dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Microsoft is is bed with Google now, in a worse, more OS-integrated way than Mozilla was. This timeline sucks. 16 hours ago:
Heyoo!
- Comment on Oranges? In this economy? 17 hours ago:
It’s a shame nobody’s heard from Angle Grinder Man in a while.
- Comment on Oranges? In this economy? 18 hours ago:
I knew I carried that damn katana around everywhere for a reason when I was a teenager.
- Comment on Fine Literature 22 hours ago:
Or, “We’re salty because people have the audacity to comment on the threads in our little circlejerk sub!!!” I get this one on Lemmy occasionally, too.
Well, guess what: your shit made it to /all. If whatever lunatic thing you just posted can’t withstand public scrutiny, don’t post it to a public forum on the internet.
- Comment on Too many non-working holidays in America. 1 day ago:
Chattel slavery is illegal. It’s true that you can be enslaved, or at least enslaved in all but name and forced to work, as punishment for a crime. I.e. as part of your incarceration. This is per the 13th amendment.
I’m not enough of a legal eagle to explain what would happen or what your recourse would (or would not) be if you refused, though.
- Comment on Too many non-working holidays in America. 1 day ago:
He posted it on Juneteenth, i.e. the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery.
- Comment on Always wanted to start a cult 3 days ago:
Niko, cousin! Let’s go bowling!
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
PC operating systems are, at least to a broad degree, generic. That’s because a huge amount of backwards compatibility is built right into the PC architecture, much to the delight or chagrin of everybody depending on who you ask. There’s silicon on your processor’s die right now that’s doing fuck-all except ensuring that if you were struck by the perverse urge, you could boot MS-DOS 1.0 onto it even though it’s virtually guaranteed that you never will.
Phone operating systems absolutely are not generic, because each phone model is basically unique unto itself in terms of what hardware is in it, and backwards compatibility is not in any way a design goal. Furthermore, the entire package has to be rolled into a single unified ROM image.
There are proprietary core components in phones, notably their SoCs (systems-on-a-chip) and modems (which are often built into the SoC) which their designers jealously guard and are loaded down with patents and other IP restrictions. This hardware requires closed source drivers which must be updated or at the very least recompiled for new kernel versions if the OS is to be updated. That’s for Android, anyhow. It’s even worse for Apple devices, because they’re entirely closed and Apple is in total control of both the hardware and the software. At least they bother to support their own devices with updates for quite some time, but even they’re not absolved of fuckery – see, for instance, the deliberate slowing-down-with-updates scandal from a few years ago.
If nobody is providing source code or compatible binaries for the core hardware your phone needs in order to work, at minimum it’s going to be impossible to update your device beyond the kernel version that was last supported on it, even with a custom ROM. And all of this is before getting into locked bootloaders and other chicanery that prevents you from running your own code outside of user space on the hardware even if you had the code to run.
At the end of the day: The hardware vendors are absolutely not interested in providing driver support to end users or source code to anyone, and the handset makers and most especially the cell service carriers, at least in the US where the majority of people buy or lease their phones from said carriers, literally have a vested interest in dropping support as soon as they can get away with it. That’s because rolling out updates to oodles of individual phone models costs money to do, but they only make more money off of you by selling you a new phone.
- Comment on You have my consent to kill me 1 week ago:
Yeah, I just winged it based on a hazy recollection of a block puzzle I’m pretty sure I saw once. I’m sure the puzzle in question was not mathematically rigorous both so it could look nicer (with the same or similar solution to what I doodled, there) and also so it could be like, you know, actually manufactured.
- Comment on You have my consent to kill me 1 week ago:
The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.
Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it’s trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:
Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:
- Comment on PC Gaming’s Mascot Squad—who makes the cut? 1 week ago:
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
- Comment on PC Gaming’s Mascot Squad—who makes the cut? 1 week ago:
Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.
The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Former professional driver here (and current avid rider of motorcycles):
Driving absolutely isn’t for everyone. Some people can’t drive. Some people – arguably a lot more people than is currently the norm – shouldn’t. And that’s okay.
If at the end of the day you can get to where you need to go regularly without driving, go for it. Nobody should be pressuring you into driving if you are not comfortable or prepared to do so. It’s not a “basic skill.” It’s a massive privilege, and one that most of the population of the world does not have access to. And it’s also a big responsibility with the potential, as you have observed, for injury or death of yourself or others, and property damage. That’s a responsibility that has to be taken seriously and the maddening fact is that most people don’t treat it with the respect that it’s due.
