wizardbeard

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

For clarity, microcode fixes are available already through Linux and Microsoft, eliminating the bug in effected CPUs.

The month(s) wait is for the firmware uodates that are expected to have less of a performance impact.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

If you think this is a dystopia, I have a lot of books for you to read.

There’s a lot of dystopian shit going down, but (assuming you hail from a first world country) we are definitively not living in one.

Wean yourself off news media, limit your consumption of it. They literally make their money through keeping eyes watching. The easiest way to do that is to keep viewers feeling like there are ongoing crises constantly and to stoke visceral emotional response in their readership/viewership as much as possible.

This is not some issue siloed off to news organizations that lean to one political side or the other, it is an inherent result of how they all generate revenue in the modern age. They are all optimizing for ad impressions.

These are hard times, not end times.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

My man are you for real? You commented in a public forum on the internet. You’re going to get unasked for feedback/advice/shit talking/commentary. That’s just how things work.

And no one’s asking you to pretend, whatever you mean by that. I’m assuming you mean that it’s impossible to accept that this world is not a dystopia, so doing otherwise requires one to pretend?

I’m asserting that we are not living in a dystopia as you and many others repeatedly claim. Maybe you disagree, but it’s not something that I personally have to pretend. Again I’ll repeat the last sentence of my last comment: These are hard times, not end times.

Plus, there’s a whole spectrum of news media exposure between “drinking from the fire hose” and “burying your head in the sand”. Everyone should stay informed, but there’s a lot in the news that only serves to get emotional response over things that have no impact on your life, where knowing of it does not convey any significant value besides emotional effect.

I have seen far too many people actively contribute to their own mental issues due to feeling some obligation to engage in news that has no direct impact on their lives, or that they can do nothing about but worry. Additionally, being aware of the emotional and psychological effects of media exposure does not make you in any way immune to it. I know way too many people suffering from depression and anxiety related issues directly and significantly exacerbated by how much they consume news media, which is why I have a hard time keeping my trap shut about this.

Moving past that, being married to a journalism major is not the supporting argument you may think it is. Of course you would bristle at the idea that news media may be harmful when you are married to someone who spent years training to be in that industry. I’m not saying any of this as an attack on journalists themselves or as an attack on caring about what is going on in the world. Ideally journalists and news organizations serve a vital part of keeping people informed, which is vital to a good society and proper political process. Unfortunately the entire way that news media makes money to continue to exist in the modern era is entirely dependant on optimizing for views, which means optimizing for emotional impact.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

And here we have an intense difference in world view.

If you’re actually “fucking furious every minute of every day”, you have a serious emotional issue. And you’re hiding behind this idea that reading more news has any reflection on mental acuity to justify it. Effort, hell yes it takes more effort, but fuck off with elitism over your righteous anger.

You don’t need to sift through all the piles of absolute bullshit to stay informed, or to be aware of all the horroble shit in the world. It doesn’t take a concentrated effort to be aware. It does take a concentrated effort to stay emotionally invested in things that don’t directly effect you, and I’m of the opinion that effort is much better spent taking action, or simply doing what you can to better your small slice of the world every day.

Unfortunately it is extremely unlikely for any of us to have significant impact on large scale issues in the world. Stay reasonably informed, do what you can, and get on with your life. No sense in wallowing when there’s far better uses of time and energy.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Hey, you have your account set as a bot account. Should be a toggle in your account settings to switch that off.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

It’s worth noting that on android, you can use Revanced Manager to patch the Youtube Music app to get almost all of the premium features for free.

revanced.app

Only thing you can’t do is the local downloads for when your service is crap.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

But this is almost all false or just speculation.

Instead of having audio and usb-c, now you have usb-c port, usb-c headphone dongle, the finally audio port and usb-c port again. Unless you want to intentionally buy a usb-c exclusive set of headphones that won’t work with whatever next “revolutionary port technology” comes out.

As long as they still work, good headphones from 40 years ago are still good. Headphone tech has not significantly changed. Amps, DACs, etc have, but not the actual drivers.

As far as space goes, reasonable DAC components are getting smaller and smaller while phones tend to be getting larger as people want more screen space. The space savings on hardware here is not significant. Seriously go and look up sizes of the components needed for audio out.

As far as thinner goes, the width needed for a headphone jack is like 2mm more than what’s needed for a usb-c port, and there’s width needed for internal speakers either way. I’m also not sure how much thinner people want cell phones to be at this point. We’re pretty close to the point of sacrificing device drop resistance for size anyway (arguably we’ve passed that point with most people doubling the size of their phone with a protective case). Not to mention that the real thing preventing more thinness is the camera lenses now, as easily evidenced by the camera island bumps all phones have now.

