- 0 Posts
- 84 Comments
Yep, it’s blatant attempts to decrease costs of employment. Just like outsourcing various tech jobs, automated phone trees, and every business tech “no code required” automation/workflow platform ever devised.
Convince people they can do more with your particular flavor of less. Charge them enough that they save money on the books but you make a profit through them using your toolkit.
At the end of the day, you will always still need someone to fully understand the problem, the inputs, the expected outputs, the tiny details that matter but are often overlooked, to identify roadblocks and determine options around them with associated costs and risks, and ultimately to chart a path from point A to B that has room for further complications.
Whatever the tool set, job title, or perceived level of efficiency provided by the tools, this need will never go away. Businesses are involved in a near constant effort to reduce what they have to pay for these skills, and welcome whatever latest fad points towards the potential of reducing those costs.
Just use the nointro romsets off archive.org. About as close as you can get to dumping the cartridges yourself.
Crowdstrike is not owned or in any way in a business relationship with Microsoft, offers the software that caused the issue for Mac and Linux as well, and in fact caused similar issues on specific Linux Distros a few months before this recent cock up.
The issue only effected Windows OS machines that were running the Crowdstrike Falcon endpoint protection software, which runs at ring 0, kernel level. This presents the same potential for causing boot loops in all OSes due to the nature of running software that deep into the guts of things. The only caveat is that some Linux Distros have separation preventing things from running at that low level, and apparently so does Mac OS.
The update was not pushed out through Microsoft, as many are incorrectly repeating. It was a malware definitions update which was downloaded automatically by the Falcon software itself, without any configuration options available for admins to stage and do partial rollouts for testing.
Also, I significantly doubt that any company is going to do a complete overhaul of its IT architecture to switch over to a new OS for end user devices, when the simplest solution is to just switch to a different endpoint protection software. I’ve worked half a decade in an enterprise architecture type position, that simply isn’t how things work in this world.
On the highest level, they have a constant firehose of as much audio data from a sea of customers as they wish.
Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.
Have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns.
Know when different customers are home or not, improving demographics data.
Know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach, brand awareness, and better advertisement targeting.
It’s not a direct data to money pipeline, but having an always on listening device in someone’s home nets you a ton of useful data as an online retailer and advertiser.
As long as you are using official Microsoft install media downloaded from Microsoft (or verify the hash to ensure what you downloaded matches the official Microsoft isos) then you should be fine.
MAS is just a PowerShell script you run after install. It’s open source, and PowerShell scripts aren’t compiled, so you can examine it yourself to see what it’s doing. It tricks Microsoft servers into issuing your hardware an official “free upgrade” license key. The one I’m familiar with as reliable is MASgrave.
That’s not an 100% guarantee that it couldn’t be doing anything shady, but it would be incredibly hard for it to hide anything if it was.
Just like the “tesla hyperloop” or whatever they’re calling it, it’s not about innovation. It’s about keeping his brands in the public eye as a form of marketing. Even if on a logical level we all know it’s horseshit, it still keeps himself and Tesla salient.
He can afford to burn an incomprehensible amount of money on stunts for outcomes most people would consider inconsequential.
I’m not saying it’s 4D chess, it definitely isn’t. He’s not particularly intelligent in that way. That said, I do think there are some very simple reasons for him to do this that go beyond his absolutely insane delusional ego.
He has enough money that he can continue funding whatever he wants regardless of public opinion. He literally exists at a level where any press is good press as it keeps him fresh in peoples’ minds.
That’s absolutely acceptable. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
But please don’t publicly post a joke/rant about how your only option to accomplish something was through absurd hacky workarounds, when the issue is that you refused to learn the tools you have.
What we have here is the slightly more tech literate version of printing out a Word Doc so you can re-arrange, remove, and add pages physically before scanning it back in as a PDF to email someone, then complaining about it being so difficult, rather than just using one of the many many print to PDF and PDF editing/splicing tools.
All of those inputs would likely be much better built into the ps1 file. PowerShell is meant as a sucessor to vbscript which was meant as a successor to windows batch.
Selecting options? Make them parameters that you just set when calling the script: ./build.ps1 -Arch 64 -CompressSplines
Needing someone to manually confirm something completed? Add a while loop to wait 5 seconds while whatever spawned process is still running.
Etc.
Also, you can have multiple terminals open in VSCode.
You’ve not listed any requirements that aren’t more easily solved with existing features in the tools you’ve listed. Learn the tools your work expects you to use before you start blaming them for shit.