If you don’t want to drive, don’t. And don’t let other people try to dictate that you should.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I’ll echo the GPD sentiment already on display here. I have a GPD Win Max 2 and it’s not exactly pocket sized per se, but it is just about as small as you can make a traditionally laid out (more or less) laptop while still keeping it usable. It’s also tiny little gaming monster which is neat, but might be overkill for purposes. I carry it around in a pistol case rather than a laptop bag, just to be an asshole.
If you want to go smaller you can dry the GPD Micro PC which is roughly the volume of an OG Nintendo DS although its proportions are a little different.
If you want cheaper and don’t need the horsepower, one of my coworkers actually bought one of those little N100 based 8" micro laptop thingies, akin to this one, and I have some hands on experience with it. They’re sold under a myriad of non-brand names and I believe internally they’re all the same. It’s got about the footprint of a paperback novel although it’s much thinner, and could conceivably be put in a pocket if you wear Jncos, or possibly in a jacket. I was surprised at the build quality but the performance is rather dire, and using its little capacitive mouse nubbin for any length of time is an exercise in frustration.
All of these are truly x86 compatible, i.e. real computers, and come with Windows by default. They can certainly be bullied into running some flavor of Linux if that’s what you prefer.
- Comment on Ads when you’re pumping gas 1 week ago:
We’ll just have to observe him carefully and see if he’s able to complete a left turn without assistance. That’ll tell us for sure.
- Comment on Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift? 1 week ago:
Or possibly ten thousand spoons.
- Comment on Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift? 1 week ago:
I’ve been summoned, just like Beetlejuice.
- Comment on Just give me a few hundred turns, and I'm gonna spank everyone at this tournament. 2 weeks ago:
Oh, that’s diabolical.
For similar reasons, I always kept Alabaster Potions around to sub out for the Meteor Shower (or Fireball, but Meteor Shower is more amusing). Pick white, you explode. Red, I’ll just give myself 4,294,967,296 health.
- Comment on Anyway to download just the song of this video? I want to put it to a ringtone but do not know how? 2 weeks ago:
You can pretty easily use yt-dlp to gank Youtube content, including just its audio. Either from this vid or whatever original it borrowed the song from.
Just Googling “youtube downloader” and clicking on everything you see is likely to land you with some malware…
- Comment on Just give me a few hundred turns, and I'm gonna spank everyone at this tournament. 2 weeks ago:
You know, I have a deck that could theoretically legitimately cast this by turn 4. Less if you were willing to abuse Lotuses or Moxes.
Usually I just dump all of that colorless mana into a Meteor Shower, though.
- Comment on Oh really? 2 weeks ago:
A friend of mine worked for the US Census Bureau for a while. Among their myriad binders and forms, etc. was a page full of tear-off perforated wallet size cards which contained no text or information on them whatsoever other than “do not distribute this card” printed on the back. And no, I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of these things was supposed to be. Nor apparently does anyone else.
So of course he dutifully tore them all off and quite deliberately handed them out to people. He gave me one. I might still have it someplace.
- Comment on How can i remove MIA mods? 2 weeks ago:
Eeenteresting. Well, now I know.
- Comment on How can i remove MIA mods? 2 weeks ago:
Really? That’s news. Is that one of those things that varies whether or not it’s presented to you depending on which client you use?
- Comment on How can i remove MIA mods? 2 weeks ago:
For fairly obvious anti-abuse reasons, mods can’t kick other mods. You will have to ask the admins of your instance (this instance, in this case) what they want to do about it.
- Comment on 5-minute oil change place 2 weeks ago:
Oh, I’m sure they do. And charge eight times more than what they’re worth.
- Comment on 5-minute oil change place 2 weeks ago:
The oil filter. Not the air filter.
- Comment on It's called seeing through a glass darkly. 2 weeks ago:
If only that boat could be made smaller somehow and fit inside the car.
- Comment on 5-minute oil change place 2 weeks ago:
They typically intend (and indeed, try to) use their machine to suck all the oil out of the dipstick hole and replace it via the same. That’s generally doable within the 5 minute allocation but it’s also only half of the job since that inevitably involves not replacing the oil filter.
- Comment on 5-minute oil change place 2 weeks ago:
The fact that these places always exclude the filter from their price and treat it as a “gotcha” add-on is deeply hilarious.
You have to replace the filter when you change the oil. That’s just how it works. It’s not special and it’s not extra. It’s literally the intended procedure.
- Comment on Stop this tomfoolery at once 3 weeks ago:
Ach, crivens. First it’s tha’ hands on the hips. Then it’s tha’ pursin’ o’ the lips. Then the tapping o’ tha’ feets. Waily, waily, waily…
