As always this is a pointless announcement.

“We’ve stomped out 7 of the 800,000,000 websites hosting illegal roms. We will pat ourselves on the back because there is a big number involved and one or two was a “big player” but that vacuum will be filled almost immediately by one of the countless sites left behind. We have wasted millions of your tax dollars to enact the vengeance of nintendo/sony/etc with the illogical nonsense that this is theft when the overwhelming majority of people who pirate media would have never purchased the media otherwise. But this allows us to justify wasting your money by saying we prevented hundreds of millions of dollars of theft.”

Is a more accurate version

For your question: honestly the best source in my opinion is a private torrent tracker (like GGn, but you’d need an invite or to join another site that has openings/interviews and an invite forum which usually is hidden until you’ve been around for awhile and have seeded/downloaded a decent amount)

The much easier faster way is just sites like http://nxbrew.net/ but these get taken down from time to time

Vanity paper, author just wanted to go on about Naruto and their dissertation topic. Any media franchise would work and the paper could be written in a more generalized manner as a result that would probably be more helpful instead of some weebs gushing about an (overrated) franchise

Case in point: in the works cited there is another paper from the author about how Naruto helped them understand CMT better from 2 year prior to this publication. Just a weeb shoehorning that shit in. At least shoehorn in the superior stereotypical shonen (dbz)

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1

This study released last year based on samples from cadavers suggests there’s enough in your brain to make a plastic spoon

IRC depends on channel and time of day

Some channels are pretty active

The issue is that there is a push to make these machines act as social partners and in some extremely misguided scenarios therapists

But if you don’t add that:

[list of tallest bridges]

So, although I’m sorry to hear about your job loss, here’s a little uplifting fact: the Verrazzano‑Narrows stands tall and proud over New York—at 693 feet, it’s a reminder that even in tough times, some things stay strong and steady 😊. Want to know more about its history or plans for visiting?

I believe they are aiming for convergence with AR OS UI and that the widely panned vision pro is something they have much more planned for over the next 10 years

basically the vision pro is the newton, and in 5-10 years when an AR device that looks much closer to glasses than ski goggles with a huge external battery pack and costs closer to $1000 than $3500 (or who knows, maybe $3500 is more normalized as a phone price by then ha) those will be akin to the iphone

If they pull it off it will be a big deal (assuming no one beats them to it, though clean software is very meaningful). It won’t though unless apple changes their operating procedure. Typically they just throw out some pretty polished first party apps and a few key partnered 3rd party apps to show off features. Then they expect 3rd party devs to fill the gaps. This worked for the iphone because there was a built in base; I needed a phone and theirs was objectively better than the competition when it dropped.

But a 4 figure goofy pair of glasses? That’s the vision pro and VR problem all over again. Niche purchase for enthusiasts. If you get the price down to $1000 more people will buy it, sure, but not that many, I bet.

Umm physical buttons are nice and all but have you ever considered this point: fuck the blind.

(It’s actually because the touch panels are cheaper at scale than the extra parts involved plus manufacturing complexity of physical buttons. Buttons last significantly longer, are more durable, and are are more appropriate in a kitchen setting (where you may have wet/greasy fingers that won’t register correctly/at all on a capacitive touch panel) but they are more likely fail during assembly and simply cost more when you make 10,000+. Plus people love their “sleek” designs)

And that’s why your 2025 car is significantly more dangerous to drive than a 1998 ford taurus, where you could muscle memory the whole dashboard after like 2 hours of driving it. Eventually our whole world will be flat capacitive glass and require our gaze (and again, fuck the blind, I guess)

but what if you need to check the status of your grill from your living room? Did you ever think about that? Did you think about the horrors of not owning a $350 toaster that connects to your wifi so it can display the weather and will inevitably break in 2-3 years because its exponentially more complex than a $10 toaster

It’s basically the same thing as a ring fit adventure, a strain gauge, though research ones are far more sensitive

These things are used in really sketchy therapy like conversion therapy. They were also used in pedophilia treatment in the 90s which was basically conversion therapy to track outcomes, basically exactly as what’s written here (though they wouldn’t present actual illegal material, just risqué material like pictures of kids at the beach or something). Penile plethysmography is the area and it’s still practiced in some places, though it’s pretty controversial because they’re evaluating sex offenders for risk of recidivism and viability of release which is always inherently controversial and other more obvious reasons

Yeah!

