Blackbeard in particular was all about the aesthetics. He’s the archetype for a damn good reason: theatricality makes legends. There’s no historical account of him ever directly killing anyone until his final battle, but that’s not what the outfit says. He’s basically pirate Batman.
Are we still acting like this excuse was the actual explanation for why you couldn’t use a calculator?
They just said this. It was easier than trying to explain the nuances of education to kids. The actual reason was “because you have to learn to use your brain to do shit, it’s kind of important.”
Like, this is the equivalent of being upset the gym teacher wouldn’t let you use a segway in class. You’re missing the point.
I get being annoyed by the excuse when your kid, but it’s bizarre seeing adults still harping on this decades later.
You couldn’t use a calculator in math class for the same reason you couldn’t use a segway in gym class. Because there’s a lot more going on in a math class than just teaching you how to enter the correct answer.
Like… presumably most people here took some college of some kind, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp that education is a complex and multifaceted thing. It was never just about getting every answer right.
am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand
Depends on the context.
If I’m hanging out with friends, in a city or area I’m relatively familiar with, and somebody suggests going to a restaurant or something I don’t know, I might just casually ask “Where is it? How are we getting there?” or something like that. Because there’s a good chance I don’t need to pull out my phone, open an app, type something in, make sure it’s the right location (being buried beneath the ad results), and following the steps the whole time, when a simple “just head to where the BDSM dungeon is, it like 2 doors down”
Google Play Music was legitimately excellent. The last Google service I ever paid for that I was 100% happy with.
It died because that style of music app wasn’t seen as “in vogue” anymore. It was much more akin to a music manager app, but also one that allowed you to manage things on the streaming service. Best of both worlds. Library management tools and options that have been a thing since iTunes popularized them a decade earlier, but all the content, suggestions, playlists, and radio functionality of Spotify.
And someone at Google decided to burn it down, make it a Spotify clone (with all the same neutered management tools), shove it into YouTube, and gave a huge middle finger to customers that paid for the app as it was (and they probably got a promotion for it).
Don’t ever trust Google. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad service, it means nothing. They’ll fuck it up eventually.
Mine are all super specific to sites I use and various elements of them I hate.
Just little things that I don’t want to see. “Score” gets blocked on Reddit. Don’t have a problem with the voting, but the numbers are just distracting to me.
For a similar example, I tend to go out of my way to create filters that block random visual ratings for media. Like when you search for a movie and get the IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes scores without having asked for them.
Not that I have a problem with ratings in general, it’s that they’re effectively opinions, and when I want to hear opinions on media, I’ll go look for them. I really don’t like looking up something about a show or movie I enjoy and see a giant visual indicator “HEY PEOPLE HATE THIS”, or vise versa. Or you’re just going to OpenSubtitles or a meta data site to get something and have to be reminded how the internet feels about this thing.
One odd stand out is Sonarr/Radarr. I can’t create a filter for those search results, because they’re not elements on the page apparently, and there’s no setting to turn it off.
In other words, there’s “let people mod whatever they like” and there’s mods that are effectively a statement of an ethos, and not all ethos are worth letting your platform be used to broadcast.
There’s also mods that are tools to give players more freedom, and mods that are fixes to correct what the dev sees as mistakes or shortcomings. The difference between “choose what color you want the flags to be” and “the flags are all blue now”. The latter is a statement of a belief: “I think the game would be better if all the flags were blue”.
The changes in this mod could be framed differently, like “gives player more granular control over NPC gender and sexuality”. It could have been done in a respectful and open-ended fashion that doesn’t play on harmful stereotypes. It could even be used to make the game “more gay” if the player chooses, then if some players choose to make it all “less gay”, so be it. That would be fine.
But that’s not what this mod is, and the intent behind it is fairly obvious. There’s no reason to pussyfoot around this one with arguments about player freedom, that wasn’t why it was made.
I don’t see how this is any different than when straight characters in a game hit on you and you have to reject them. Why does the sexuality or gender of the person change anything when it comes to rejection? You’re either into them or you aren’t. Make a mod that eliminates awkward rejection moments across the board.
