tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Apparently Bluesky lets you require a sign in to view a post 4 days ago:
I never moved to the new UI. I assume that users using the new UI is a combination of:
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Many, probably most of the existing userbase came in after the redesign – Reddit kept growing. Probably not even aware of it.
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A lot of users – especially today, though not back when the site was created – are browsing the site using a smartphone, and the old UI, while usable, is not designed around a small smartphone screen. (That’s a two-edged sword; to some extent, I think that the new UI is poorly suited to a personal computer.) That being said, Reddit, like many Web-based services, pushes hard to get mobile users on the official app – more access to a user’s computer and data-harvesting potential, I suppose – and I’d guess that a lot of smartphone users use the official app these days, rather than the mobile Web UI. I think that Reddit mostly sees the mobile Web UI as a way to help lower the bar to feed new users in, but that’s not where they want mobile users long-term.
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Reddit added inline images to the new UI, but not the old.
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There is a small amount of incompatibility…I’d have to go back and look it up, but IIRC backslash-URL-escaping for URLs just pasted into the text rather than using Markdown the
[]()link syntax has slightly different edge cases, so you can get a link that works in the old UI but not the new and vice versa.
I haven’t played with the new UI enough to know what didn’t make it over, but I don’t know if the subreddit wikis – each subreddit came bundled with a wiki – ever made it over. They weren’t accessible from the new UI when it came out.
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- Comment on Apparently Bluesky lets you require a sign in to view a post 4 days ago:
twitter is fucked and requires a login for everything,
They will show you a login screen at the home page. However. You can view specific tweets without an account. You can also view some content from a user.
You’re crippled important ways in that as far as I know, you can’t sort by reverse date order (to see a user’s recent tweets, which is kind of important), and AFAIK you can’t search, but you’re not completely blocked out.
Here’s Michael Kofman’s tweets:
And here’s a specific tweet of his:
- Comment on Apparently Bluesky lets you require a sign in to view a post 4 days ago:
The mobile website doesn’t let you view NSFW without using the Reddit app. You can bypass that by flipping your web browser to request desktop mode and viewing old.reddit.com too.
- Comment on Apparently Bluesky lets you require a sign in to view a post 4 days ago:
You can bypass that by just replacing “www.reddit.com” with “old.reddit.com”, which shows exactly the same content using the old Reddit UI, and has no more restriction than just clicking an “I am over 18” button.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 5 days ago:
So, having a pre-chilled and conveniently-available product can be nice when you’re away from home, but if this is for at home, have you ever considered just, you know, making a pitcher of your own drink with whatever you want? Maybe take a Thermos of the stuff chilled or iced if you’re on the go? I mean, if you want agave as your sweetener, then you can make a drink with just agave and then tweak it to however you want. Food-grade citric acid is a preservative – I have a bottle in the pantry. You can purchase all sorts of flavors.
Like, if you buy a premade good, then you can benefit from the R&D done by the company, but if you have extremely exacting demands that you feel no company is making, you can rage about it or just make what you want. In general, drinks have an enormous markup – I mean, you’re mostly buying water with a little flavoring and coloring – so you can have exactly what you want and it’ll probably be cheaper, too.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 5 days ago:
You can get plain old water in a can.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 5 days ago:
Stevia is not artificial you silly duck.
Not to mention that while it’s OP’s money, but at least in the US, natural and artificial sweeteners (or flavors) can be chemically-identical. I remember a bit…might have been from NPR Planet Money on a substance that literally could be obtained either way, but some people thought that artificial flavors were bad, so there was a market for companies to go out and (more-expensively) extract the thing so that they could make the food they made say “natural flavor” rather than “artificial flavor”. The designation is just a function of whether you synthesize or extract the thing, the manufacturing process. It doesn’t say anything about the actual content.
- Comment on Xbox Sales Hit Rock Bottom After Historic 2024 Decline 6 days ago:
I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.
Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:
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Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.
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The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.
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While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.
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Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.
There were some things that I did like. In particular:
- It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.
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- Comment on Turning my printer on v. turning it off 6 days ago:
If the cat is actively trying to push the power button, then that’s probably an issue – he can probably figure out how to flip up a cover and push the button beneath it. But OP says that he’s just accidentally stepping on it.
- Comment on Turning my printer on v. turning it off 6 days ago:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard
molly-guard
Etymology: From Molly (female given name) + guard.
Originally a Plexiglas cover improvised for the Big Red Switch on an IBM 4341 mainframe after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) tripped it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
Yeah, that’s another thing that bugs me about products that can be remotely-updated and which don’t currently represent an ongoing revenue stream. I think that it’s a broader problem, too.
