[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 months ago

Not sure about your setup but just thought you should remember that the PS2 was primarily designed to be used with CRT TVs and they were blurry as hell. Game designers of that era expected it and even designed their in-game-assets around that e.g. jagged edges in low poly art got blurred into smooth curves.

PC emulators are even adding CRT filters to make games look more true to the intended vision.

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 months ago

Yeah a lot of pro audio discussion still happens on gearspace (formerly gearslutz), KVR, dogsonacid, etc

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 37 points 4 months ago

It’s always crazy to me that a kettle isn’t a standard kitchen item in NA (assuming that’s where you are).

They’re so cheap and so useful for so many things besides tea and it takes aaaages to get water to boil on a hob for any kind of cooking. Pasta, ramen, soups, sauces, hot water bottles, cleaning anything difficult.

But then again because of the 110V vs 240V situation, they take twice as long to boil in NA vs Europe so maybe it is more comparable to microwaving or boiling on the stove so they seem less useful.

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 20 points 4 months ago

No they ditched OSX and yearly point updates in 2020 and went from Mac OSX 10.15.7 to MacOS 11.0

The next yearly release was MacOS 12.

It's now up to 14.2.1

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 20 points 5 months ago

He WAS suspected of cheating via vibrating anal beads!

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 months ago

This is an awesome lecture by a guy who works in a team that’s been training AI models to decode languages and translate languages without any external dictionary. Pretty interesting in itself but it gets crazy when they apply it to animal communication and realize the same principles apply. Defo worth a watch.

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 80 points 6 months ago

Free in FOSS means free as in freedom not free as in beer.

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 46 points 7 months ago

It’s pretty normal for the company you work for to have your name, address and DOB.

I’m all for protecting your privacy and online anonymity to the max but when it’s literally the company you work for that need the most basic information, which they do need for a variety of reasons to keep you employed, that’s a little too far IMO.

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 42 points 8 months ago

Wtf walk there right now you nutter

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 52 points 10 months ago

At around 10pm one night I realized I’d forgotten to walk the dog and should probably do so before going to bed. As I step out onto the street I notice a woman leaning against a car with a weird look on her face, like a grimace. It’s a big city and I’ve seen lots of weird people around here so I don’t think much of it and start walking away when I hear her whimper. I turn around and ask her if she’s ok and she assures me she’s fine, her “husband is coming”. At this point I notice she’s heavily pregnant and there’s also a toddler in her car, but she insists she’s fine so I start walking away again.

I get 20 or 30 paces down the street and the woman lets out this blood-curdling howl. I run back to her and ask her what’s going on and she just says “I need to sit down”. I lead her to the steps outside my apartment building where she sits down and I fetch her a glass of water and put the dog back inside. I’ll always regret not inviting her in to my place for what comes next but I’ve been jaded by so many con-artists and burglars trying to get into my building that I didn’t feel like it was an option.

She starts breathing super heavily and stops responding to me completely. Like I’m not even there. I’m freaking out and her husband is nowhere in sight. I have no idea what to do so I rush into the hotel next door to find a “real adult” (I was early 20s) and come out with a few other 20-somethings that “knew first aid”. We immediately call an ambulance.

The ambulance guys tell me they’ll be here in 5mins but to go and get towels just in-case she’s about to give birth. I run in and get all my towels. As I come out the woman gets off the step and kneels on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. I place towels all around her on the floor and she screams in pain. By this point a small crowd has gathered to see what all the fuss is about and some dude tries to convince her to get on her back and starts pulling her around. She fucking screams at him to stop and he backs off. She then drops her leggings down to her knees and screams “CATCH THE BABY” at which point me and one of the guys from the hotel reach down and see a newborn baby dangling in her leggings. Ambulance guys are still on the phone and tell us to wrap the baby in clean towels and, I kid you not, not even 30 seconds later the ambulance and husband both arrive.

Apparently they had rented a place a few doors down from me for the birth but there was a problem with the keys or something. The husband thanks us and they all go into the ambulance. I’m in shock and the only thing I can think is that I need to clean all this blood and poop off the sidewalk so I clean it all off. The guys from the hotel crack open a bottle of wine and we all just stand around in shock at what just happened.

So that’s the story of how I delivered a baby on the street outside my apartment. I can’t watch any birth scenes on TV or movies anymore either because of what I think is probably mild PTSD and it makes me feel instantly sick to my stomach and panicked.

TLDR: delivered a stranger’s baby on the street outside my apartment with zero prior experience

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 months ago

I joined Lemmy 3 years ago and my cake day is in... wait for it... June like the rest of you!

[-] dizzy@lemmy.ml 41 points 10 months ago

This isn’t that though. Running a federated service instance is more akin to them having to abide by the rule of the people than the status quo where Musk or Zuck could boot them from their platform or hide anything they don’t like without any reason at all.

In the fediverse, they’re choosing to run a self-hosted outlet that can interact with other privately or publicly run services. It’s like them choosing to run their own email servers instead of their officials all using gmail accounts.

The free market solutions have just led to unelected billionaire oligarchs controlling the narrative. With this federated stuff, no single entity can control the narrative (once all the kinks are ironed out like vote manipulation, exploits, etc)

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1260794

Hello /r/london.

We're back - for now.

I've decided to write something of my own rather than repost another copy of the official messaging and I hope you'll excuse me for it. Funnily enough, I've had a lot more free time than usual over the last couple of days.

