https://www.patreon.com/Orioto

Might just be a me thing, but this guy puts out a new wallpaper almost every week and they’re all amazing. The higher tiers allow you to participate in choosing the next wallpaper, but they’re mostly for 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p. Buying in once gets you the whole lot of everything he’s done until now.

No offense to the creators, but the art styles being employed here are wholly inconsistent. I’m certain that there is a load of hard work going into this, but it just seems like one of those Skyrim ENB packs where mods from all sorts of various sources have been thrown together and each of them has a different aesthetic ideal driving them so the end result is a presentation that has really high production quality, but it has like 60 really high production qualities and they don’t congeal into a cohesive whole.

All the best regardless, but the DMCA fairy is probably going to leave a letter for them soon. The first rule of Nintendo Fan Remake Club is that you don’t talk about Nintendo Fan Remake Club until after you’ve got a finished product up as a Torrent.

I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it.

My apologies if I implied that you did, that was not my intent.

But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. […] I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.

Sorry, that was my point though, without the tracking, you’re not getting YouTube, or most of Google’s services as we know them. The Google secret sauce is that they know enough about their users to curate an experience per user. That’s largely why competitors to Google services rarely take off, the competitors lack enough individual user knowledge to make an experience that is better than what Google can offer for most users.

The services more or less are what they are because of the breadth of what and how Google knows to shape the experience for an individual, and that’s why Workspace accounts still track what they do. Google would be providing their paying customers with a lesser experience if they genericized everything you’re interacting with in those content related services due to a lack of learned data and behaviors per user. Which is probably not what the average user wants if I had to guess?

Heck, even paid YouTube Premium still needs your tracking data or it’s just going to show you whatever popular rage bait is trending day to day with the general public? Or maybe just an unfiltered firehose of all the hours of nonsense that is uploaded every minute to the platform? I guess you could treat it as a whitebox video hosting site, but where does the money come from if YouTube can’t make guarantees to advertisers that their ads will be seen by people who might care about the ad, and how do the content creators make money if YouTube can’t get advertisers on board, and who is making interesting content if they have to pay to host it themselves because advertisers aren’t paying that cost for them? I think my point is that if you pull the tracking and user knowledge out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing just crashes down.

I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It’s why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don’t care about.

An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they’re targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I’m not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they’re not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I’d consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.

I think there’s a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I’ll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don’t sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they’d be killing the golden goose. So long as they’re contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I’m good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I’m running Firefox/uBlock.

That said, if you don’t want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won’t get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn’t hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that’s what you’d get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn’t worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?

if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.

It’s called Google Workspace and it’s decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it’s pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don’t track your preferences so they don’t have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.

I’ve been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it’s shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.

Happened today, and for those with governments that actually regulate (the EU) his AltStore is also up.

I am so glad, that there is no chance of ever meeting one in my country

Lucky 😆

Very true. Perhaps my statement which continued on beyond what you quoted didn’t make it clear, but I did point out what you said: “You’ve got brakes, but you’re without any of the assistance that the car normally provides” as well as stating later that you’ve got “naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle” both of which were intended to say that it’s pretty hard to brake in most cars these days without power brakes.

I don’t know how the Cybertruck breaks down on the easy <-> difficult manual braking spectrum, but I imagine that given the high gross vehicle weight and large wheels, it probably steers more towards the difficult end of the spectrum than the easy. Such a dumpster fire of a vehicle.

One has already been pulled, though seemingly for unrelated copyright issues?

That said, I’m surprised that things have gotten to this point, I suppose time will tell once the property holders get involved how committed Apple is to this whole change, there’s still a lot of room to interpret the clause about conforming to all laws for the content that is being run in the app.

Given that I didn’t think ANY emulators would make it into the Appstore, I’m going to retract my position. However, I think that we’re still in the “Fuck around” stage of things and there may yet be some “Find out” to come.

It is a ridiculously proven and safe technology.

In Planes, where there are 3 or more levels of redundant power and hydraulic systems with an ability to fail down to a limited mechanical operation mode if all the other backup systems fail. It’s proven because they designed it with a stupid level of failsafes.

There’s no redundant power in the Tesla Drive By Wire system, if the power is cut, you lose the ability to steer. You’ve got brakes, but you’re without any of the assistance that the car normally provides. It’s so fucking stupid I can’t believe it’s allowed on the road. If anything goes wrong that cuts power while you’re in motion, you’re suddenly captive in 3.3 tons of stainless steel without crumple zones, without the ability to steer, with naught but your unaided foot on the brake peddle to determine your outcome. It’s nothing like the multiple layers of failures you’d have to endure to find yourself in trouble in a plane both for the power and the hydraulics.

OpenCV may be fairly set for purpose for your needs already. If you could train the Cascade classifier (See: https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/d88/tutorial_traincascade.html) with enough data of what constitutes your dog in the garden, you’d be able to string a video feed through a script and have it trigger audio playback whenever it identifies the naughty doggo. (See: https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/db/d28/tutorial_cascade_classifier.html)

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser’s have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I’ve wanted it without delay or failure? None. I’ve owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don’t think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don’t have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you’re in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can’t get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it’s “backwards rhetoric” to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that’s just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It’s why anything that doesn’t have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it’s just more reliable and often more efficient. That’s not backwards, it’s just a priority that you don’t value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they’d still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don’t weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

Agree to disagree.

Dolphin requires JIT compilation and that is still verboten under these new guidelines.

Further, the rule change says that these apps are allowed to “Download” ROMs, it doesn’t say that they can just play anything they want, it in fact says that they have to provide an index of everything their software might run and where it is downloaded from. The rules are not going to allow emulators as we know and love them. It says specifically that the software offered under the guidelines must be offered via In App Purchases, so in all,

A) Emulators can exist

B) They can download ROMs

C) You have to comply with all applicable laws while you offer an emulator that allows people to download ROMs ಠ_ಠ

D) “Software offered in apps under this rule must: use in-app purchase in order to offer digital goods or services to end users.”

Which in whole means that they’ve allowed (for example) Sega to offer an Emulator app that will run ROMs of games that Sega owns, but they have to sell the ROMs to you individually via IAPs.

Feel free to read their guidelines at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#third-party-software, because there isn’t any way in my reading to interpret those rules as allowing something like Higan to exist on the app store, the new rules are such a narrow carve out that it’s hard to imagine that anyone is able to provide an emulator for iOS any time soon. They’ve opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn’t need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it’s business as usual for Apple.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

It depends. In the early days of the Android ROM scene, Twitter was the best place for news. Cyanogen and all the crews basically announced their new releases exclusively on Twitter. There has been a similar vibe for other scenes over the years as well. Discord is largely taking over that space these days, but I miss the simplicity of following one or two people whose updates I cared about a bunch over the new reality where I’m in 30 Discords and they’re all chock full of notifications for endless nonsense I care nothing about.

They did

It’s a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.