ProdigalFrog
@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
- Comment on “I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!) 16 hours ago:
100%. An android device will recieve updates for 7 years in the best case scenario (on average more like 4 years), while a steamdeck is fully supported with mainline Linux, so it’ll continue to recieve support for 20 years at a minimum (support for 486 CPU’s from the early 90’s are only just now being dropped).
- Submitted 2 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 3 comments
- Comment on I'm nit sure tbh 3 days ago:
There’s actually quite a lot we can do about it, and not only does that materially help our situation, it also reduces the feeling of helplessness and despair dramatically.
Here’s a handy guide on how to get involved in that sort of stuff.
Part 1: The big picture 🖼️
The protests are good ways of meeting like-minded people in your community to form connections, as well as spreading awareness of local mutual aid groups so more can join or form ICE resistance groups who can join an encrypted chat to coordinate, alert neighbors, and talk strategy. It also is a good place for unions or union members to encourage others to unionize their workplaces, which can also ultimately work toward a national general strike, which is our most tangible and powerful collective action. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (such as ending the war in Iran, ceasing support for the genocide of Palestine, and Abolishing ICE). The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed. There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Part 2: Learn First Aid ⛑️
Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life. But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing. Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Part 3: Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions. These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area. This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice. There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!), for more info, go here, and scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community) section”
Part 4: Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike 💪
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to make a general strike possible. Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn’t the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so. Most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner. You can contact the IWW with the link below: * 🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español) And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch. * 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA * 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA * 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB * 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB * 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU * 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE * 🇮🇹 Italy: USI * 🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland * 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond * 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT * 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC * 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW
Part 5: Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE. Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work. Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided. Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle. We’ll start it off with some General Advice: * Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state * Be careful about who you meet online * Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN) * Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail * agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary. For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
- Submitted 3 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Submitted 3 days ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Microsoft has a new idea on how to deter students from MacBook Neo - 9to5Mac 6 days ago:
I definitely had a few blue screens with XP over the years, maybe once every 5 or 6 months?
7 was super stable on my hardware, I’ve probably had about the same amount of blue screens on that as I did on Windows 10, maybe about 4 or 5 from what I can recall? The bigger issue I had back then was AMD’s GPU drivers were insanely unstable at that point, resulting in constant green screen crashes from youtube videos.
At least for me, blue screens haven’t been too much of an issue, especially since after they reboot, everything is still working as normal. That’s in contrast to Windows 11’s bugs introduced from updates, which often introduce a new persistent problem that a user either has to actively troubleshoot to resolve, or cannot resolve on their own, leaving them to wait until Microsoft pushes out a fix.
Examples of that being:
- KB5077181 breaking Blutooth and causing Samsung devices to lose the ability to access the C: drive
- KB5085516, preventing users from resizing or moving windows, which itself was supposed to be a fix for KB5079473
- Microsoft themselves admitting that multiple major core features were broken for months
I personally consider the severity and frequency of these issues are appearing in Windows 11 to be fairly unprecedented in the history of Windows, which happens to coincide with the QA team being fired.
- Comment on Microsoft has a new idea on how to deter students from MacBook Neo - 9to5Mac 6 days ago:
I think a majority of people would consider needing to disable multiple parts of the default installed system to not encounter potentially breaking bugs to be a pretty big indicator that the platform is not as stable as it used to be.
Personally, I never had to disable anything, perform any specific actions, or disable a particular part of Windows XP or Window 7 to achieve a very stable system, and new updates generally didn’t introduce any bugs either since MS had a pretty big QA team.
There are now regularly reports of major or critical components of a windows system failing or even becoming unbootable due to updates or bugs in new features in Windows 11, which is very much a change from the norm.
It is likely these bugs are being introduced far more frequently due to MS laying off the majority of their QA team, and instead relying on regular users to report bugs after they have already been shipped.
- Comment on Personalized Political Spectrum 1 week ago:
Anarchists and Libertarian used to be synonymous, since Libertarian was a way to talk about Anarchism without being persecuted. Later in the US Proprietarians coopted the term Libertarian, and later even Anarchism by claiming to be ‘Anarcho-Capitalists’.
- Comment on Personalized Political Spectrum 1 week ago:
A person who believes that an authoritarian state is righteous and justified as long as it calls itself communist (even if it’s not), examples being the USSR, North Korea, China, and oddly the current capitalist Russian federation. You can find a more in-depth answer here.
- Comment on Hacker group threatens to release Grand Theft Auto VI data in Rockstar Games attack 1 week ago:
Honestly deserved since they union busted so hard recently.
- Submitted 1 week ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Your RAM Has a 60 Year Old Design Flaw. I Bypassed It. 2 weeks ago:
90% of thumbnails have a face in them, usually of an exaggerated strong emotion, and that goes for both male and female youtubers. Many youtubers have confirmed time and time again that the algorithm favors faces by a pretty wide margin, and thus most play that game.