I think there is a lot of anger and rhetoric going around at the moment, and while the anger is absolutely justified, it's getting hard to understand what's actually happening due to the fog of war. Background

In May, without warning, and contrary to many public statements made previously by current and former CEOs, Reddit Inc announced broad API policy changes that will price out most commercial third-party apps from continuing to operate.

Already, Apollo and Reddit is Fun have announced they will shutter on July 31st as these changes take effect. Other apps will likely end up joining them.

Reddit has done this for a very simple reason: as a loss making company, they need to a path to profit to successfully launch their IPO this year. One way to do this is to drive people to their official app because that's where they can monetise their users the best through buying premium, awards, showing more adverts, and whatever bullshit they're doing with NFTs. In particular, it's no coincidence that Reddit Inc launched new ad options just this weekend - I'm sure these new forms of ads are in no small part responsible for wanting eyes on their apps only.

Another issue is the rise of the large language models (ChatGPT etc.) which are clearly using social media posts as a large part of their training corpus. So, the social media companies have suddenly decided this is a valuable asset and they should charge for it. Something u/spez

(the Reddit CEO) and Elon (over at Twitter) are no doubt looking to cash in on.

It's not completely unreasonable for a company to want people to use its official apps. It's not completely unreasonable to charge for an API. What is unreasonable is Reddit's timing, pricing, lack of feature parity, and u/spez

's frankly insulting attitude to the community on which his company and its revenue relies. The Timing

Reddit Inc announced these changes in May, to be enforced from July 31st. This is far too short a timescale for apps like Apollo to entirely rewrite their backend to ensure compliance and cost controls with the new API policies. Many of these apps are one-person operations, many of them are part time projects. They cannot get this done on the timescale Reddit proposed.

Feels real like a rug pull man. The Pricing

Christian Selig of Apollo calculated he would have to pay Reddit $20 million a year just to keep Apollo running, which would mean Apollo would have to vastly increase their per user subscription cost. It's also very clear that Reddit's API does not cost them this much to run for themselves, as otherwise the company's total yearly revenue would be losses in the billions.

While they may be losing out on some ad revenue, there's nothing to say they couldn't right this by having an agreement with third party app developers that they must show Reddit's ads. Simples.

But no, they're not doing this. Lack of feature parity

The official Reddit app lacks many useful features for moderators, but most frustratingly, lacks good accessibility, which is a huge problem for users of /r/blind and others with disabilities.

Reddit have partly relented and allowed two accessibility-focussed apps to continue to use the API for free - RedReader on Android and Dystopia on iOS, but under a non-commercial agreement that Reddit can pull with 30 days notice.

This is not a long-term sustainable model.

They have also made exceptions for mod tools but they miss the point that many moderators work on mobile only, and the moderation tools in the official mobile app are not good in comparison with third party offerings that will now shut down.

No matter what you might think of mods, we are volunteers, who put time in for free to manage communities. Each mod is trying to do what they think is a good job in their spare time, for the benefit of their subreddit. Taking away our tools is not helpful, and many mods will likely quit the site or reduce the number of actions they're able to take as a result of these changes.

Boo-hoo, you might say, but without moderation, the subs would be chock full of hate speech, bots and spam (well, more-so than it is now, we do what we can). The only reward we've ever received from our work is to see the online communities we volunteer in thrive and grow, and the occasional t-shirt. u/spez

Spez, supposedly the professional CEO of a large social media company with over 2000 employees, has shown an abysmal attitude towards us throughout the discontent this situation has caused.

Among other things:

Dismissive answers in his AMA about the API changes
Severe mischaracterisation of his interactions with Apollo
Leaked memo shows he believes the blackout is meaningless
Complete refusal to compromise

When Spez returned to Reddit, we were promised a step change in user relations after the Ellen Pao debacle. I suppose ultimately, money talks, and he's been told by his board he needs to take these steps to support the IPO.

If anything it reinforces the point that these kinds of companies do not work for you: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product The blackout

We participated with many other subs in the blackout this week. Some large subs are continuing to stay locked down, but but we have to balance that /r/London is a community resource, not just a fun/meme/shitposting sub that people can do without for a while.

So we're reopening for now, and letting the large subs take the heat as many of them are staying shut permanently.

It's not over though. There's talk of further actions called for, and we may well participate.

Ultimately though, this may not be a fight we can win on Reddit. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this is the reminder that we can't trust social media companies to act in good faith towards their users.

I remember the Digg v4 debacle and the great migration to Reddit - nothing says it can't happen again. . Maybe it's time to find a new frontpage of our Internet. Perhaps it's time to start dipping our toes into alternatives.

Here are some:

https://kbin.social/
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://squabbles.io/
https://tildes.net/

I am not a soothsayer and can't tell you which platform might emerge is "next Reddit", but if we've learned anything from the fall of MySpace, Digg, and Twitter, and the precarious situation of Meta, it's that the next Reddit will come. Perhaps this time we'll learn some lessons about choosing a federated platform or a non-profit to run whatever comes next. Your thoughts

We'd like to hear your views on whether we should. Not running a poll this time, as they tend to get brigaded by people who aren't on the sub, so instead please just voice your thoughts in the comments.

Should we:

stay open?
keep our eye on things and participate in further blackouts if/when they occur?
participate in the indefinite blackout?

Honestly want to hear your opinions.

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