I was kind of not enthusiastic when I discovered that TenCent bought Oxygen Not Included and started pushing data-harvesting updates into it via Steam. As things stand, that’s optional. But any company could do the same with other games and not have it be optional. If you figure that all the games out there that have already been sold aren’t actually generating revenue but do represent the option to push and execute code on someone’s computer, they have value to some other company that could purchase them and monetize that.
Then you figure that the same applies to browser extensions.
And apps on phones.
Like, if I buy a product, all I can do when I make my purchasing decision is to evaluate the product as it is at purchase time. If the vendor also has the ability and right to change that product whenever they want, then what I’m actually buying is a pretty big question mark.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
That would reduce fuel usage.
I bet that those ad guys haven’t even considered or promoted the fact that they can reduce carbon emissions.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
Clearly, the problem is that they went with a subscription model instead of an ad-supported model. Like, supposing that you’re allowed to turn on the seat heater, but then the car starts playing advertisements. Then they could offer a premium heat seater subscription if you want to buy an ad-free experience.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python
The group came to prominence for the sketch comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974.
No, I believe that that was paid for by the television tax in the UK, rather than interspersed advertisements, as probably most television is.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
See, they’re probably just framing it in negative terms. Just has to be presented in the right way.
www.telenav.com/…/why-in-car-advertising-works
Why In-Car Advertising Works
For over two decades, advertising has fueled the online and mobile world. What can it do for your car?
Advertising is worth it to the consumer.
In-car ads are a win-win for drivers and automakers.
In-car ads can also be rather helpful while on the drive.
As a matter of fact, a recent McKinsey Report [Monetizing Car Data, McKinsey & Company September 2016] indicates that most consumers would prefer ads for connected navigation service.
The way to think of it isn’t “ads come up whenever my car stops”, but “ads go away whenever it starts moving!”
Drivers will never see an ad while their vehicles are in motion. Ads automatically disappear whenever the car is moving or when users interact with other in-dash functions. For example, when a driver starts her vehicle, a relevant ad will appear on her dashboard. The moment the driver shifts into reverse to back out the driveway, the ad automatically disappears.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
This isn’t a new thing because even my decade old Toyota car with the SirusXM car radio automatically switches to the XM 1 radio station that advertises the SirusXM subscription service about once a month ever since I cancelled the subscription a year after the original three month one expired. Fuck that company and their monthly resubscribtion demand letters also!
Hmm. I think that this is maybe kind of a fundamental problem with buying something that you want to keep with attached hardware from a company with a subscription service that you don’t want.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 1 week ago:
Ah, just on the screen. If they had those HUD windshield projectors, they could put them on the windshield too. I mean, that’s pretty much just unused eyeball space!
- Comment on The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games 1 week ago:
Yeah, I was going to say, of all the things one might complain about…a lack of cloud saves and achievements?
- Comment on This guy decided to "redact" his comment which probably solved my issue 1 week ago:
- The text you wanted. Searched using Google to find the original URL, which you didn’t include, then grabbed the original text, courtesy of archive.org’s Wayback Machine:
web.archive.org/…/added_raid1_and_added_to_fstab_…
what does the grub2 boot line look like?
/boot is traditionally a separate partition, although it may not be required depending on how new your hardware is.
/boot/EFI must be its own partition and formatted vfat file system in EFI boot systems.
- There’s an xkcd for that:
- Comment on Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models. 2 weeks ago:
or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.
This guy might get a bill through that bans Chinese AI stuff, though I think that enforcement is gonna be a pain, but as per the text, this is banning all Chinese intellectual property, AI or not. That’s a nonstarter.
- Comment on Romance scammers are now in the fediverse 2 weeks ago:
Darn, and I was so sure that it was specifically me that these Polish chicks were interested in.
- Comment on Gemini wont talk about Bernie Sanders 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I still struggle to see the appeal of Chatbot LLMs.
I think that one major application is to avoid having humans on support sites. Some people aren’t willing or able or something to search a site for information, but they can ask human-language questions. I’ve seen a ton of companies with AI-driven support chatbots.
There’s sexy chatbots. What I’ve seen of them hasn’t really impressed me, but you don’t always need an amazing performance to keep an aroused human happy. I do remember, back when I was much younger, trying to gently tell a friend who had spent multiple days chatting with “the sysadmin’s sister” on a BBS that he’d been talking to a chatbot – and that’s a lot simpler than current systems. There’s probably real demand, though I think that this is going to become commodified pretty quickly.
There’s the “works well with voice control” aspect that I mentioned above. That’s a real thing today, especially when, say, driving a car.
It’s just not – certainly not in 2025 – a general replacement for Web search for me.
