Yeah, Adventure 2 Battle topped the original in most ways tbh. I wish it had more variety in the playable characters, (Adventure 1 had Big, Gamma, and Amy, for instance).) But I understand that they wanted to create a sort of mirror/parity between the light and dark storylines so they gave both sides the same three gameplay styles, instead of having six distinct playstyles.

Same with any media, really. Lots of people idolize old music in a “they don’t make it like they used to” way, purely because the bad music didn’t get replayed often enough to enter the zeitgeist.

The problem with Stremio is that it relies on torrents, but only caches the content you’re watching. Essentially, it puts you into a permanent leecher mode, and rarely contributes any meaningful seeding because the content is deleted shortly after you’re done watching it.

Stremio users are the libertarians of the piracy world. They’re staunchly independent, but also completely reliant on the infrastructure that seeders have set up and maintain. They want all of their content available conveniently, without actually putting in any of the “pay it forward” work that piracy relies on to stay healthy.

Essentially, if everyone used Stremio, nobody would be able to use Stremio. Stremio is only possible because of the people who actually seed.

I went to high school with at least six. I say “at least” because those are just the four I know about. Two killed people with their car, three went into the military right after graduating and did combat tours. Talking with them afterwards, it was clear they had 100% seen combat and killed people. And the last just straight up shanked a dude at a local fast food place during a drug deal.

You’re just looking for genres. Your comment is a little like saying “when I want to listen to music, I don’t want acoustic guitar. That instrument shouldn’t be called music.”

Yeah, my smart TVs are the noisiest devices on my network, by far. In a day of heavy usage where I’m doomscrolling and constantly scrolling past ads, my phone may log ~2500 blocked requests. My Roku and Samsung TVs both average around 7000 blocked requests per day, even when we haven’t used them at all. That’s a request to their data-harvesting and ad servers getting blocked every ~12 seconds, even when they’ve been turned “off” all day.

I mean, that’s more than reasonable. The video poster made over 13k in ad revenue and merch sales, against the person’s wishes. Imagine if someone made you go viral, and then sold merch with your name and face on it. It’s a privacy nightmare.

Rephrased
BREAKING NEWS!:
62% of republicans believe Trump is hiding Epstein ties, but still actively support him.

A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.

I have a similar story… But first off, you can do that directly through the pihole’s UI. No need to set up custom DNS stuff just for her. Just create an empty blocklist, and assign her devices to only use that list. Multiple blocklists are also handy if you have kids, because you can set things like porn blocklists, and only assign them to the kids’ devices. So you can still jork it when you want, without the kids being able to accidentally stumble across anything.

I have a basic blocklist for guests as well, which is the default list for any new device that connects to my guest network. It selectively blocks some of the more invasive BS but doesn’t block some of the more “this will make things on your device stop working” trackers, like how some Google devices refuse to work unless you allow their trackers.

I’m pretty sure you can even set lists to default based on an IP range? Like if you have multiple subnets for different VLANs, you can set a default list (or lists) for each VLAN. So like you can have an IoT VLAN with a default “stop phoning home, I just want to be able to cast to you” type of blocklist. Then your guest VLAN can have its own default list. And your personal devices can have their own list as well. I haven’t personally dug into that yet, but it’s on my list of future projects.

My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.

It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…

We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.

What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”

Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.

In most cases, you’d want a block to go both directions. Imagine you’re being stalked by a user. In its current implementation, blocking that user won’t stop the stalking, because they can still see and interact with your posts. You simply won’t be able to see their interactions. If they comment on your post, you won’t see it because you have them blocked. But your block does not prevent them from seeing, voting on, or commenting on your post.

Essentially, lemmy’s current block function works more like a mute. When you “block” someone, you’re just muting their interactions so you don’t see the harassment. But it doesn’t actually stop them from harassing you. It just ensures you can’t see it to stay on top of it. To use the earlier stalker example, what if they’re amping up their stalking and have started doxxing you, and you’re completely oblivious because you’re not seeing their responses to your posts?

I’ve literally heard coworkers mention the whole “I actually don’t want a raise because my taxes would go up and I’d make less” bullshit before. I do what I can to redirect them when I hear it, but some people are extremely dug into their worldview and don’t want to be helped. Like acknowledging a progressive tax rate would require acknowledging that their entire concept of income and taxation is built on a lie.

That just means you’re not paying taxes on the income. It’s not like you get the entire $700 back in taxes, because your tax rate probably isn’t 100%. If you pay 30% in taxes, (no clue what you actually pay), writing off the $700 would simply mean you pay $210 less on your taxes.

They already do. Paid parking is a thing in pretty much every city in America. In many places, parking lots are wildly profitable. Each parking spot can often earn upwards of $50 per hour during surges.

Paid parking lots in Dallas average somewhere around $8 per hour. That’s with some people paying like $30 for three hours, or $60 for all-day parking. Assuming a ~50% occupancy (busy during the day, emptier overnight) will have a 100 spot lot taking home around $9600 per day.

That’s a number that many coffee shops and convenience stores could only dream of… And the lot doesn’t even need to worry about things like maintaining inventory or hiring cashiers. Their overhead costs are basically nonexistent. They just plop a sign with a QR code at the entrance for people with Apple/Google Pay, and have an automated card reader for the people who don’t have phones. A pair of minimum wage attendants can watch multiple lots in a few city blocks, golf carting between them every ~20 minutes as they make the rounds to scan license plates and make sure people are paid up. Maybe give the attendant who calls in the most tows an extra vacation day each quarter to keep them “motivated”.

Security cameras make limiting your security liability easy. Hell, in many cases tow truck companies will even pay the owner to be allowed to tow from their lots. Because the tow company makes money every single time they snag a car, so they’ll pay a percentage of that to be allowed to tow cars from their lots. So towing enforcement actually makes you money instead of being an expense.

I mean yeah, the poverty line is unrealistically low. It’s tied to the average annual price of food, even though food is not a major expense in most impoverished households. Truly broke people are spending like five dollars a day on food, with beans, rice, lentils, bouillon, spices, and whatever else they happen to have available/find on sale in a 20 year old crockpot. Food is a negligible expense when you take the time to prep, and truly impoverished people don’t have a choice. They’re forced to prep, or else they’ll starve.

The other costs, like rent, car payments, utilities, etc., have all massively ballooned in comparison to the price of food. Rent only used to account for ~20% of expenses, but now it often accounts for over 50%… But since the poverty line is tied directly to food, it hasn’t adjusted to maintain a realistic measure of expenses.

While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.

But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.

Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.

Personal projects. Not everything has to be FOSS. My tiny little script to automate my lights turning green and my smart speaker playing All-Star by Smash Mouth at full volume, so I can jork it in peace? That shit doesn’t need to be public.

I agree that it should be heavily regulated, and kids shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised access… But I disagree with why Putin banned it. It’s just anti-LGBT propaganda on Putin’s part.

Fun fact: Lemmy’s mod log is public. Here is the log for .world, filtered by that user:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=19175986

FWIW, Plappa works really well on iOS. It’s not the official ABS app, but it was obviously designed around ABS. It has all of the features as the official app, without the whole “try every month to get into the TestFlight beta, because TestFlight hard caps the user count” BS.