using windows.

But I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn’t have to go through that stage at all. The same “discover settings” works for customizing (but it’s better because linux devs don’t have any metrics pushed on them by marketing or MBAs who think user goodwill and patience is infinite when they are “captured”, leading to hidden or buried settings so most users just go with what MS wants).

Setup was easier, though deceptively so because I wasn’t expecting the answer to “gpu drivers?” to be “already installed” and was skeptical until I had a game running. I did do a bunch of reading during the process but could have just used the defaults for most things and kinda regret some where I didn’t (like snapshots are probably worth the disk space they use).

But the best part is that I haven’t had to go on little “ok why the fuck is this <back to the default setting/behaving differently/addressing me without my prompting or a reason worthy of my PC interrupting me>?” adventures and wade through outdated MS help forum posts where if the problem was solved, it wasn’t by the useless MS rep that seems to be struggling just to understand the words being used (indicated by copy/pasting anything that is vaguely related as a response, rather than actually addressing the question) to either figure out how to force it or give up until the next time it annoys me enough to search again.

I haven’t had a single imaginary “it’s my fucking computer, not yours” argument since switching and wish I had just tried sooner because it was way less friction than expected.

Fwiw, just because a dumb phone doesn’t give you access to “smart” features doesn’t mean the capabilities aren’t present on the phone. It’s just a matter of what could be hidden on the circuit board (lots can be hidden in chips), and what can be hidden in usual expected traffic (if bandwidth requirements are low, even timing of packets could be used to encode hidden data that would never show up in any logs).

Plus the simple tracking of cellphones is necessary for them to function at all.

A robot can theoretically drive better than a human because emotions and boredom don’t have to be involved. But we aren’t there yet and Teslas are trying to solve the hard mode of pure vision without range finding.

Also, I suspect that the ones we have are set up purely as NNs where everything is determined by the training, which likely means there’s some random-ass behaviour for rare edge cases where it “thinks” slamming on the accelerator is as good an option as anything else but since it’s a black box no one really understands, there’s no way to tell until someone ends up in that position.

The tech still belongs in universities, not on public roads as a commercial product/service. Certainly not by the type of people who would at any point say, “fuck it, good enough, ship it like that”, which seems to be most of the tech industry these days.

4k high framerate! But the compression algorithm and settings optimize that down to something between 720p and 1080p. With a half second of input latency when factors line up well.

But don’t worry, soon there will be AI input prediction so that the game can predict what you’ll do and render that before you even do it.

Fast forward 10 years and there’s a generation of kids who think that the difference between a video game and a movie/tv show is that video games let you push buttons to look at other things if you get curious while watching. Or that would be the difference, but it’s actually that you can look around accurately in VGs while it’s more of a “let’s see what the AI spits out if I look this way during this scene… Bahahaha, another dickbutt!”

But I thought they hated cancel culture?

I’m disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren’t being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.

There’s a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren’t the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren’t surprising on the “what they are capable of” side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren’t crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn’t all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users’ privacy.

When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn’t because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.

That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn’t use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).

“I’m actively seeking to limit my usage of porn”

Seems like you never grew out of the “shit on others for harmless interests” phase, so you shouldn’t seek out adult content until you’re 18.

Yeah, security screws are security theatre. I had an electronics screw driver set that came with a bunch of the rarer screw bits by default. Actually ran into one I didn’t have, then noticed another set with that one (plus other features like the long bendy bit for hard to reach screws) next time I was in the tool section and just bought it.

That said, I won’t be needing this one. Driving a BMW would go against the image I’m trying to cultivate of not being an asshole.

Similar with mp3 bitrate. While I do think I noticed a difference going from 128kbps to 192kbps, anything beyond that I can’t hear a difference for.

Which clearly means I need to dump 15k into my sound setup because it maxes out somewhere between 128kbps and 192kbps!

Edit: dumb -> dump
aound -> sound

I read the comment, then judge the comment and use that judgement and voting scores to judge the community.

Yeah, windows came from a different era where if you’re seeing a new exe, it’s because you put a disk in the drive and explicitly navigated to it. Speaking of which, this isn’t even the first time that convenience ended up opening up a wide security hole because they handled CDs differently and added an autoplay feature that would check the disk for autorun.exe and just run it if autorun was enabled. I started disabling it after word about sony’s rootkits got out but have been appalled to see it enabled by default still ever since then.

I was one of the few that appreciated UAC when it was there and kept it on one of the stricter settings. I’d rather my PC ask than assume, but people bitched about it so they weakened it and eventually just got rid of it entirely I think?

Though a permissions setup would be even better. I didn’t like that UAC was an all or nothing prompt, plus it didn’t give any details about what a program wanted to do. Are you asking because this program is trying to create a new directory in program files or because it wants to replace system32 dlls with its own versions?

It’s an area even Linux can improve in (though probably depends on flavour). I like the android permissions model, where there’s various actions and you can allow or deny categories (though GrapheneOS does it even better by also sandboxing everything). I’d love to see something like that for my desktop, where apps are free to save files but can’t touch files that aren’t their own unless an explicit share is set up, where I might want one app to have network access and no disk access and another to have the opposite. I’d love to be at a state where I could just run any executable from the internet because I know that my OS won’t let it fuck anything up other than its own address space. Hell, could even dedicate a core to monitoring apps to detect if one breaks out of its sandbox without my explicit permission (while the OS also doesn’t use that to enforce the desires of other developers over my own).

I can’t think of any good reason why links opened via notepad should be treated as trusted. Or any remote exe being treated as trusted regardless of what program is trying to open it, including the windows app store. If anything, the default behavior should be to download the file or open a prompt. I’d call that the second flaw.

Glad to be away from that platform.

Can you elaborate a bit on how notepad following a link can result in running arbitrary code? Cause it sounds more like a second vulnerability is involved, because a text editor following a link still shouldn’t result in running whatever code is on the other side of the link.

Though it is a privacy issue on its own, just like a tracking pixel or images in emails.

I’m also curious what the actual use case is for having a link that notepad automatically follows on load in markdown. Or why they got rid of wordpad (their default rich text editor) and put it into notepad (their plain text editor), ruining one of the reliable things about notepad: it would just show you the actual bytes of the file, whether it was text or not, kinda like a poor man’s hex editor (just without the hex).

Makes me wonder if eventually opening an html file in notepad will make it render it like a browser. “Back in my day, we edited html in notepad instead of browsed it!”

Best movie ever made without colour IMO.

Yeah, I haven’t really delved into Japanese rock, but there’s plenty of banging tunes used as anime intros or outros. Dandadan, a bunch of the Naruto/Boruto ones, Hunter x Hunter, and Spy x Family to name a few.

I wouldn’t say zero scientific merit, but I do agree that some of their conclusions were overly strong. The “plausible” option really helped, rather than everything needing to be confirmed or denied.