I can also imagine some ways to improve it down the line. Like, okay, one obvious point that you raise is that if a human can judge the reliability of information on a website, that human having access to the website is useful. I feel like I’ve got pretty good heuristics for that. Not perfect – I certainly can get stuff wrong – but probably better than current LLMs do.
But…a number of people must be really appallingly awful at this. People would not be watching conspiracy theory material on wacky websites if they had a great ability to evaluate it. It might be possible to have a bot that has solid-enough heuristics that it filters out or deprioritizes sources based on reliability. A big part of what Web search does today is to do that – it wants to get a relevant result to you in the top few results, and filter out the dreck. I bet that there’s a lot of room to improve on that. Like, say I’m viewing a page of forum text. Google’s PageRank or similar can’t treat different content on the page as having different reliability, because it can only choose to send you to the page or not at some priority. But an AI training system can, say, profile individual users for reliability on a forum, and get a finer-grained response to a user. Maybe a Reddit thread has material from User A who the ranking algorithm doesn’t consider reliable, and User B who it does.
- Comment on Gemini wont talk about Bernie Sanders 3 weeks ago:
I mostly can’t understand why people are so into “LLMs as a substitute for Web search”, though there are a bunch of generative AI applications that I do think are great, but I did realize that for people who want to use their cell phone via voice, LLM queries can be done without hands or eyes getting involved. Web searches cannot.
- Comment on German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours 3 weeks ago:
While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.
I mean, Amazon lets anyone sell through the site. Unless an order is specifically from Amazon itself, you could get it from any seller out there. It’s not like they’re going to conduct some kind of technical evalution of the product.
- Comment on Rachel Reeves backs third Heathrow runway in growth push 3 weeks ago:
Chicago O’Hare has eight runways and still doesn’t have to deal with the annual passenger load that Heathrow does.
- Comment on What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection. 3 weeks ago:
I really don’t like Monopoly. It’s very widespread in the US, I’d guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.
I think that it’s actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn’t appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.
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Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I’ve looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
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Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
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Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they’re going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it’s not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
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There’s a limited amount by way of strategy and it’s not very sophisticated. There aren’t a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it’s not your then, there’s not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is roll.
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It has a high RNG depenedence.
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Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren’t very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like “everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t interesting, it should be removed from the game”. I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work – they aren’t making interesting decisions.
The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn’t principally to entertain.
I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.
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- Comment on Steam Brick: A DIY cut-down Steam Deck, sans input and screen 3 weeks ago:
I recently went looking to see if there was a practical way to expose a USB powerstation to Linux as a battery under
/sys/class/power_supply, the way internal laptop batteries are. Unfortunately, that didn’t appear to be the case. There are UPSes that NUT can monitor, but not a route to treat them the way Linux does laptop batteries. Kind of annoying, since for a luggable computer, it’d be really neat to have an external, expandable battery. - Comment on MPs and peers start inquiry into Russian and Chinese sabotage threats to subsea internet cables 3 weeks ago:
At a basic level, this isn’t really a new threat. This kind of gray-zone attack maybe is, where a country is willing to attack the submarine cable infrastructure of a country when it’s not actually at war with it.
But while it’s been a long time since we’ve had major-power wars, when we did, countries certainly cut submarine cables. I remember reading a recent article from two US Navy people talking about the risks and pointing out that way back when we fought major-power wars against countries with submarine cables, it was standard practice for us to cut them where we could, and so it’s a pretty safe bet that in any future major wars, we will also do the same and opponents will do the same to us.
Europe’s geography – lots of peninsulas with shallow seas with large population centers on each side of it – make it a particularly acute problem: if you think about Fennoscandia, the British Isles, North Africa, Greece and Italy, there’s a lot of reasons to want to run submarine cables and pipelines. Most other places in the world don’t have the same kind of geography, outside of some places like Malaysia.
Also, advances in hardware have made accessing submarine cables a lot more-accessible. I remember looking up what it’d take to buy an off-the-shelf underwater drone that could plant an explosive on a pipeline from a boat above it. You can go out and drop $20k and you’ve got a commercial, off-the-shelf underwater drone that can handle the depths of the seas that surround Europe. Like, in 2025, anyone who can afford to buy a new, low-end car can afford the hardware required to plant explosives to take out submarine infrastructure in international waters. That’s not a very high bar.
- Comment on Dwarf Fortress - Adventure Mode is Out Now! 3 weeks ago:
Ironvest.com (nee blur.com, nee abine.com) also provides a “masked card” service (which can be independently useful, as it can have whatever name and address you want, if you don’t want someone harvesting that). That being said, they charge an annual fee, and your bank may provide free temporary numbers.