I’m not a fan of it, I wish they didn’t, but I understand why they do. Though I don’t think it’s particularly gendered as your image claims.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 28 comments
- Comment on Gotta go fast 2 weeks ago:
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility and the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.
Looks like the first is still producing power, but the electricity being generated ended up being much costlier than photovoltaic panels (since they didn’t anticipate they would become so cheap back when it was being constructed) and the people running it want to shut it down. And the latter was shut down after the company went bankrupt twice.
- HW News - US Bans Most Routers - Shortage Likely, AMD Joins Corrupt Council, CPU Price Hikewww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 2 comments
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 3 weeks ago:
Just gonna throw this out there; If you’ve never had a Nintendo Wii, I’d genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.
My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC. I’d always written off the Wii as a gimmick, but after taking a closer look at its library, it’s actually surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are actually a pretty unique way to interact with games. I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even with a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it’s done, I was amazing to find that after it connects to wifi, you have access to an online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.
That means the console has access to:
- The entire Wii library (Including modern light-gun game ports and original titles, plus Wii fit with the balance board, which is actually really fun)
- All gamecube games with the Nintendont emulator (best paired with either a gamecube controller or the Wii Classic controller)
- Pretty much every retro console such as SNES, Genesis, GB, GBC, GBA, etc with emulators
- The highlights of the N64 and NeoGeo thanks to being ported to the Virtual Console
All for less than $100. It’s an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas, and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I’ve ever owned, but I suspect I’ll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future.
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 3 weeks ago:
But it is possible to pick up a cheap used office PC off ebay and stick a GPU in it, which would let someone play almost any game on the market for much less than a console.
- Comment on Just shave it bro 4 weeks ago:
Be the baldness you want to see in the world (I.e, create a baldness community here :3)
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 4 weeks ago:
It certainly was my kind of game growing up when I had a lot of free time, but even then, I wasn’t super into grinding, I just did it to get to the quests, which I very much enjoyed. If there was a server with virtually no grinding and just quests to where I could play it essentially like an online point’n’click adventure with some combat, I’d hit it for sure. :)
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 4 weeks ago:
I tried a couple of those a few years back, but even with the xp multipliers, it seemed like a bit too much of a time commitment :(
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 5 weeks ago:
Uhh, no? I pointed out the good parts about it that stand out even to this day, and that I had a much higher tolerance for endless grinding when I was younger (the clear negative of the game).
Your response is leads me to believe you’re either trolling or only read the first few words of my comment.
- Comment on RuneScape's monthly membership now costs as much as a World of Warcraft subscription as Jagex announces its second price hike in less than 2 years 5 weeks ago:
I played the older rune scape growing up, like a lot, it was my first MMO.
The draw of the game, at least for me, were two things.
One: the punishment for dying was losing all but 3 of your items, do there were high stakes that made enemy encounters kinda exciting. It was pretty unique at the time, though maybe Ultima Online had that too, not sure.
Two: the quests in run escape actually slapped. Unlike literally every other MMO on the market (which had simple fetch quests or kill X amount of things quests), Rune scape had really well written, funny, interesting quests that often played like an older point’n’click adventure, many of which gave really unique and odd rewards that you could practically use in other parts of the game.
Those just blew my wee little mind back then, and I was absolutely hooked on it. I think in particular the quests would hold up, even against modern titles.
The downside was to get to those quests, you had to grind like a motherfucker to get the required skill levels to start it. That padded out the play time by hundreds of hours, but doing it with friends or chatting while you did cooked some lobster for the 300th time made it bearable, sometimes even soothing to zone out to.
I could never tolerate the grind today like 12 year old me could, it’s unbearable, but if I could play a version of runescspe that removed the grind, I’d be tempted just to play allthe quests I never got to.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 5 weeks ago:
but I see it like trying to fill a jug with a hole in the bottom.
If viewed from the perspective that the community fridge isn’t solving the issue of the people near it needing it to be continuously resupplied, then yes, it is a ‘bottomless pit’. But at the same time, what it is providing is a somewhat constant relief from the system which created the circumstances for a community fridge to be needed, which means its also a source of endless/ongoing harm reduction.
But, if the community fridge is viewed as one tool in our belt with which to build alternative systems that would eventually allow us to decouple from our current one, then it is not a bottomless pit, and instead is one very needed and useful stepping stone leading to a much more egalitarian and prosperous society that could eliminate food deserts and wage labor entirely. In that way, a community fridge is just one form of prefiguration. Specifically, a community fridge is building out one part of a gift-economy.
If you’d like to see the end result of those efforts visualized in a very realisistic manner, I’d highly suggest The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, which is a classic sci-fi novel based in an egalitarian gift-economy, and goes quite in-depth on how it functions.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 5 weeks ago:
Hi, no offense taken.
but that particular recommendation seems like something that would be ignored, marginalized, or abused/destroyed.
If I may ask, are you basing that on personal experience, or your own research into the effectiveness of community food fridges?
