I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

Oh shit, I thought he died after it ended. Still the worst celebrity death for me, and one of the few that I could care about.

What a great guy.

Fuck Discovery for ruining a good thing

A few years ago I was rewatching the Smyths edit of the show and I was wondering if it was ruined or if the show just was a product of its time and couldn’t exist in <modern year>

I think the internet has turned urban legends on their head. What constitutes a plausible myth has changed. We can just search for a lot of these now (and back then too, but it was less common and there was less stuff online). A lot of new urban legends are floating around now, but I don’t know, a lot of these early episodes tackled timeless schoolyard myths.

But the point wasn’t always to test the myth, the myth was just a premise to see them build things and blow them up. Even when I remembered the outcome from when I was a kid, I loved rewatching some of these episodes. It was really interesting to see how they set their experiments up as well. Very practical, very “workshop-brained” in the very best way.

But more than that, I think there’s just no way any network is bankrolling anything like that anymore. My understanding of TV show finance is very limited but I can’t see a modern Mythbusters being profitable, between the insurance and the networks’ unfailing appetite for canceling shows and writing them off, especially expensive shows. Didn’t Netflix make a spiritual successor with the B team only to cancel it, back when Netflix was just blowing up in popularity?

I firmly believe Mythbusters was made in the best possible era for it. Right when the internet was becoming a part of everyone’s lives but not to an intrusive level. Right when there was enough public interest in educational (well, educational-adjacent) TV and right when it was feasible to make the show.

Of course I’d like Mythbusters to exist in some form today. Maybe a tiny self-funded operation with its own in-house streaming site. But are there enough 25-40 year old vaguely nerdy types willing to pay for it? Adam Savage’s YouTube just isn’t the same. I appreciate it, but it’s a shadow of the real deal.

I do really miss seeing the world through the eyes of a kid flipping channels and landing on Jamie Hyneman creating a frozen poultry cannon.

I think I just like the retrofuturism of “giga pager”. Of course calling would work but it would be besides the point for me.

A modern phone could do everything this would be used for on a day-to-day.

BT headphones

Or a jack of some description, wires are always better for calls

Drop a SIM card in there and you’re not far off from a modern version of PDAs from back when pocket tech was interesting.

Not for calling of course. Text only (although everyone texts over the internet now - maybe for data as well).

Replying under the top comment but this really applies to all of these, how do these search engines determine what counts as a personal site? For example I had procrastinated for years on finally spinning up a static, barren HTML blog. The infamous Lucidity AI post introduced me to Mataroa and I got over the hump and started writing. Would that get indexed? Etc

Does it just crawl through webrings?

I remember people recommending decentraleyes for some time and then I remember there being an argument against it. I don’t remember what the problem was though.

One thing this recent ad injection debacle has me worried about is that I’ll open an archived download of a YouTube video and find ads in my files. I have hesitated to continue my personal archival project until I could be 100% sure my downloads are clean, because I can’t go through everything to make sure they didn’t inject a 5 second ad somewhere.

This kind of reminds me of older deep dream style images.

I miss those and the VQGAN images. I wonder if there’s a way to run those original old models and algorithms on newer hardware, faster. I feel like they were more interesting to probe around to see how the model works.

Not that the new stuff can’t be interesting to play with, it’s just that the older ones felt more like toys and less consequential.

My thought process is that in the case of media I’m not accessing the same files over and over, at least not for most of the files. For a media archive it would make sense, to me at least. I’m not familiar with modern tape storage, I’m sure there’s many good reasons why this isn’t done (yet?).

Would be good for self hosted offsite backups too I’d imagine.

Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.

Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

Suddenly thinking about how the race to sustainably create more soil will probably be a theme for scientific research in the near future.

Desertification is scary!

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.