It’s a matter of targeting. There are ways to address the change you’d like to see that aren’t this focused, give granular control, and permit players to form an experience of their own. It’s not just about the mod they made, it’s about the mod they could have made but didn’t, and that reveals a prejudice.
You don’t have to care. No one does. No one is blocking this from working.
It’s just not being listed on Nexus.
Moreover this mod wasn’t giving options to players to choose how they wanted to play, it was changing very specific things and advertising it. Nexus doesn’t care to let them use their platform to advertise a mod made for a very specific audience of really shitty people.
Part of it, for me, is that I still want to play games as I did when I was younger. I.e. multi-hour play sessions. To sit there and just get lost in it for the whole evening.
But increasingly that’s becoming unworkable. I got shit to do.
The solution, then, would be to adjust my expectations to like an hour of playtime here and there. But when I do that, I’ve created a schedule, and time limit, both of which really kill my personal enjoyment of game time. Playing a game while watching the clock is just not relaxing to me.
So I keep holding out for more of those evenings, those solid chunks of time when I pick up the controller and play till I’m ready for bed. But they’ve become so few and far between that gaming has become a weekend thing. That’s a problem in itself because the weekend is generally reserved for doing things with my partner or other outings.
Quarantine was probably the most gaming I’ve done in a long time. I basically got to play with the same reckless abandon as I did when I was much younger, for a couple solid months. But the chances of me being able to have that same relationship with this past time ever again appears fleeting.
The benefit of a visual medium is being able to show the punchline without actually having it spelled out in text.
It’s redundant and clunky, often using a cliche line, like “I should have known _____.” or “Really? You just had to ________?” or “wow, ______, why am I not surprised?”
Plenty of OEMs allow bootloader unlocking, stop buying Samsung.
Safetynet issues
It’s Google Play Integrity checking now, and as someone who has been using LinageOS on unrooted phones for a while, I’ve never had these issues. Not to say people out there aren’t having them, but it’s not as bleak as people seem to believe it is.
I have one phone that’s rooted, and I have to use magisk to hide it, and that occasionally has issues, but not the non-rooted ones running custom roms.
I’m obstinate as fuck, and I have a downright unhealthy resentment of having software capabilities taken away. As long as there’s a single setting or feature that I can get from a custom ROM that I can’t get on stock, I will use them.
Many versions ago, Google removed the “hold back button to kill foreground app” functionality, and I’ll use LineageOS soley to keep that (but there’s plenty of other reasons). The ability to restore useful features that Google and OEMs take away is an absolute necessity for me.
It’s almost enjoyable; I get a kick out of telling Google to fuck itself and restoring my device’s capabilities.
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
This is part of a much larger plan. Google wants to establish a new standard that the rest of the internet will follow.
If Google is seen fighting an endless war against ad blockers, it will encourage other websites to do the same.
No longer will it be “Please disable your ad blocker, as advertising supports us and helps keep this content free”
It will start being “Ad blockers are not permitted.”
Google wants the Internet to start thinking of allowing ads as requirement for entry, and (via Manifest v3 and web environment integrity checking (which you better believe will be brought back in another form)), they will provide websites the tools to enforce this.
Fun fact: the psychiatric yard is where the psych ward doctors are allowed to go outside and play for an hour everyday, and where a psychologist is most likely to be shanked by a psychiatrist.
Honestly I think the pink would draw more attention than the size of the watch in that example. Most people aren’t paying close enough attention to others’ wristwear to notice size.
I think there are certain traditionally “masculine” things that would draw more attention than others if a woman wore them, but I’m struggling to think of any that would cause actual upset. You still hear the occasional grumble about women in business suits from time to time, to spite women’s cut suits having been a thing for decades, but that’s mostly well accepted now.
Tuxedo, maybe? They cut them for women too, but that one feels like it’s mostly still in the male category because its opposite is often expected in certain formal settings. A women showing up to something formal in a tux and not a dress would probably still do it today, depending on the event and the people in attendance.
Like imagine a ball or some other bougie shit where a husband and wife both show up in tuxes.