Lastly, you can’t seriously be arguing that analog audio out represents any significant amount of attack surface kernel wise. Like holy shit man. Wow. Yes, technically every line of code is increased attack surface, but it’s a huge assumption that USB-C audio is in any way more secure or less surface.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Now tell me how many of them actually are. This is just OEMs trying to save literal pennies across 100s of devices by externalizing the cost of a cheap DAC to their customers.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

I have a hard time accepting that argument with the camera islands on every phone now.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Dear god. I burned out around your age with a similar work schedule. Less commute but more work hours. Took me years to recover.

If your situation allows, please find yourself a better work and commute setup. Your boss isn’t going to care that you’re dying inside, especially when they’ve grown accustomed to everything you get done running yourself ragged. If you can, start doing less at work so you have energy to search for other jobs.

In some workplaces, it’s actually better to let things slip so your boss can push for more manpower.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Mods my man. Minecraft is definitely a game to play on PC.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Why? Vanced has been dead for over a year. Revanced has taken it’s place and is actually maintained.

revanced.app

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

But this doesn’t. It’s not like people can google a pixelated logo that small and find their way here.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

I personally don’t have a dedicated toolbox USB anymore, since any repairs I do now are in my home and I can just set up what I need when I need, but when I did have one I used SARDU to handle setting it up to boot into a grub menu that I could use to launch multiple live boot environments.

It was real handy to have Hiren’s Boot CD, a couple live boot antivirus tools, live boot gparted, a live boot lightweight linux like puppylinux, and a live boot of a more “standard” linux like Ubuntu all on the same USB. Just boot to it and select which one you need from the GRUB menu.

Besides live-boot utilities, I worked on Windows most of the time, so I’d have the sysinternals suite handy, a few ninite installers exes for quick batch installs of standard programs, and a kludged together set of portable apps.

There’s a handful of “portable app” launchers for Windows, and each framework has it’s own library of compatible apps. I mixed and matched from a few of them with some programs that had official portable installs. I think the frameworks I used were “PortableApps” and “Liberkey”.

I had a portable hardened Firefox, a portable PDF reader (I think SumatraPDF), Notepad++ (has an official portable mode), 7-zip or Peazip (can’t remember, one has official portable mode), Bleachbit with the extended application support configs, the LargeAddressAware patcher (to allow 32 bit programs to use more that 4GB of RAM), and I think Teracopy had a portable mode as well.

If I had to set one up again now I would probably see if there was a portable way to carry Powershell around as well. There’s a ton of stuff on Windows that’s just easier to config and troubleshoot through it. I also might include some Windows 10 and 11 debloater/privacy configuration tools too, but I’d need to do some research on which ones are actually useful/good.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Please don’t. Revanced has been around for well over a year now and is actually maintained. Vanced was abandoned ages ago. Revanced is significantly less buggy, has options to block shorts, and has Sponsorblock built in now.

Official site: revanced.app

APK mirror is great for getting the right Youtube APK version to patch with Revanced Manager though. Revanced also supports Youtube Music, pretty much giving you the premium features for free.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

It may complicate the money situation, but as a new parent my wife and I have found a lot of value in paying the extra price for stuff like grocery delivery. We also found value in getting a roomba.

The roomba keeps the main floor of our house clean enough that we can afford to go a few weeks without using a real vacuum if we need to.

The grocery delivery saves us on having to get the kid together, ensure the diaper bag’s packed, drive out to the store, find the stuff, drive back home. Or at least we can avoid locking down one of us with kid duty while the other runs out to shop. It’s not cheap, between fees and a tip we often end up paying ~20% more, but it’s a time vs money value decision. I find we’re valuing our time more than money a lot lately. It also allows us to re-up groceries or household goods on days one of us is working from home, while we’re working.

Granted, I’m in a very stable salaried position where I’m not constantly being picked apart on metrics or qualified productivity (I’m more sysadmin and automation than software dev). We’re also in the early stages of child rearing, not even 6 months in yet. Mileage may vary.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Oof, and since they pretty much require a valid cell number for each new account it’s not like you can have alts for certain topics.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

“Newfangled”? Shinies have existed since Gen 2. Granted, they’ve been made absurdly more common in recent gens. I think originally they were like a 1/1024 chance.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

What?! 9000?

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Another good Kirby one is Canvas Curse, entirely touch based. Any of the many puzzle vns on DS should be good too, like hotel dusk or 999

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

They were literally caught artificially slowing down page loads and responsiveness on non-chrome browsers a while back.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

Been using Firefox for over 15 years, including weird open source custom forks of it, and I’ve never run into that issue. I’ve got bookmarks kicking around that I imported into FF from IE on Windows XP.

Not saying it didn’t happen, but I’d hazard a guess that it was related to some bookmarks related addon you installed, or user error. Sorry you lost your bookmarks.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

I think it might be time for an intervention, thats some serious Docker addiction lol.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

The godawful changes with Roe v Wade happened after this incident, and you can’t be charged with breaking a law by actions taken before the law was in effect/changed. So at the time, they still could have done the abortion legally.

wizardbeard, 10 months ago

That’s a massive oversimplification of things. Intentionally removing nuance doesn’t help people.

More response in my other reply to your similar message