from childhood my dad gave some consciousness. he was a Vietnam vet who was drafted against his will and was resentful of his experiences. He wasn’t necessarily versed in theory but he was as a result pretty fiercely anti war. He struggled with ptsd and health effects from agent orange exposure for the rest of his life. The second point stuck with me and with early Internet access I researched that very young. PTSD is kind of inherent to warfare but a poorly tested ecological weapon that is essentially chemical warfare because of how much cancer, birth defects, etc it causes? And then dropping propaganda on the country to claim it was safe even though scientists were protesting its use domestically? Starting to form the opinion the US is maybe a shithead state and not the “good guys”

High school was 9/11 and Iraq/Afghanistan which was a lot of firsts. Going into this was more of a traditional 90s counterculture “fuck the system” anarchist queer kid. The context of the times was different though; had friends who were shitheads. A lot more was tolerated then. 9/11 was shocking but also what prompted some of us to start researching what could’ve prompted such an attack and the history of imperialism. This led to lots of tension and some friend group fracturing as many buried their heads in the sand believing the attacks were out of spite (the gwb “they hate our freedom” narrative).

This is also around the time I became vegan, although admittedly I stopped for a brief period in my late 20s. That was around 16? Iirc. This was wholly for welfare reasons so i consider that politically informed

As an aside I remember my dad genuinely researching places to send me as the Iraq war started. I was about to turn 18 and he was terrified of another conscription. I had 2 friends from high school enlist and they were killed, I don’t know how to feel about it. I am sad they were exploited and destroyed for imperialist machinations so that they could pay for college, I guess. I am far more sad somewhere between 600,000-1,000,000 Iraqis were murdered.

Shaped from there, lots of reading, went to college and formed new social groups, internet matured, etc this is like 2005 era and when I start getting into reading various philosophers, the classic college freshman ones like Nietzsche and Sartre, then a ton more. Eventually that came into Marx and Engels, etc.

I struggled throughout life defining political concept. Anarchy felt wrong because especially the more i learned about logic and thought about it the state seemed inevitable but i also despise hierarchy. I do believe capitalism is inherently and deeply flawed and i do think communism is a superior model but it is still flawed because it ultimately relies on creating a system wherein some people are more important than others which opens the doors for corruption and avarice, which are part of human nature. I believe this is necessary though, at least for the foreseeable future, because while technology and automation could enable people to self govern we are not at a point where such technology can be deployed in a trustworthy state and protected from malicious actors. in the meantime literally any collaborative model would be a vast improvement. Why fight each other when we can work together? But with this last point I suppose I am preaching to the choir

In another post I wrote on this I encouraged the potential of 3rd party docks eventually happening

Thinking more on that I will say that nintendo probably did this because of third party docks damaging switches. I repaired a bunch of switches and a common issue I would see is a blown up pi3usb chip with often pcb damage leading to pin (iirc) 5. This was caused by cheap/shitty docks feeding too much power or incorrectly negotiating power delivery. It wasnt just like cheap AliExpress docks either, nyko, insignia(best buy), etc actual name brand docks would brick your switch.

Swapping the damaged chip for a good one would make the switch boot and work normally except it would only work in handheld mode. To work in dock mode you’d have to rebuild the damaged trace. Nintendo won’t do this; they would just replace the entire board, so to them this is a very costly repair (though tbf paying a tech labor to replace a chip and rebuild a trace is costly too as it’s much more skilled labor, requires more testing, and has a much higher potential for failure after repair)

That said I still think it’s a users right to use a third party dock if they so choose. Fuck nintendo. Though nyko should be on the hook to buy you a new switch if they design a piece of shit that wrecks your switch

Games suck now. Movies too. Culture in decline. We (millennials and gen x) got to see the art form (gaming and at least short form video on youtube and vimeo and stuff) evolve from studios owned by people who were passionate about the craft to the current state of big business making “safe” investments. It’s not that only bad games will ever come out from now on, indie studios exist and some big studios take chances, but there will always be a sea of remakes, remasters, endless sequels, generic safe garbage, etc

Also data is about 18-24 year old spending. I bet a lot of switch 2 purchases were by people 30+ for their kids

For the switch 2 it’s far more restrictive from the few videos I’ve seen where people have used flash carts and gotten banned. For one, a good deal of the games don’t exist on physical media even if you purchase physical copies. So an online ban means that if the console is ever reset for any reason those games are done. No updates obviously.

