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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • $5 says the problem is the ad revenue they were living on has dried up and/or dramatically shrunk.

    This has happened to a LOT of sites, and a more niche site like newgrounds probably doesn’t command high rates, so they have to figure out how to fund themselves now.

    Edit: Also, I don’t think sites asking you to donate/pay for features is “enshittification”. If anything, getting revenue from you, the user, is a hard counter to enshittification.

    Enshittification is exploiting you for the benefit of capital: you become the product, and are pimped out to anyone who wants to pay.

    If you’re the one paying for the service, you’re maintaining the relationship as a customer, and you keep the power in that dynamic, which is a power ‘free users’ on enshittified platforms don’t have: you can take your money and leave, and that will actually hurt them.

    This isn’t globally true, of course - what is? - but telling you they need money to keep the site up and offer you a method to pay and provide something for your money is very very honest compared to what most of big tech pulls.


  • Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.

    Interesting if that’s really true, given how prison labor being slavery is pretty much how it works otherwise.

    I’d love to know how fair-market the wages are, becuase I somehow suspect that:

    1. They’re way lower than someone not in prison would get paid and
    2. The benefits don’t exist (no PTO, no insurance, no 401k, etc.) and
    3. The coercive incentives of being able to report your employee to their guards would drive all sorts of abuses

    This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’, but perhaps I’m wrong.





  • I’d also argue it makes it harder to use, period: something that takes me 10 seconds to read somehow ends up being a 5 minute video, of which 90% is fluff that’s not related to the problem.

    I’ve yet to land on a tutorial video that gets to the point and doesn’t feel the need to waste a ton of time introducing themselves, a paragraph about what we’re doing, asking me to subscribe, talking about their sponsor and so on.

    I lament the death of the text-based tutorial and strongly dislike the youtube format video.









  • I’m a fan of the Bambu printers because they just simply work.

    You want to print something, they print something, done.

    If you want to fiddle, then they’re the wrong printers, but if you want to model shit and make things then they’re really hard to beat right now.

    And, yes, I have reservations about the closed sourced nature, but honestly ask yourself: are you going to contribute to the code? Are you going to build your own firmware to run on your printer? If the answer is no, then that’s probably not really a concern that should be driving your decisions.


  • will never be widely accepted by the majority of the populatioj because it just isn’t what the vast majority of people want. They want communication methods that compliment their real world lives

    I don’t think that’s strictly true, but I do think it would require their real world lives to get shockingly worse to increase the appeal of living in a “better” world.

    This is usually how you see these kind of things presented in fiction: everyone uses a “metaverse”, but it requires a full on completely society destroying dystopia to also exist to make it sufficiently appealing.

    I’d put money on the next round of VR worlds getting a lot more buy-in since you’ve got a generation of kids growing up that are already living mostly online, and a species that seems hell-bent on diving in to a nice authoritarian dystopia, so uh, the next 20 years will probably be real interesting,





  • There’s other use cases for that.

    The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there’s one switch for the lights and it’s in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you’d enter the living room from the rest of the house.

    The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.

    Though, and this is the next use case, I really don’t have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that’ll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there’s a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you’ll find in use in that you don’t have to actually be moving, because it’s good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)

    And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it’s also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don’t resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it’ll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)

    Also it’s useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.

    So yeah, it’s maybe not life-changing by itself, but it’s seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I’ve got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I’m doing in the room.

    Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It’s not trivial, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a product most people could build on their own, so I don’t entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.