Beefalo

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Sir the rest of us were ignoring the mission trying to see how many cops could chase us at once and also how many of them we could murder when we let them catch up. Then they went online with it and people started wearing the game like a suit.

That may explain things.

I feel like it’s two separate markets that are forced to share the same big tent known as “gaming”.

I never play AAA games. I’m not on some moral crusade, they just don’t appeal. I do not have the twitch reflexes for FPS, but smaller devs tend to make the sort of gameplay I like.

Right now the only indy game I can think of that’s truly competitive is Battlebit, and that’s only because everyone hates what became of Battlefield. Otherwise it’s just me and what feels like a half dozen other weirdos out here trying to build a bakery so we can feed pie to harpies, while 90% of the world is playing COD like it’s their job. It’s two vastly different people who do not have the same needs, is what I’m saying.

So maybe people need to deal with that and stop honking the “play indy” horn so much. If that was the solution, people would already be on it.

Gotta love running that bag full of money to the bank at the end of the night. They know you’ve got it, too. They know exactly when to expect the manager to leave for the bank. Late at night, after close, in some shit neighborhood.

That’s how you get this door.

Even an Atari 2600 was too expensive for the average family in 1982, about $1000 in today money. The 80s were not a great economy for most people, Reagan’s fuckery and I believe really high interest rates thanks to 70s inflation meant that even the cheapest home console was wildly unreasonable. It was 1982. Colecovision was on shelves. Television was still a very pricey home luxury in 1982, not a universal yet, so never mind the game console. The VCR wasn’t really a thing yet. People were still using radio a lot at home. You could afford radio.

Video games looked like they were always going to cost too much money to see really mainstream adoption. That thought isn’t even wrong, people just try harder to find the $1000 for a new console now, because it offers more. Sharon thought video games looked like shit, and she was right, they did. They didn’t look exciting, they just looked like a weird side technology.

For her, video games were a thing in a dark corner of the amusement park, they were literally Pong, and cost quarters to play, 80 cents today, for a five-minute experience or a lot less.

Pac-Man was the current gold standard of games in 82. Did kids like it? Sure. But remember Pogs? Fidget spinners? Those snap bands for your wrist? How many things have been wildly popular with children and then into the trash they go, forever? Did Pac-Man look like something that nobody would ever grow tired of, forever? Or did it look like an excuse to sell toys? Because it very much was, they sold a lot of Pac-Man toys and merch about it, just like the 80s cartoons that faded into obscurity once they were also done selling toys.

Sharon didn’t have a lot of evidence before her that would show any other outcome. She couldn’t see 2023 while staring down at the Pac-Man quarter muncher at the local pizza shop in 82. It’s miserable, because a proper fad and the wave of the future both look the same in the present.

Sharon was a “word processor” in 82, she was well ahead of the curve, working with computers - or at least their precursors - when most people hadn’t even seen one. Somebody shoves a mic in your face, asks for a quote, and you give them an opinion, which haunts your fuckin ghost decades later. Maybe five years later she thinks oh, I was wrong on that, but it’s too late now.

This is why we don’t try to predict the future any more than we have to. Today’s information is never good enough.

The Ford F650 is part of a platform that, as you can see, is heavy-duty enough that you can put a proper dump bed on the back. It can be built many different ways, and the way that Ford will sell the vast majority of these trucks is that it will sell a cab and empty frame to another company, who will then build something else around it, some sort of heavy-duty thing that will see quite a lot of professional use, probably off-road more often than not. The massive ground clearance will look a lot more appropriate when this truck ends up where it belongs.

These things end up with buckets on the back, and used for powerline maintenance, or the entire back end becomes a steel locker for a bunch of welding and fabrication equipment. Once it is specced out properly, the size of it will make sense.

