Captain Aggravated

So are fatbergs.

What a fucking waste of time this must have been.

I could actually see 3D TVs taking off, even with the requirement for glasses. At the time, there was a fad for 3D movies in theaters. But, they needed to have gotten with content creators so that there was a reason to own one. There was no content, so no one invested, so probably in a year or two there’s going to be some Youtubers making videos of “I finally found Sony’s forgotten 3D TV.”

There was that one time when an AI gave a pizza recipe including gluing the cheese down with Elmer’s glue, because that was suggested as a joke on Reddit once.

There will never be such a thing as a useful LLM.

…to the loud apathy of us GM owners.

Yes, along with Ram pickup trucks and IIRC Fiat, somehow.

Bixby is the 8th or 9th best kitchen timer I’ve ever accidentally bought.

“PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine.”

No, we’ve definitely gotten dumber as time has gone on. Especially socially; interpersonal skills have basically vanished since I was in high school.

Lemmy, and I guess mbin and piefed, seem to be their own little island. I’ve used a Pixelfed account to comment on a Peertube video, I tried that from my Lemmy account and it threw an error. That “ActivityPub services even of different formats can interact with each other” thing seems to break down with the Reddit clones. I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve never interacted with an Mbin instance or if they just look exactly like Lemmy from a Lemmy account.

People still use Lemmy exactly like they use Reddit, they fill it with screenshots of or links to other platforms. If there is direct interoperability with Pixelfed or Peertube or Mastodon, no one seems to know how to use it. I’ve heard but not played with Kbin/Mbin’s microblogging capability, so your mbin account is kind of also a Mastodon account in a way your Lemmy account isn’t?

Hell, commenting on that Peertube video from Pixelfed was done ass-first. Go to a Peertube instance’s website not logged into an account there, choose a video, then under that video click in the comment field, a pop-up appears that asks you to sign in or “remote interact” in which you input your [email protected] name, which opens a separate window for you to log into that account on that instance, where you are then given a form to write the comment. It doesn’t feel like a design feature, it feels like a thing that is technically possible.

I have seen this conversation play out a lot:

“We need to do [something] if we want the Fediverse to grow!” “Who says we want the Fediverse to grow?”

There are those who are perfectly fine with this being their little corner of the internet, somewhere they can personally escape to, and there are those who think they’re leading a revolution, overthrowing the oligarchs and creating a new paradigm for the world where we run on solar power and eat vegetables and other “better for you” wholesomeness.

As you say, it’s working fine right now while servers and their admins and moderators can handle the relatively small load. Just the legitimate traffic of Reddit would collapse the infrastructure pretty quickly.

A day or two ago I saw someone in a thread about “What actually stops the Fediverse from going the way of Reddit” acting actually offended at the idea that hosting your own instance would require owning server hardware or paying to rent one.

If the goal is to replace commercial social media with federated systems…where’s the funding going to come from?

I’m still not entirely sure where each individual parcel of data is stored.

My account is on sh.itjust.works; the URL for the page I’m viewing this in is a sh.itjust.works address, this post and comment thread are from lemmy.world. When I hit reply in a few minutes my time, this comment will be sent to sh.itjust.works. Does it get stored there, or does it get forwarded to lemmy.world and stored there? If sh.itjust.works shuts down, does this comment disappear with it?

Possibly depending on how that works, viewing one lemmy instance’s content from another may not be “using that instance” but posting or commenting might be.

Handbrake can handle DVDs directly; you’ll need Make MKV for Blu-Rays.

A couple years ago I made a big project to rip all my DVDs.

Out of several hundred movies only 6 were unplayable. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to it either; age of the disc, wear or handling, big budget then current release or old movie slapped onto a disc in one of those cheap cardboard sleeves.

Out of my collection of TV shows on DVD, easily a quarter of the discs failed, and if one disc in a season of a show didn’t work most of them probably wouldn’t. Many had visible blotch marks in them. I figure they probably used a cheaper manufacturing process for TV shows where they were selling 3 to 6 discs rather than one, maybe two discs with a single movie on it.

I did once talk to Ukraine from some woods in North Carolina on 20 meters (~14 MHz) So when you say “long range radio” to me I think in hemispheres.

I’m a ham radio operator; it just feels weird hearing someone call 400 MHz “long range.” Above, say, 60 MHz I wouldn’t count on anything beyond line-of-sight anyway, though I suppose the lower in the UHF band you are the more likely you are to punch through leaves and such.

I have a feeling we’re going to regret a lot of the “From 201x all new cars have to have ibuttfuck.” It’s like paying to be assimilated by the goddamn Borg.

I kinda like the British word “satnav”.

haven’t bought anything from Amazon in years.

On my small fleet of Logi M570 trackball mice, I occasionally have to crack them open and tweezer out the wreath of hair that has built up in the mouse wheel which obscures the sensor. It’ll be a mix of mine and my cats hair.