Though I do think some physical games will work without needing a digital “receipt” at least to activate and play, so you are correct in that the console isn’t entirely useless after being banned, just significantly limited in functionality and restricts you from playing a majority of your game library (even if 99% of those games have no online component)

That last point is the kicker for me. There should be regulation on this. If you’re sony/nintendo/microsoft and you’re pissed I modified my console and want to ban me because I might cheat online? Fine, I guess. If you want to ban me from making purchases because you’re afraid I spoofed the purchasing system? Ban me from making purchases, I guess. But you should never be able to ban me from redownloading titles I have purchased legitimately.

Frankly the 3ds freeshop fiasco (which, unlike switch freeshops that rely on external servers, was a system that spoofed nintendos purchase authentication ticketing system and allowed downloading directly from their servers) has likely made nintendo overly wary. The counterpoint to this though is that nintendo handled that situation terribly. The freeshop worked for years. They sent a dmca takedown almost immediately for the software but obviously people kept hosting copies. It took them almost 2 years to patch and at that point the 3ds was basically dead.

Imagine sony or microsoft in the same situation: their console is exploited with a softmod. They’re already probably working on a hardware revision to stop the softmod. But then an exploit comes out that allows modded users to download literally any game, update, or dlc from their servers, for free? They’d have that patched in weeks, maybe days (though tbf they’d probably also issue tons of bans here)

So essentially nintendo is overcorrecting because in the past they’ve made boneheaded security decisions and responded to people exploiting them like idiots. That’s not anyone’s fault but nintendos and it doesn’t mean they should be allowed to be super hostile to consumers. Fuck the switch 2

This is absolutely true. It’s called design-to-cost or design-to-spec. It’s not how every laptop is made but it’s how a lot of them are

Most companies will say “let’s make a $699 laptop built around amd ryzen with 15” display and 8gb ram” then engineerings job is to work around the constraints

That’s how you end up with plastic instead of aluminum casing, 60hz panel instead of 120, soldered ram, weirdly placed ports, etc

Some laptops are design first (macbook, framework, surface) but even these will have cost cutting measures to bring them to ideal price points

things I learned from repairing/refurbishing laptops as a hobby/way to save a ton of useful electronics from becoming ewaste/way to earn extra cash:

most laptops are designed atrociously bad. like from an electronics perspective but also from a casing perspective. This is the case regardless of your laptop being $300 or $3000 and it’s a mixture of planned obsolescence, idiotic design choices, poor material selection, and cost cutting

Sometimes it’s just a cheap laptop with very thin or brittle plastic that will inevitably wear down and start to break apart, especially if it’s used heavily. Lots of chromebooks were like this but even pricier stuff like the $6-900 acer nitro

Sometimes it’s got a weird material selection like a rubberized coating that wears away like the asus zephyrus ($1500-3000)

Sometimes the hinges are basically designed to fail and after a year the top half cracks apart in such a way that the casing needs to be entirely replaced or given a hideously ugly and not sturdy repair (basically every hp laptop ever ranging from hundreds to thousands)

Sometimes boards are given cost cutting measures that are paired with “security” measures that render repair impossible. If you have a macbook from ~2015-20 that was a cheaper model one of the cost cutting measures was to remove what’s called a TVS diode from the 3.3v and 1.8v nand power rails. A TVS diode, to oversimplify things, is to protect against power surges. So now when a power surge occurs on either of those lines instead of a TVS diode taking the hit and either clamp the excess or in extreme cases fail. In that case you’re replacing a 3 cent diode that takes 5 seconds to solder instead of a much more costly SSD that requires complex BGA rework. BUT here’s the kicker - apple also stores the firmware keys on the SSD which are paired to a chip called the t2. So once the ssd is dead you are fucked, only apple can restore it. I can reflash macos and efi partitions but without the firmware keys it won’t boot. Only option is an entirely new logic board. Also all your data is gone

It’s fucked now. We let tech bros win. Apple gets the heat but they’re not the only ones. Dell pairs ssds to their tpm module, pairs displays, webcams, fingerprint readers, etc. hp has whitelists for ssds and wan (meaning only “authorized” parts work) and pairs ssds. Lenovo has whitelists for wan cards. They’re all not as aggressive as apple and it’s not across all models but they’re testing the waters and clearly moving in that direction.

Even consoles now - ps5 and Xbox pairs optical drive (though Xbox can be done with some nonsense), switch pairs nand, all three will ban you from their network for fucking with the console.

Our world is designed to consume and waste.

More a sign that ranked choice voting allows people to choose for candidates that actually represent their interests which is why 13 states have already banned it and 3 more are working to ban it

Harris would do it with decorum. A classy bombing, and polite ice raids

the crowd the villain plays to is much easier to play to and extract money from