This model of truck is large and serious enough to also come with a proper, grown up diesel engine comparable to other heavy equipment engines in both weight and general durability. That it is the true purpose of the Ford F650, it is big and heavy enough to accept a respectable diesel engine for a proper dump truck, not the little baby diesels in the F150s, but one that is probably not available in anything smaller, a diesel that will actually last for 1 million km if maintained. It won’t even be a Ford engine, it will probably be a Cummins or another brand common in American heavy equipment, not passenger cars.

I am not trying to flex when I say this thing isn’t a toy. The transmission for it probably isn’t available in any other Ford pickup. They’re too small. Most of them will not spend a lot of time in the commuter lane, they’ll be on job sites all day. Even Americans don’t really drive the truck in the picture. The thing is in a class by itself.

Ford may as well sell a civilian version in case any Texas oil boys want the biggest truck on the block, but that just means adding a pickup truck bed to it, which goes with the rest of the cab in front. It certainly looks ridiculous. But somebody will want it to pull a really long horse trailer, so the bed back there is just a place to install a fifth wheel, the attachment point for a goose neck trailer. The owner will probably be somebody with a successful contracting business, somebody who can justify this thing as a proper business expense, since their other vehicle will say Caterpillar on it somewhere and has to also be towed on a trailer from job site to job site.

That is what the Ford F650 is for, and can do, it tows other heavy equipment around on public roads. It looks a lot less ridiculous with a skid loader and heavy trailer behind it. Park it next to a piece of proper construction equipment and it looks like a baby toy. It is small by heavy equipment standards, so that makes it maneuverable on construction sites.

The size of the current F150, the truck meant for average office workers to buy, that is the problem. It is unreasonable and no longer even fit for its original utility purpose. The modern F150 is too big, too expensive, and too cushy to be a farm truck, or a work truck on a job site. It is extremely common, overtall, and perfect for killing pedestrians.

The size of this thing, the F650, is not actually an issue. It is huge for defensible reasons, and it just looks crazy when you try to spec it out for civilian pickup use, because that’s fuckng crazy. It looks striking in the marketing material, for sure. We’re discussing the beast right now. Victory achieved for the marketing guy who insisted on offering this spec. Now even the Germans are aware of the truck.

But, oops, I can only assume that this entire “fuck cars” community is just the online version of those Just Stop Oil pricks, it’s all the idea of some PR firm who want to make public transport advocacy look like a position for shitty assholes with no respect for the needs of others. So I assume you don’t care about a proper explanation. I didn’t realize I was here when I started typing. Too late now.

I wish Reddit would stay on Reddit, instead of growing into completely different websites like some sort of mold. But anyway, the F650 is not actually a problem.

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.

I think you’re expecting some women to show up and argue with you like this is drive time FM radio with Wacky Bob the DJ but all you’re going to get is dudes trying to act like they won because they get mad at the word hygiene and piss on the seat when they leave just to spite you.

Yes, when they leave. They won’t put the lid down without a gun to their heads, but they’ll hold one last bit of tinkle just for you.

This joke needs a more appropriate venue, is what I’m saying . Nobody here actually cares about the subject.

And then he drew a picture of a huge woman with a huge ass and drew himself crawling up her leg like some kind of horny worm

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.

Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?

Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn’t doing half bad, financially, maybe they’ll bring tapes back.

It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old “sign the EULA or lose everything” bullshit and it’s just not working for them. Too bad we can’t kick them in the dick like other nations can.

“set to run out”

Source? Man I wish Lemmy could have developed its own culture without every miserable thing from r/All coming in here to peddle the usual toxic negativity from Reddit.

Worthless ass Twitter repost

They’re expecting you to have a mount for your wall, already installed, even, from the last TV. So the legs are an afterthought, they’re cheap, easy to remove and you’ll probably toss them, they know. So they’re enough to use for store display, no more.

Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.

Well we know that, but anybody who does anything less than clap and sing about it gets treated like trash by the huge wave of people who immediately trusted the crazy thing with their lives. It’s the fucking iPhone all over again. So hooray for AI.

That’s how you sell monkey pictures my man now let’s all go do coke until we get divorced, Leo will be there

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

“I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.

Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.