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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Keep in mind that fire extinguishers have a safe storage temperature. It varies from type to type but is generally at the 120-130 F range. Ironic.

    So your extinguisher in your car is potentially regularly reaching that if you live in a hot climate and park outdoors. Which means you potentially have degraded performance and could even see a pressure/leakage issue if it continues too much.

    So probably not a catastrophic failure (I mean… it is a fire extinguisher) but nowhere near as safe as you think. External motorbike one is probably fine though.


    I have one that I keep with my camping gear as “just in case” but don’t see much of a reason to keep it in my car’s emergency bag. I figure if my car catches on fire I am fucked anyway.


  • Fascists care about setting precedent and “purchased vaguely illegal content” is some great precedent.

    This just also is a smart attack because the usual crowd is going to come out to insist that it is OWN’s fault for playing Nintendo games and piracy is the greatest problem facing the world and that Nintendo Switch Online™ is a great service.

    Its the same as when the christofacists attacked Pornhub via Visa et al in the US. Everyone hates revenge porn and child porn (well, except for certain heads of state…) so nobody is going to complain but it made it very clear the path to destroy content that goes against the fascists’ interests.


  • I would argue more that anyone grabbing this from the app store is painting a target on their back. It doesn’t matter what permissions it does or does not have: You are now giving a mega company run by a c-suite that have demonstrably bended the knee to a fascist information that you care about this.

    Push notifications are incredibly valuable. I still argue that doing it through a dedicated app at all is idiotic and it should instead be through a semi-anonymous chat system like Signal or Matrix and the like and get group blasted.




    1. No it won’t. People aren’t going to change their bank because their debit card doesn’t like a company
    2. It wouldn’t change anything. Take a look at said debit card. Notice how it is probably either Visa or Mastercard (Discover if you’re nasty (ain’t nobody use American Express)). THOSE are the companies that matter
    3. Don’t use your debit card for online purchases. Get a credit card. The fees are the same on the vendor end and you get much better protections AND cash back

    And its always worth remembering what happened with Pornhub back in 2022. I genuinely don’t care what anyone thinks (or were told to think by the tates of the world…) about porn. “Special Interest Groups” largely speareheaded by right wing fascists built up a narrative that Pornhub was nothing but revenge porn (not wrong) and child porn (still way less than facebook or twitter. And I am talking 2022 twitter, not mechahitler twitter) which led to credit card companies immediately cutting it off and the company wiping almost its entire video library almost literally overnight.

    And while I do think that was a net good, it is worth remembering where it came from and the implications of christofacists pressuring Visa et al to boycott a company for you.

    So this is mostly Valve saying “We aren’t going to fight this fight and it is on you”. Which… considering how the usual response to a journalist fighting for the truth is “UGH! HOW FUCKING DARE YOU LINK TO PAYWALLED CONTENT!!!”… I don’t blame Gabe The Knife Collecting Libertarian at all.




  • You, eh, ever try to lift 150-200 pounds of dead weight? while trying to make it look like that dead weight did it himself?

    One murderer puts their arms under his armpits. The other loops the noose and then ties it off.

    Could Abby Sciuto and Ducky figure out it was faked? Sure. But they aren’t getting called in to investigate a hit that was organized by the people who would be investigating the murder.

    To also then string him up, and remove whatever you need to, to make it look like suicide?

    Open the door. One guy rushes him and does a blood choke. He was old and nowhere near at his best. The other quickly throws the noose up and ties it off. They don’t have to remove anything but themselves.

    Again. I think more time is more likely. But be very cautious of “They needed way more than one minute!” because, again, even the wired article suggests it may just be overlapping clips and it would be super easy to say “Actually that analyst is wrong and it is really only one minute of lost footage so all of you conspiracy theorists are wrong and owe donald j trump an apology”


    As an example, think OJ Simpson. So much of the case became fixated on that glove. So once it was “proved” that he couldn’t wear it (because his hands were swollen and had thick latex gloves on them…) the entire case fell apart.

    This will basically never reach trial for obvious reasons. But the principle still holds. Don’t overly fixate on specific details that can be trivially refuted unless they are key details. And it is very possible, if not overly plausible, that they could have suicide’d epstein in under a minute.


  • I haven’t really looked much into the layout or video (I tend to not like staring at corpses OR rapists), but assuming it is of the cell itself or the door right outside?

    A minute is more than enough time for a couple of blokes to get in, grab someone, put them in a blood choke, loop the noose, throw it, and tie a super quick knot. Hollywood likes people to think you can struggle against getting choked. An air choke where your oxygen supply is cut off? Sure, those can take a minute or two to kill someone. A blood choke where you put pressure on the artery? They are unconscious in less than 10 seconds (sometimes almost instantaneously) and they aren’t going to wake up the moment you release. Similarly, ask any climber to tie a quick figure eight (or bowline if they are old or european) and they can do that blindfolded, in the rain, in like 10 seconds.