I wouldn’t suggest using blahaj as a home instance. It’s one of the instances that pussyfoots around with defederating from hexbear, and I think it disables downvotes, which just means the content isn’t voted on democratically, which fucks up the aggregation and doesn’t give you an accurate view of Lemmy as a whole.
Cool communities there, poor admins. Stick with lemmy.world or pick a different home.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
Can I get a source on this? I’m not even sure what you mean by it, because salt clears active roadways as much as it does backroads, so how is this being measured “per person”?
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
You’re talking about pedestrians, but what about non-pedestrian traffic? The roads are more than just avenues to get to the grocery store, they’re also how the grocery store gets stocked with goods for rising out storms. It how the ambulance gets to you.
And what about the disabled or elderly? Can you get a wheelchair across the gravel?
So…the issue isn’t cars, it’s capitalism? All we need to do to get rid of cars and all their negative effects is rearrange our country on a socioeconomic level?
Seriously launched the app (by accident today) and what is this? They’re trying to play the victim from the big bad ad blockers saying all they’re doing is trying to show an ad at the beginning of video, and then I see all of this crap....
How much of it have you watched in recent years? What happened on the episodes you watched?
It sure is funny how many people that haven’t actually watched the show since like season 6 still sound off about it like they have any idea what its currently like.
YouTuber 20 minute opinion drops, sorry, “video essays” are a dime a dozen and the vast majority have nothing notable to say. Better to just try things for yourself and make up your own mind.
Update…Per Microsoft’s instructions, disabled all tracking protections in Safari and requested desktop mode and it works. Their instructions say turn protections back on after using teams… 😐...
The business/work version of Teams isn’t free, you’re paying for it as part of the 365 subscription.
That’s part of why there’s a push to use Teams: companies see it as already paying for it, so might as well use it.
And of course there’s the constant barrage of fear mongering coming out of the security crowd that says the only sensible, secure thing to do is bring absolutely every fucking thing into a native 365 app. Because they fail to notice that the attack surface they’re so concerned about is a healthy software market.
The long fight to make Apple’s iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union’s Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires...
You went from being pedantic to straight up disingenuous.
No reasonable person reading that line would think they were talking about the protocol. You picked out one thing you thought you could pick apart, and it makes no sense. When called out on it, you’re doubling down.
We are very excited to let you know now that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you....
Yeah, they want to funnel you to multiplayer…but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend the funnel itself isn’t great. People were saying all this about RDR2 and while I think it lacked in certain design choices, it was not lacking in content and attention to detail.
Hey now…I’m bitter and balding, and I marched my ass into my polling station in Ohio this morning to vote yes on issue 1. And I’ll be voting this way when I’m as old, wrinkly, and bald as any of those fuckers.
Age doesn’t make monsters. Monsters just get older.
“Frustrating” doesn’t feel like a strong enough word. Enraging, maybe. Lord knows we need more anger at them in this country than the quiet shrugging many people seem to have adopted.
I’ve been saying it for months now: note the language on the YouTube ad-blocker messages.
It’s not “Please turn off ad blockers”, it’s “Ad-blockers are not allowed”.
They’re not asking, they’re not being polite, they’re not trying to coax you, or imply the site won’t work if you leave the ad-blockers on.
They’re drawing a line. They’re telling you, from this point forward, they are the authority and they are declaring ad-blockers as verboten.
That language is extremely telling, and it signals a very troubling future for the web, because the rest of the internet is going to follow their lead on this. As soon as Google provides them the means to enforce this authority, they will.
"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
The bottom line is, they started something that’s bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.
I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.
After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it’s own without the creator’s direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.
That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.
Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can’t be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.
I don’t like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn’t Mozilla, it’s the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.
What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.
They need money. That’s it. That’s the long and short of it.
I’ll just point out this isn’t only an Android issue.
If there any IT person here who has had to direct an employee to download the Microsoft authenticator app from the iPhone App Store, you’ve almost certainly seen that it promotes a deceptively similar looking authenticator above the Microsoft one, and you have to make sure the user knows not to download it.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
Xbox users booting up their console today were greeted with a large splash screen prompting them to buy it now that the new campaign is out, and some of them aren’t too happy about it.
