Hah yeah, Lemmy is a much smaller community than Reddit. I have started tagging users, and it’s surprising how often I see the same tags in the comments sections.

This is true in America. In the EU, Apple was recently forced to allow third-party browsers. But even in the EU, developing those third-party browsers will take time and money.

That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.

Yeah, people complain about roombas not giving a super deep clean… But they’re really not intended to do so. They’re meant to be a daily maintenance clean. They may not be great for when you dump an entire can of coffee grounds in your carpet… But they’re wonderful when you have a big dog with lots of fur that needs to be vacuumed every single day.

Yeah, you always have to account for the Wife Factor with things like this. Good luck convincing your wife to stop clicking on sponsored links on Google, especially when it’s what she’s searching for.

There’s a reason people say officers are class traitors. Policing has never been about protecting the public; It has always been about suppressing the masses and protecting the elite.

Ding ding ding. This is just a talking point so they’ll be able to pivot into “we should give Musk a trillion dollar contract to run GPS on his Starlink satellites.” Hammer the “GPS is unreliable” point long enough that the conservative voters have time to start believing it. Then pivot into handing more money to Musk. It’s a typical advertising strategy; Create a problem so you can sell the solution.

IIRC, part of the argument is that Switch games are encrypted, and the emulator uses real Switch keys to read the games. So Nintendo claims that by using official Nintendo Switch keys, it is violating Nintendo’s copyright and is subject to DMCA claims.

The argument is shaky at best. But the problem with DMCA is that combating it actually requires taking the claimant to court. So that’s a prohibitively long and difficult process, just to be able to go “hey Nintendo doesn’t actually have any claim here. Restore my repo.” Especially when Nintendo has a known history of drawing out long legal battles to exhaust defendants’ time+resources.

You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note or counterfeits cash with it, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.

There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. One of the other big criteria is that the printer needs to be able to recognize and refuse to print images of cash, to prevent counterfeiting. If you try to print an image of a dollar bill, the printer’s firmware will refuse to continue the print job. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near duopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.

There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.

I bought a bidet like six years ago (right before the pandemic) and Amazon is convinced I need to buy another one every single week. How many toilets do you think I have, Amazon?

The funny part is that there’s very little reason to actually buy a barrel of lube. In porn, they just mix their own lube using distilled water (available cheaply from virtually any grocery or hardware store) and a dissolvable powder. There’s not a good reason to ship wet lube in bulk, because freight shipping is calculated by weight and you’re essentially just paying to ship water. The added benefit is that the porn makers can mix the lube to be a thinner or thicker consistency, depending on their specific needs.

For the curious, look up J-lube, X-lube, K-lube, or Fist Lubricant Powder. And yes, all of the above are available for purchase on Amazon.

And to drive the point home that you’re just paying for freight shipping… J-lube powder is currently $26.77 for 10oz, which makes 10 liters of lube when mixed per the manufacturer’s recommended dosage. So $26.77 for 10 liters, plus probably $3 for the distilled water you need to mix it with. Let’s round up to an even $30 in total. The barrel is currently $1775.32 for 7080fl.oz, or ~209.4 liters. So the barrel is ~$8.47 per liter, while the dry powder mix is ~$3.00 per liter. The barrel is almost 3x as much per liter as the dry powder.

Where I live, everyone used AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for short. It was popular with teens because it offered chat rooms, but that meant it was also a popular hunting ground for predators. Nearly every terminally online teen from the late 90’s and early 2000’s has a story about getting groomed on AIM, by someone they initially thought was their own age.

Then Google Chat and Facebook Messenger came along, (and AOL’s subscriber count began to dwindle as people moved to broadband internet) and it was almost completely dead by 2010.

The first three Ratchet and Clank games (R&C, Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal) were phenomenal. The first feels dated by today’s standards, but 2 and 3 are peak. Deadlocked is a divisive entry; Some players loved it, others hated it. Try it first yourself and see. It’s definitely different than the first 3 games.

Final Fantasy X has already been mentioned in the thread, but I’d suggest trying the PC HD remaster instead. It adds a lot of quality of life improvements.

Final Fantasy XII wasn’t well received at launch, and I initially agreed. But that was largely because it didn’t fit into my idea of what a Final Fantasy game should be. I gave it another try a few years ago with a more open mind, and ended up loving it. The gambit system seems basic at first, but eventually opens up into a very versatile system once you start unlocking new gambit combos for it. The Zodiac version is the definitive version, (it enforces a rigid job system, where each character is locked into a specific ability tree) but the original is still alright too.

If you enjoy the Castlevania series, Curse of Darkness is an interesting entry. It features Hector, who has the ability to summon creatures to fight alongside him. They level up based on which weapons you use in combat, so it encourages you to diversify your play style to level up your creatures in specific ways. The gameplay can initially feel clunky by today’s standards, but that’s true of most 3D hack-n-slash games from that era.

Speaking of clunky hack-n-slash games, I see you already have Kingdom Hearts 2. Do yourself a favor, and play the other games (KH1, then KH Re:Chain of Memories) first. CoM has some radically different gameplay, which many players hated. It seems like one you can skip… You can’t. You will be horribly confused for the rest of the series without it. At the very least, go watch the cutscenes on YouTube. In terms of gameplay, KH1 feels janky by today’s standards. CoM is very different. KH2 is where the series really hit its peak.

Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening. It’s a prequel, so you don’t need to play 1 or 2 first.

Metal Gear Solid. Play 3 (Snake Eater), 1, and 2 (Sons of Liberty) in that order. Snake Eater is an early prequel. Then 1 is on the PS1. Sons of Liberty is the direct sequel to 1.

GTA: San Andreas.

Final Fantasy X unless you want to do the HD remaster, which is a great way to play tbh.

Yeah, I’d argue that the HD PC port is actually the definitive way to play the game. They fucked up Tidus’ face, but virtually everything else about the game is better. And you can just install a mod to change his face back to the way it used to be.

They have port forwarding, but they were bought by a company that has been caught stuffing malware into purchased programs. Basically, it was a company that has a history of buying out otherwise legitimate software brands, and then bulking them with adware as a quick cash grab on the existing customers.

That buyout was like 4 or 5 years ago, but it left a sour taste in many people’s mouths. Because everyone expected the PIA client to silently get bulked with adware one day. Since trust is basically the only reason to casually use a VPN, it pushed a lot of their users to alternatives.

Yep. For the curious, any time a license plate photo couldn’t be fully read by the automated system, it was marked as “NULL” and he was flagged as the driver. So every single red light camera and speeding camera in the area was sending him to court every day.

From what I understood, it’s an unintended consequence of accessibility rules coming into place.

It’s a fully intended consequence of DRM refusing to adapt to said accessibility rules. Closed ecosystems make DRM easier, which was always the goal for publishers.

Welcome to Readarr and Calibre, my friend.

The issue with Streamio is that it uses torrents but doesn’t seed. It just caches the content and then deletes it. If everyone used Streamio, nobody would be able to because there would be no seeds for anything.

Yeah, a Sonic metroidvania with gameplay akin to Ori and the Blind Forest would be absolutely top-tier. Ori was largely focused on movement instead of combat, just like the side-scrolling Sonic games typically have been.