Still hurts, but sometimes it’s the only option.
If you’re trying to confirm things like account existence/deletion, there’s often no “account exists” function to return true or false. You just have to figure out the specific exception thrown and catch that specific one.
The worst are libraries that don’t give specific exceptions, so you have to catch all exceptions then do extra work to tell what the specific situation is. Does the account not exist, or is the system unreachable?
It’s still not your hardware, so you can’t rely on the data being private to you even if the connection is secure.
Then there’s going to be all the politics present with the location of whatever endpoint you connect to, issues of uptime and availability, etc.
It’s a matter of the threat model you’re concerned about, but this does not fill me with confidence if this is considered a “breakthrough solution”. There’s nothing quite like a half assed solution to kneecap work on a “proper” one.
Depends on if you’re allowed to bring the Pi in at all. Might be safer to just buy what you need “on site”. There’s a lot more to this than just the technical side.
Whatever you do, just be careful. A lot of places don’t play easy with foreigners breaking the law. It can be easy to hide what you’re specifically doing over a network, but they don’t need to know what you’re spefically doing to say “bypassing the filter at all is illegal”, “using tor gives us probable cause”.
Depending on your situation and how they check things you bring in, it might be better to just load up a/some big hard drive(s) with enough content to carry you through until your next trip outside the filter. Knew someone who was in a similar situation for a long while that would emulate their way through old console game libraries like that.
May be worth looking into how political dissidents can protect themselves. Hidden encrypted containers. Private vps outside the filter that you connect to, doing all your questionable shit on the remote server outside, so the only data transfer is video feed to/from. If hiding what you’re doing is needed, steal notes from the people with lives at stake.
So much of this depends on specifics it may not be safe for you to share. Probably worth asking questions in some of the privacy focused communities.
OpenWRT won’t hide what you’re doing from the network that handles your internet connection. It’s just an option for something you could use as a router/wifi AP.
Wow, that’s certainly a take. How are they worse than Sony or fucking Microsoft? Microsoft was under IRS investigation at one point. They dragged thing out resulting in multiple millions of taxpayer money being wasted, ruined the professional careers of the lead names on the investigation, bribed politicians to cut so much funding from the IRS that another investigation of that scale is simply not possible, and bribed other politicians to sway laws in their favor to help make what they were investigated for much harder to pursue charges on.
Do you have any substantive shit that the other big names aren’t guilty of as well? I’d love to hear it!
- Shattered Pixel Dungeon
- Project Zomboid
- Vampire Survivors
- Rimworld
- Metal Gear Solid V (on PC with mods that greatly expand/enhance free roam, and add more side ops)
- Tomba 1 and 2 (Tombi in the EU)
- Chrono Trigger
- Megaman Legends (love the sequel, but haven’t ever completed it, life keeps getting in the way)
- Castlevania Syphony of the Night
- Sonic Adventure (it’s trash, but fun trash, especially with mods)
- Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and Knuckles
- Minecraft
Some that I haven’t come back to in a while, but I’m overdue:
- Ape Escape
- Crash Bandicoot (1-3)
- Spyro (1-3)
- Digimon World 3
- Any of the GBA or DS Castlevanias
- Actraiser
- Rayman 2
- Megaman Battle Network series(3 and 4 are my favorite entries)
- Dissidia Duodecim
- Zone of the Enders 2
- God Hand
- Wipeout Pulse/Pure
- Pretty much any Kirby game
Most of these games I find just plain fun. Thanks for asking, I was starting to get burned out and not finding stuff as fun, but writing this out has me hankering to revisit some old favorites again.
Lego Island was one of my first PC games, and I spent absolute ages in it. Still have my CD. As an adult I find it a little too zany and wacky for an in-depth revisit, but as a young imaginative ADHD boy it was an amazing little sandbox to run around in. So many different ways to interact with things, ways to customize your island through different characters changing stuff when you clicked on it, and just enough mysterious things to keep the imagination going.
I’m looking forward to the decomp that MattKC is working on for it.
Outside of that, I played a TON of the old flash and shockwave games on the Lego website. I felt so cool knowing extra lore around the mask of light movie because I had been playing the Bionicle flash game. They also had a lot of neat puzzle games.
The concept of the programmable Spybots, and the K’Nex programmable kit really jump started my interest in programming as a kid too.
