dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 1 day ago:
In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 2 days ago:
My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.
I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 2 days ago:
Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked “at” him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 2 days ago:
some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.
This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 2 days ago:
That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.
- Comment on Happy American new year or something idk 3 days ago:
Whenever this comes up I’m obligated to mention that the illustration comes from Dougal Dixon’s Man After Man. It is chock-a-block full of these kinds of illustrations from Philip Hood and as soon as you get to the future phase in part 2, all of them are just as batshit as this one. It’s gold.
- Comment on Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all 3 days ago:
Obligatory.
- Comment on Thank you, Thor! 4 days ago:
And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.
Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
It sure does. But America is the center of the world, right…?
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
People here in the US will say “in the South” and mean, like, Alabama. Not Tierra del Fuego.
- Comment on So if we're just good with careening into fascism 2.0 what does the future look like? 6 days ago:
Bull. I don’t even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.
- Comment on 🦆 Duck 🦆 1 week ago:
Goose!
- Comment on Update to last week's BestBuy Shenanigan. They refused to refund me after not delivering me the stuff I ordered after a so-called "investigation". 1 week ago:
That decent percent is in fact roughly 60%, in my industry. At least according to what my vendor reps tell me.
Only 4 in 10 people even bother to attempt to do their rebates. The manufacturers love that, because it allows them to put a giant "$2000 OFF!!! ^viamailinrebate^" on their marketing literature and that gets eyeballs on the ad and feet in the door, but they know damn well they won’t actually have to pay out on the majority of those promos and in fact they don’t even budget with the expectation that they will.
- Comment on Update to last week's BestBuy Shenanigan. They refused to refund me after not delivering me the stuff I ordered after a so-called "investigation". 1 week ago:
Amazon stuff sometimes arrives. For instance, it’s going on 7 months by now I think and they still haven’t found my camera.
This is the sad reality of every company everywhere trying to turn their delivery operation into a “gig” position. Amazon does it, too. Their delivery contractors-who-are-totally-not-employees steal valuable items from deliveries all the time.
Anyway, you are certain to win your chargeback. Banks side with their cardholders more often than not, and Best Buy is going to have to provide proof positive that you received your item. “We handed it off to Doordash and then washed our hands of it” is not going to cut the mustard, there.
(We have to deal with chargebacks in my business, too. Defending ourselves is a pain in the ass because we have to provide indisputable documentation that the client’s order was fulfilled. The issuing bank always starts from the default position of their cardholder being a saint and all retail businesses automatically being scammers. A small subset of people will fraudulently dispute a charge for a big ticket purchase just because they feel this is a way to weasel out of paying for it, and usually they’ve been emboldened by the fact that they’ve tried it before and gotten away with it.)
- Comment on What will be the future of "Social Media Investigations"? Is every country gonna start checking for social media posts before permitting entry? 2 weeks ago:
I’m calling this now: It’ll be even worse than you think, because “investigating” everyone this way would require a completely unrealistic amount of effort, because you’d have to review possibly decades worth of social media activity right then and there when the prospective entrant is standing at the customs desk. Nobody could possibly do that.
So these idiots will just use AI to do it for them, and as we all know full well the AI will return Earth-shatteringly wrong results pretty much all the time.
- Comment on Microsoft is is bed with Google now, in a worse, more OS-integrated way than Mozilla was. This timeline sucks. 2 weeks ago:
Heyoo!
- Comment on Oranges? In this economy? 2 weeks ago:
It’s a shame nobody’s heard from Angle Grinder Man in a while.
- Comment on Oranges? In this economy? 2 weeks ago:
I knew I carried that damn katana around everywhere for a reason when I was a teenager.
- Comment on Fine Literature 2 weeks 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. 2 weeks 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. 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago:
Niko, cousin! Let’s go bowling!
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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] 3 weeks 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] 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
