I would be happy with one guideline: taxpayers should see and feel the impact of their tax dollars.

It feels like that’s currently not a priority at all. The govt can just hand the money to some middleman who pockets 90% for a job worth 10%, and no one checks on it. DOGE was the pinnacle of this practice; honestly felt like Elon and Trump said “hey, you know what would be funny?”

Posted on April fools. Is the joke that it’s such old news?

Is the monocle a reference to a particular character? Oh, like the guy on the box art? Hah, I’m not even sure what that character is supposed to be.

Iconic Red Alert 2 stuff would probably be:

• A Kirov bombing some iconic american building like the statue of liberty or white house
• Tesla Coil frying infantry to dust
• GI’s deployed in their sandbags
• Yuri’s psychic paraphernalia (ex. his headwear with the tubes running behind him, or his phone with a little antenna on it that he uses to mind control people he calls)
• Tanya with her dual pistols

The money you gather in RA2 is mostly gold ore, with some gems. I expect some yellow sprinkles with a patch of primary-colored sprinkles would be good for this.

There are two aesthetics: C&C versus C&C Red Alert.

• C&C uses Tiberium, factions are GDI vs Nod, iconic Nod structure is the Obelisk, iconic character is Kane.

• C&C Red Alert uses gold+gems, factions are Allies vs Soviets, iconic Soviet defensive structure is the Tesla Tower, iconic character is Tanya.

I’d say mixing aesthetics would look odd to a fan, so probably best to pick one. If you don’t know which is preferred, C&C (non-red alert) is probably the safer choice.

Honestly don’t know if that’s worse than the protestant message that “god is omnipotent, all knowing, created good and evil, created you in his image, loves you and wants you to go to heaven, buuuuuut sorry, he can’t unless you “freely” choose to accept him into your heart. Yep, the heart he made, the mind he gave you, yeah, those are going to send you to hell. Nothing he can do about it, it’s on you. Totally not a weird, abusive, logically inconsistent relationship we have with him.”

Then stack on top of that “the woman should serve the man in the same way the church serves the Lord”. Just problematic all the way down.

If it was as simple as, “the man hates the woman just as god hates us” then the next step is easy. Fuck that guy, I’m out.

Let’s be clear, getting rid of trump doesn’t stop anything. If anything, they WANT someone to target trump, because that gives them justification to be more tyrannical. What you are advocating for is called a Civil War, and if we started one now, Trump would win.

Like all countries, we have a system of government in place. When it comes to removing the president (executive branch) over objectionable behaviour, we have a process: it falls on the judicial and legislative branches to conclude that the behaviour was objectionable and that the president should be forcibly removed (a process in the system called impeachment). Trying to remove the president using means outside this system is literally saying, “the system doesn’t work, we need to throw it out, take matters into our own hands, and start from scratch”, i.e. a civil war.

For now we continue to try to take steps within the system, but it is now abundantly clear to most Americans that the Republicans in Congress have been colluding to allow the president to do whatever objectionable thing he wants. SCOTUS seems to be doing something similar. Unfortunately, that is their prerogative in the system we have.

If a group of states said, “that’s it, we’re done, the system doesn’t work, we don’t acknowledge you as the president, and we’re going to try to stop you” then within the system, it is the job of the US military to put a stop to that. Their job within the system is to ensure the system keeps working as the law dictates. And the US military is the most funded military in the world, so the rebellion would lose almost instantly.

This fall will be the real decider because of midterms. Trump is polling very poorly. A record number of Republican congress-people have announced they will not seek reelection. Democrats are winning in red states for the first time in close to a century. Trump is desperately trying to rig elections, and there’s a possibility he’ll attempt to cancel elections entirely. The result will be one of two things:

1. Democrats regain control of Congress, and all of the crimes that Republicans wouldn’t hold anyone accountable for suddenly get held accountable.
2. Trump tries to say “the system isn’t working, we need to establish a dictatorship and cancel elections”.

Ideally it’s option 1, but there’s a very real chance it’s option 2, in which case the US military is obligated to stop him. If they don’t, then we will cross the bridge you’re describing, and it won’t be pretty.

I wouldnt want to pay for a musician I dont listen to.

I disagree, and here is why.

The difference is between entertainment value and artistic value. There are a lot of art (music, film, writing, games, etc) that I think are important to exist for the betterment of humanity, but are too emotionally heavy to enjoy recreationally, or too niche for most people to engage with it; and yet, I believe are important that they exist. I want to support quality art that falls into those categories, even if I never consume them, because if I don’t, then one day when someone does come up with an idea that would be relevant to my niche, they are less likely to make it.

I don’t want a game’s ability to maximize engagement to be what determines how valuable it is, which is equivalent to saying, I don’t want the games I put my money toward to only be the games that I engage with. If you agree with the first half, then you must agree with the second half.