I don’t think it’s that big of a deal if it’s an event or 1p release but I can see why people wouldn’t like it tbh,
For the love of all things holy, can you people, for once in your lives, oppose something on principle? This weak-ass justification, this “it ain’t that bad” shit is exactly why we end up with something far worse in a few years. They count on this.
Do you know what Microsoft learned from the Xbox One launch? They didn’t learn not to be anti-consumer, they just learned that they need to do so slowly and gradually. The mistake they made was going too hard too fast, and creating kickback. They learned to implement little things, the things that “aren’t that bad”. And then another one a few months later. And another one after that.
It’s called boiling a frog. It works because of the average person’s passivism.
So please, I’m begging you, think forward. Develop some pattern recognition. Stop downplaying the minor things just to be contrarian and defend a billion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism.
Google has abandoned the “Web Environment Integrity” API that was supposed to allow websites to only allow approved and verified browser environments. The plan would allow websites to reject browser or even OS modifications that were “unattested” for the purpose of supposedly stopping bots, piracy, ad-blocking, and other...
Firefox 121.0 released (www.mozilla.org)
So non-conformist (lemmy.world)
Compendium of human knowledge at my fingertips (lemmy.world)
Google is working on message editing feature in Google Messages - TheSpAndroid (thespandroid.blogspot.com)
What are some uBlock Origin filters you're using to make the internet nicer to use?
Here are some of mine, see my cross-post’s comments for more...
Can't outsmart your teacher (telegra.ph)
Mod That Makes ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Less Gay Gets Nuked After Players Revolt (www.vice.com)
You don't need to watch my six. It's already covered (files.catbox.moe)
I can't wait to play tonight [Clueless Hero] (startrek.website)
"Bored" by War and Peas (lemmy.world)
All the links...
The magic starship (startrek.website)
Banksy on Advertising [Zen Pencils] (lemmy.sdf.org)
LineageOS is currently installed on 1.5 million Android devices (9to5google.com)
YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
Strange times... (lemmy.world)
Berry Club by J.L. Westlover (@mrlovenstein)
It's not fair (startrek.website)
(sorry if anyone got this post twice. I posted while Lemmy.World was down for maintenance, and it was acting weird, so I deleted and reposted)
Yes, also Teslas (media.mastodon.scot)
Hey Buddy (feddit.de)
Youtube Depends on Ads to work (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)
Seriously launched the app (by accident today) and what is this? They’re trying to play the victim from the big bad ad blockers saying all they’re doing is trying to show an ad at the beginning of video, and then I see all of this crap....
OK Microsoft... trying to log into Teams while work lapop updates to Windows 11. No longer works in any iPhone browser, including Edge. The app will not authenticate my work login. (lemmy.world)
Update…Per Microsoft’s instructions, disabled all tracking protections in Safari and requested desktop mode and it works. Their instructions say turn protections back on after using teams… 😐...
Google and major mobile carriers want Europe to regulate Apple's iMessage platform (www.engadget.com)
The long fight to make Apple’s iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union’s Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires...
Rockstar Games regarding Grand Theft Auto VI (twitter.com)
We are very excited to let you know now that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you....
Abortion Rights: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (www.youtube.com)
Chrome not proceeding with Web Integrity API deemed by many to be DRM (9to5google.com)
Revert
Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon (techcrunch.com)
"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
Does Google Inserting Deceptively Placed Ads in the Play Store seem icky to anyone else? (i.imgur.com)
They’ve started inserting a subtle ad as the first result instead of the actual app you’re searching for....
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers (www.androidauthority.com)
cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android)
Xbox consoles getting full-screen ad (www.ign.com)
Xbox users booting up their console today were greeted with a large splash screen prompting them to buy it now that the new campaign is out, and some of them aren’t too happy about it.
Google abandons “Web Environment Integrity” (simplifiedprivacy.com)
Google has abandoned the “Web Environment Integrity” API that was supposed to allow websites to only allow approved and verified browser environments. The plan would allow websites to reject browser or even OS modifications that were “unattested” for the purpose of supposedly stopping bots, piracy, ad-blocking, and other...