Plus, a lot of companies don’t bother going back to the film when they do rereleases. A lot can’t due to all the post processing and special effects dome digitally. So most upres’d releases make significant compromises in one area or another, to the point where for some you can have better quality just stretching the video and using some shaders.
You’d probably like Richard Cheese (vulgar rap and rock done as vegas style lounge music).
For less vulgar, but still fun genre switch up, Paul Anka’s album Rock Swings is nice. Similarly there’s Pat Boone’s album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy.
In previous years I’ve found new stuff using Pandora Radio, Youtube Music, and occasionally just by browsing music communities. Reddit’s listentothis sub used to be really good for finding relatively unknown bands a number of years ago.
Pandora Radio advertises that instead of doing a basic genre or artist comparison, each track they have is manually analyzed for specific aspects of the track like “call and response”, “wall of sound”, “excessive vamping”, so it makes connections crossing genre lines.
My dude, the DS Lite is 20 years old already. There’s plenty of video game hardware still kicking 20 years out. The only hardware in the switch that shows any signs of wearing out over time is the analog sticks in the joycons and the rechargable batteries. Both already have replacements available and will likely continue to.
You can also play it docked, with a wired controller, if you somehow can’t get generic rechargable battery replacements for it.
Hardware does not break down that fast.
Just to stave off anyone else coming in and going “ackshuallee”… it’s true that you could technically do that with libreELEC. It’d be a fool’s errand of using SSH to get to the terminal and install all the programs and dependencies, and you’d still need some way to do arbitrary terminal commands from the kodi menu (I think there are plugins for that and for launching arbitrary programs though).
I played around with that myself for a few hours and gave up.
I’d love something actually good, but the closest you’ll get probably is running Kodi or whatever media frontend you want on top of a stripped down “normal” OS, with a separate frontend for games/programs like HyperSpin. Find a way to launch one from the other and you’d be set.
You’d still have to deal with Kodi not being able to pull full quality video from streaming platforms too, assuming you aren’t just sailing the high seas for your media.
Instead of just opening them with Excel, make a blank workbook or sheet, go to the data tab, import from text/csv. It’ll give you a bunch of menus and such where you can adnust how it reads the file and how it will format columns. Any column with leading zeros you want as text. It doesn’t fuck with “as text” columns.
The only caveat is that once you’ve imported the CSV that way, you’ll want to open the data sources tab and delete the connection to the csv file, otherwise changes in the original csv file will change shit in your spreadsheet, but only if excel feels like syncing it. Better to shut that off and do it yourself as needed.
I feel like that’s a stretch, and there’s some important things to consider here.
People are weird, and can fetishize all sorts of shit. There’s no reasonable way to control say, someone jerking off to pictures of hand models. Or to stop someone shlicking it to your shlubby beer gut at the beach photos you put up on social media if that’s their thing (and I know a woman who’s thing was “straight bears” for a long time).
But no one has any agency or ability to prevent that. No one has any agency to prevent any random person passing them on the street and then later using that memory plus imagination as cranking fuel.
For the sake of every individual’s personal sanity, I think it’s important that each and every one of us understand and accept that. Existing in the world is naturally giving up a certain amount of control. This is part of it, as disgusting as it is.
This is even more the case when you put content out there. Whether through acting in film or other media, creating artwork, posting pictures, etc. Creating content in the current age of the internet is inherently ceding ownership and control over it. The moment it hits the public space, you cannot control what is done with it, and the sooner people can learn to accept that, the better off I think we all will be.
I understand that feeling of violation to learn that someone has used you purely as an object for arousal.
abuse
Multiple times an ex manually stimulated me to physical arousal and used me as a human dildo. At the time I convinced myself I was into it, because I was a guy. I wasn’t, and while my trauma is relatively minor, it exists.
That said, there is nuance. This content was not edited, it was merely taken out of the original context. Are we going to prevent news from doing this to prevent using content in ways unintended and unanticipated by the original creators?
“I’ll know misuse when I see it” is not a sustainable method for evaluating misuse at scale.
“If it’s clearly being used for erotic purposes” likewise doesn’t work, as defining that line isn’t straightforward. Do we ban reposts of bikini shots?
This isn’t something that was created for private use that was leaked. It was content made for public consption. Being disgusted with how the public chooses to consume it is your right, but there’s no way to control that.
Again, I entirely sympathize with the women experiencing this. Being used in this manner is dehumanizing.
But there’s no stopping it. Best to accept as best you can and ignore it.