I was more hoping for a way to passively support indie devs that the market may otherwise not be giving enough attention to. I agree, I’d rather own a license (or better yet, physical copy) of a game and play it when I want, but I still view that relationship as part of the problem. I’d rather quality artwork not need to worry so much about playing the attention-lottery in order to survive.

the firm is working to sign up games from other developers, who’ll earn from a revenue share based on player engagement.

This is the dealbreaker for me. If there is a masterpiece game on there that takes 10h to complete, and a slop game that people sink 100s of hours into, I want the rev share to reward the 10h masterpiece more. I do not want an indie subscription service that incentivizes player engagement, full stop.

If I thought the majority of my $7 went to indie game devs, particularly ones doing interesting stuff that the market doesn’t properly reward, then I wouldn’t bat an eye at it. Probably wouldn’t even use the service and would continue buying game licenses directly, but if I’m only funding the few hits that make it in front of me, then I’m just contributing to the BS capitalist lottery that is the entertainment industry. Would much rather have a communal way to fund devs.

You might be surprised how little power it’s sipping when sitting idle. Unnecessary disk accesses might be the biggest power use in those hours, but that’s more likely to cost you due to wear and tear and eventual replacement of the drive.

I recommend buying a Kill-a-watt and monitoring your power consumption on the server for a week or two. Then do some math to see how much it’s actually costing your energy bill. If it’s actually considerable, then try using tools like powertop to see if you can determine what’s generating all the activity.

I haven’t seen any issues with year in review, I’m curious what you’ve seen.

Yep, my steam rewinds have been 100% Linux for a couple of years now.

I think the only exception in that time was AW2 because it’s an EGL exclusive (and ray tracing/mesh shading support in proton were still a bit lacking in performance).

Ok, I misread what you were linking to. Yeah, that’s pretty bad to allow actual streaming of content to unauthed users. I agree they should not be encouraging anyone to set this up to be publicly accessible until those are fixed. Or at least add a warning.

If I say I custom rolled my own crypto and it’s designed to be deployed to the open web, and you inspect it and don’t see anything wrong, should you do it?

Jellyfin is young and still in heavy development. As time goes on, more eyes have seen it, and it’s been battle hardened, the security naturally gets stronger and the risk lower. I don’t agree that no one should ever host a public jellyfin server for all time, but for right now, it should be clear that you’re assuming obvious risk.

Technically there’s no real problem here. Just like with any vulnerability in any service that’s exposed in some way, as long as you update right now you’re (probably) fine. I just don’t want staying on top of it to be a full time job, so I limit my attack surface by using a VPN.

Yeah, kinda wish I still had it. I remember selling it in a garage sale for money to put toward a gameboy hah.

Same, I use wgtunnel with autostart when I’m not on my home wifi. The only time I have to think about it is when I’m trying to see devices on others’ networks (ex. Chromecast/apple tv/etc), but that’s much less common than just always wanting access to my home services.

Quick feedback on the experience of casually browsing to your steam page: the trailer that autoplays spends the first ~20s being mostly just black. First person view of running and then hiding in a closet, then black, then a very dimly lit room, with cuts to what looks like the player inspecting a doll. I can’t have sound on right now, so I don’t know if there is interesting audio happening.

I highly recommend those first few seconds of the autoplay trailer showing something more compelling. IMO the best case outcome for someone in my shoes is, I see something in those first few seconds that makes me go “oooo, hell yeah, that looks interesting” and I click Add to Wishlist. Instead my first thought was “there’s no way this has just been black for 20s” and checked my brightness settings to see if I was missing something.

If it’s just for you, then you don’t need to tackle the hardest problem of content moderation.

The second hardest problem is bandwidth. If you post something to a forum that suddenly gets a lot of traffic, without some kind of CDN intermediary, you’ll get a hug of death and/or a huge bill for all the bandwidth.

The third hardest problem is uptime. My assumption is that you want the content to remain valid forever. No one likes seeing dead links in old forum threads. So as you use it over time, anything you’ve posted over the years could get a sudden unexpected viral hug, or you have to let it die (which may not necessarily stop the hug, since everyone would still be trying to ask your server for the content).

Just making sure you appreciate how difficult solving this problem inevitably becomes. Note that discord and Lemmy Posts let you upload images, so you shouldn’t need such a service in those cases. But for random forums, it quickly becomes hard.

I was also intrigued by the introduction of the matter standard, but the reality is there are already a ton of low power, cheap ZigBee devices out there that can operate for years on a battery.

I think I’ve run into one thread/matter compatible device that I was considering, but found a HA forum thread saying their experience with that protocol+device+HA wasn’t as stable. So I didn’t do it. I’m not even sure how cheap and low power thread/matter devices can get.