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  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • it’s not really subjective, having a drm free download is like owning the thing, having it on steam is like borrowing it from someone fairly trustworthy, and having it on epic is like borrowing it from an asshole

    you’re on a decentralised, federated social media website. why are you arguing that more centralisation is a good thing? the comparison you’re making is nonsense. you don’t need to download an app or sign up for an account to listen to music drm free or to play drm free copies of games. you download the thing at the point of purchase and then you own it and you can do whatever you want with it. and that includes launching it from steam, which I do with a lot of my drm free games



  • as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams

    the company, Google, that you are paying, didn’t make the videos, doesn’t fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage

    people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate

    get real



  • I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs

    but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it’s a soulless corporate husk of what it one was


  • I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

    after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

    I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

    my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad








  • The fact that book-readers don’t like the TV show isn’t some failure to conceptualise on their part - it’s because Foundation is a below-average TV show and a terrible book adaptation. The Foundation series is an examination of the social and political forces that shape society on the scale of millions of people and hundreds of years. But none of the science and politics that underpins Foundation comes through in the TV adaption. In the books, Hari Seldon is just a scientist, but in the show he becomes more like magic wizard man\Jesus allegory, while Salvor Hardin (who is mostly a politician in the books) ends up as a low-rent space action hero.

    The fact that the series doesn’t directly follow the books isn’t the problem, because a 1:1 adaption of the book probably wouldn’t make for good TV, it would feel dated and dry. I generally like it when an adaption has a new, original spin on the material. The problem is, Foundation isn’t a good show on its own terms, it’s a shallow-but-flashy science fiction soap opera with thin characters and an overarching plot mostly driven by pointless mystery boxes and stupid coincidences. It never engages with the political and sociological ideas presented in the novels, but it also provides no new ideas to replace them. The whole experience feels empty and meaningless.

    In your post, you don’t just say that you like it, you’re actually implying that you think the people who prefer the books are wrong, and that they have a lesser understanding of the material than you. So I ask you: what is the foundation TV show actually about?


  • I think I’m a bit of a dinosaur, but I’ve been making all of my notes in Zim for over 10 years. It’s not much to look at but I find the hierarchical wiki structure easy to navigate, and most of the functionality (todo lists, equations, version control integration, etc) is implemented by simple plugins.

    in my opinion, a lot of these programs are too complicated - I tried Joplin for a while but I ended up spending more time organising my notes than I did making them.