Personally, I don’t see it as terribly different from the work of Food Not Bombs, which provides food to anyone who needs it at a particular location at set schedule.
The usefulness of a community fridge is that it can often be used to prevent food wastage. As an example, if your garden produces too many zucchini for you or your neighbors to eat, the extra can be distributed to the food fridge for anyone who needs them. Local small businesses also often participate, and donate their unsold food to prevent having to throw it away.
The Teach a Man to fish analogy is often not viable in vulnerable communities or impoverished ones. As an example, if someone lives and works in a food desert, they may not have access to a car to get them to a grocery store with more healthy food options, and their job’s low pay may effectively trap them in that area if the places closer to a good grocery store are too expensive to rent. You could potentially teach them how to grow their own food if they have a viable place to grow them, but they may not be able to spare the extra funds to purchase the seeds or the equipment required to start growing effectively.
I’d suggest taking a look at this instructional video on how to set up a food fridge by someone who has already done so to see how viable it is in practice, and how much good it can potentially do. You may find that your views on it change when its laid out in such a way.
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 5 weeks ago:
Turn your aggression toward building up alternative systems that allow us to reduce and eventually eliminate our need to rely on capitalist systems dominated by sociopaths. That could be taking part in a mutual aid group, creating a free food fridge in food deserts, or learning how to grow your own produce along with your friends and neighbors.
For more info on exactly how to do that stuff, look here: slrpnk.net/post/34794436/21025333
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 1 month ago:
Donate to PostmarketOS so they can support more phones and polish it up. It’s based on upstream Linux, and once polished would give us a true and permanent alternative.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 1 month ago:
No prob! :)
- Comment on Firearm Advice 1 month ago:
Yes, the meat analog he uses, though not perfect, is the closest to a real-world test I’ve found that a regular person could reasonably perform themselves.
357 out of a revolver is indeed still too slow, even with lighter bullets. Only in a lever action carbine does 357 start to reach the required power to perform some hydrostatic tearing, since 357 is really able to take advantage of that extra barrel length to increase velocity fairly dramatically.
There was an extremely comprehensive video done on real-world wound ballistics that I was struggling to find for my last comment, but I found it just now, once again thanks to Luckygunner.
He gives a summary of it here, and also made this video as a supplement, but if you’d like to see the absolute last word on firearm wound ballistics, I’d suggest this full documentary featuring Dr. Martin Fackler (but be warned, this has NSFW gory images as examples).
- Comment on Firearm Advice 1 month ago:
When it comes to pistol calibers, raw kinetic energy isn’t really a factor, they’re just too weak to actually induce any sort of hydro-static shock that could cause a permanent rupturing of nearby tissues, you need much higher velocities or energy to do that that, which only rifle rounds or shotgun slugs can reliably induce.
For pistols, the only mechanism of action they can rely on is the mechanical size of the bullet itself, as the bigger the bullet, the larger the hole, and thus the faster the blood loss. Hollow points are the best method to cause bigger holes.
Ballistic gel is a somewhat deceptive testing media, as it can show a big permanent wound cavity beyond the size of the bullet itself, which isn’t actually how it would perform real tissue, which is able to stretch much more than ballistic gel. What really matters for pistol rounds are being able to expand as much as possible while also maintaining adequate penetration (12" in gel), so that you can reliably penetrate bone and muscle to reach critical organs from any angle. You also want to ensure that the specific hollow point chosen isn’t prone to being plugged by heavy clothing if you live in colder environments.
LuckyGunner provides the best comparison of bullets that I’ve personally seen for every pistol caliber, allowing you to avoid bullets that don’t adequately penetrate, expand, or over-penetrate.
All pistol defensive pistol calibers break bone when struck, the xtreme penetrators will simply penetrate further and through more bone than a hollow point. This makes it act similarly to a hardcast (ultra hard lead that doesn’t deform) flatnose bullet, which are also usually only recommended for bear protection.
Over-penetration is an extremely negative trait in personal defense against humans, as it means that the bullet will pass through the target into anything behind them, including innocent who you do not intent to hurt. In self defense rounds you want the bullet to stop inside the first target to avoid endangering anything behind them.
But how do you assess value?
Xtreme Defenders are a good value for bear protection, but are extremely poor value for self-defense, as they are more expensive than a good hollow point while providing less effective wounding characteristics and increased danger to bystanders.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 1 month ago:
These aren’t really that effective compared to a hollow point. They create a big visual in ballistic gel, but in a more realistic medium they act more like an improved FMJ, but still over penetrate badly (which isn’t a good thing in most cases).
They tend to be recommend as a bear round, where over-penetration is actually valuable and desired.
The same manufacturer actually makes a deeper cut version that doesn’t over penetrate called the xtreme defender, which is generally still worse than a good hollow point in standard calibers, but can be a good option for weaker calibers like .380, where hollow point under-penetrate.
however, for 9mm and above, you’re better off with a standard hollow point, which is more effective and far more affordable than the all-copper xtreme rounds.