he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻
Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.
They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.
I’ve been using Kagi for 2 months and swear by it. It might feel silly paying for a search engine, but I’m now the customer instead of the product, and I can customize my searches the way I want.
It’s specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.
On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.
I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn’t know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.
Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.
Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.
Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There’s only one set of games I still have easy access to – Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I’m sure none of them work. But any game I’ve bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.
Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there’s a new one.
My point is that, if someone really leverages the power of AWS, it is entwined into their software stack to such an extent that it is not just a service anymore. It’s a platform. It’s the glue that keeps everything together. The lines between service and proprietary software blur real quick. It’s one of the reasons for the AGPL.
Everything in development involves risk, and products will move real slow if you don’t depend on someone for some services. But developers aren’t very good at risk management, not being reliant on a single service to butter your bread. It is very quick to bring a minimum value product to market on AWS, but the followup to that MVP needs to be moving to a more sustainable, less risky infrastructure.
The vendor lock in from AWS doesn’t come from just using EC2 servers. EC2 is just linux servers, like you say. You could run them anywhere. In fact, if you’re just running AWS EC2 servers without leveraging their other features, particularly auto-scaling, you’re probably just setting money on fire. Everything EC2 offers can be done much cheaper at a different host.
The AWS lock-in comes when you expand to their other services. Route 53 DNS, Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, etc etc. AWS offers a ton of different services that are quite useful, and they add new ones all the time. And if your company uses a bunch of them, and then realizes they need to leave AWS, doing so is incredibly painful. Which is the point.
Spoiler: it fits very few company’s business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that “don’t be evil” promise, and most any other, is void.
This. After my first Android phone I had only gotten Nexus phones. I had a Nexus 6p when the Pixel was announced, and it wasn’t going to have a headphone jack. I tried multiple dongles with my Nexus 6p, and none of them both reliably worked with my headphones and fast charged my phone. My wife ordered a Pixel, I ordered a Note 9.
I’ve gone Note 9, then a One Plus Nord v10, and now an Asus ZenFone 9. Every time a manufacturer ditched the headphone jack (or made it only available at ludicrous price), I just switched manufacturers. I don’t even use a headphone jack that often, but when I need it I want it to be there and just work.
When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.
I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.
For note, this is an option on Kbin. You can go to /d/thedomain.com and block the whole domain
Someone played too much True Crime: Streets of LA
If there’s a crime in progress in the area, let’s say a little old lady getting mugged, you can either:
Either way, you get points for it and the message “Crime successfully resolved”
I use kbin.social mostly because I liked the interface better and I wanted to be contrary, and if I ever self-host it, I’m much more familiar with PHP than Rust.
I setup a Mastodon instance at leftist.network back in 2020, when I was worried that the COVID/Trump situation was going to quickly transition into something more serious. Besides Jan 6th that didn’t happen, but hey, it was a cool domain for people to join when Twitter started tanking!
But the thing is, I never really used Twitter. My social media was Facebook and reddit. Both of them for the discussion groups (Facebook isn’t boring if all your friends are gay communists). Mastodon didn’t quite scratch the itch, mostly because there’s nothing like Facebook groups or subreddits. I had looked at Lemmy before, but there wasn’t a big enough user base to really move over.
I looked up kbin and lemmy with the reddit diaspora, and they fit both social media fixes. Most communities are on Lemmy, but I like kbin’s interface more. I just want kbin to add the feature to hide upvoted posts.
I’m a little dismayed that more and more stuff is moving to Discord though. I was an IRC regular back in the day, but I could never quite deal with Discord’s 24/7 conversation to try to keep up with.
Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.
Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.