    So assuming even two killers? Yeah, a minute is more than enough time.

    That isn’t to say that multiple minutes is not more likely. But the article has many caveats for why that isn’t necessarily the case (overlap, basically) and there is already a massive push by fascists to somehow spin all of this as being Obama’s fault. So be wary of easy gotchas that they can introduce and disprove.


  • Not sure how I feel about this (aside from it being 8bitdo so even understanding what SKU is what is hell).

    The swappable buttons remind me a lot of the framework usb c dongle “ports”. In theory it sounds awesome. In practice it sounds like a LOT of engineering work going into something people will touch once when they buy it and never again. Would much rather a bigger focus on repairability so that swapping the buttons isn’t a big deal WITHOUT a magnetic system and special keypuller and so forth.

    I also don’t think ANYONE will ever use the “arcade thumbsticks”.




  • It depends on the size/“disruptiveness” of the company but yeah. You either have your own tape back up system or you contract out to someone who does and try not to think about what it means to be doing a glorified rsync of all your data offsite every week.

    I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say anyone doing genuine offsite backups using a spinning disc is wrong but…


    The caveat I’ll carve out is the hobbyist space where a lot of us will back up truly essential data to a cloud bucket or even a friend/family member’s NAS. I… still think that is more wrong than not but (assuming you trust them and they have proper practices) it is probably the best way for a hobbyist to keep a backup without worrying about that USB drive degrading since it gets plugged in once a year.


  • Words hard

    And I would go so far as to say that nobody who is buying 36 TB spinners is doing offsite backups of that data. For any org doing offsites of that much data you are almost guaranteed using a tape drive of some form because… they pay for themselves pretty fast and are much better for actual cold storage backups.

    Seagate et al keep pushing for these truly massive spinners and I really do wonder who the market is for them. They are overly expensive for cold storage and basically any setup with that volume of data is going to be better off slowly rotating out smaller drives. Partially because of recovery times and partially because nobody but a sponsored youtuber is throwing out their 24 TB drives because 36 TB hit the market.

    I assume these are a byproduct of some actually useful tech that is sold to help offset the costs while maybe REALLY REALLY REALLY want 72 TBs in their four bay Synology.



  • All signs are that is the “next xbox”

    Migrating the Series to Windows would end horribly. Theoretically there can be a path from xbox OS to windows but it is going to be a pretty large update and will be prone to erroring out. And it also feels like a REAL good way to accidentally jailbreak your own consoles. And people already (rightfully) lose their shit when MS change the dashboard every year to add even more ads and make it even harder to find your god damned games.

    I forget what The Leakers are saying but this console generation more or less started in 2020 and we are coming up on the 5th year. Assuming a 7 to 8 year cycle, the XBOX 2 Pi would be coming out as early as Fall of 2027. So massive software/firmware hell combined with support burden versus potentially breaking their lockstep with Sony and trying to pivot more toward the Nintendo “We are your second console” mindset. Except that your “second console” is also your netflix box and your MS word box and how you watch pornhub and so forth. Especially if said “XBOX 2 Pi” is more just branding and HTPCs from existing vendors.

    So… Steam Boxes. And those totally weren’t a horrible failure.


  • 800-1200 for a low end “gaming laptop” isn’t super out of the realm.

    Figuring out (meaningful) specs on the Z2s is… hard but https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/handheld-gaming-pcs/amds-baffling-new-ryzen-z2-apus-for-handheld-gaming-pcs-include-a-premium-ai-model-with-an-npu-and-seemingly-the-ancient-chip-from-valves-steam-deck/ seems to be the best comparison out there and it sounds like it is within the realm of the Steam Deck plus AI Magic NPU. Which is potentially incredibly good in a handheld for upscaling/framegen purposes if you roll that way (I don’t care if you do or don’t).

    And the ROG Ally 2023s seem to be at the 650-900 range. So new chip gen combined with pre-pricing for tariffs and those are “reasonable” if you like the rest of the ROG specs. Personally? I think a 120 Hz 1080p display on a handheld is idiotic but if it is your only device there might be an argument. I forget if those support VRR.

    But yeah. Definitely feels like another increasingly common MS fail which is becoming increasingly the case as they devote all of their competency toward enabling genocide (friendly reminder that BDS encourages boycotting of MS)

    But with the Switch 2 just launching and being the perfect device that will give you a handy while you play? And the Steam Deck still kind of the best all arounder for closer to half the price than not? Really feels like this is being sent out to die.


  • GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don’t remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.

    GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so… mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.

    I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.


  • Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.

    Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.

    Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.