‘It’s a robot war’: eastern Ukraine faces onslaught of Russian glide bombs, rockets and kamikaze drones
‘It’s a robot war’: eastern Ukraine faces onslaught of Russian glide bombs, rockets and kamikaze drones
Putin has escalated strikes on Donetsk region and is likely to demand Ukraine hands it over in talks with TrumpLuke Harding (The Guardian)
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White House says Trump-Putin meeting is a 'listening exercise'
'listening exercise'
Tell me your president is 5y old without tell me your president is 5y old
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Zelenskyy rejects Trump's proposal that Ukraine could swap territories with Russia
"Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier," Zelenskyy said in a Telegram message early Saturday.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy defiantly declared Saturday that his countrymen “will not give their land to occupiers,” after Donald Trump suggested that a peace deal would include some “swapping” of territories with Russia.
“The answer to Ukraine’s territorial question is already in the constitution of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a message on Telegram early Saturday. “No one will and no one can deviate from it. Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”
His comments came after Trump announced on Truth Social that a long-awaited meeting with Vladimir Putin had been scheduled for next Friday in Alaska.
Zelenskyy rejects Trump's proposal that Ukraine could swap territories with Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his countrymen “will not give their land” afte Trump suggested it could swap territories with Russia.Freddie Clayton (NBC News)
It is very big, white like the White House, but better. It is made from white marble. Looks great on the bank of the river. All for the cheap price of 50000 USD. If you would like we can ship it to you, shipping included. But you have to take care of the tariff. Whatever it might be when it reaches your shore. /s
On serious note do you think everyone deserve human rights. Or are you a White Christian Nationalist and are of the opinion only whites deserve it. Once all the brown people are deported, blacks are made slaves again will you reach the
golden age of human rights.
Because that is what you Baby Emperor with no clothes is doing.
Israel in talks to resettle Palestinians from Gaza in South Sudan
Israel in talks with South Sudan to resettle Palestinians from Gaza, sources say
Egypt is deeply opposed to plans to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza, with which it shares a border, fearing an influx of refugees into its own territory.Gavin Blackburn (Euronews.com)
I have no words.
And it would be so easy to stop them.
Wish I could personally stop all funds flowing into Israel right now.
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The moderate Israeli majority are the only ones who can stop this, now that the US has made it perfectly clear which side it's on.
It seems, though, that they are content to merely wave a sign around in protest.
They want peace, but not enough to actually do anything about it.
Time for a general strike in Israel.
Moderate what now? According to a recent poll, 80% of Israeli Jews aren't brothered by the suffering of Palestinians. Look up the Tel Aviv University Peace Index; Israeli society is rotten to the core. The moderate position in Israeli politics is "we should prioritize the safety of the hostages, of course without compromising the Great Patriotic War™." The people who give enough of a shit about the genocide to act are a fringe minority among fringe minorities
now that the US has made it perfectly clear which side it's on.
US's been perfectly clear which side it's on for decades; Trump is just louder about it.
New Zealand woman and six-year-old son detained for three weeks by Ice in US enduring ‘terrifying’ ordeal
New Zealand woman and six-year-old son detained for three weeks by Ice in US enduring ‘terrifying’ ordeal
Sarah Shaw, who has a US visa and lives in Washington state, was detained after attempting to re-enter US from CanadaEva Corlett (The Guardian)
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Don't go to the USA.
Even if you're convinced their jackboots will spare you. It's not worth the risk, they'll target you for anything they like.
Maybe you're not quite white enough, maybe you liked a Facebook post criticising their government, maybe you've got an unamerican sounding name. Maybe you just weren't deferential, weak and obedient enough when they spotted you trying to come through the airport.
They will target you and send you to their concentration camps. If you're lucky you'll eventually be sent home with no physical injuries and just PTSD.
Don't go to the USA. It's just not worth it. There are far nicer places to visit that aren't fascist hellholes.
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Shaw is on what is known as a “combo card” visa – an employment visa, which she obtained through her employment at a maximum security juvenile facility, and an I-360 visa, which can grant immigration status to domestic violence survivors.Shaw had recently received a letter confirming her visa renewal, not realising that the I-360 element of her visa was still pending approval.
“It wasn’t until she tried to come back across the border that she realised only half of the combination card – because it’s only one physical card – had been fully approved,” said Besancon.
Border officials did not need to detain Shaw and could have filed for humanitarian parole, Besancon said. Meanwhile, all three of Shaw’s children have had their I-360 visas approved, and Besancon alleged her youngest son was therefore being detained “illegally”.
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China’s military says it ‘drove away’ US destroyer near Scarborough Shoal
China, US trade barbs over destroyer passage near disputed shoal
It is the first known US military operation in at least six years within the shoal’s waters. Read more at straitstimes.com.ST
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Alternative Sources:
China says it 'drove away' U.S. warship near the disputed Scarborough Shoal
This comes after a Chinese warship crashed into one of its own country's coast guard vessels as it chased a patrol boat belonging to the PhilippinesLim Hui Jie (CNBC)
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Cats develop dementia in a similar way to humans
Cats develop dementia in a similar way to humans with Alzheimer's disease, leading to hopes of a breakthrough in research, according to scientists.Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalisation.
The team believe the discovery in cats could help them get a clearer understanding of the process, offering a valuable model for studying dementia in people.
The study, funded by Wellcome and the UK Dementia Research Institute, is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, and included scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and California, UK Dementia Research Institute and Scottish Brain Sciences.
Cats develop dementia in a similar way to humans
Scientists in Edinburgh believe the discovery could help their research into new treatments for Alzheimer's.Calum Watson (BBC News)
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Seems like solid research!
To those who have lost, I feel you. Had several cats through the years, cried for 3 days over the last one. She was tiny and sick from the git go, but she was my friend when I was so lonely.
I buried her in our swamp with my own hands, alone, and my friends came out to do her justice.
Oh this helps!
Anyway, after I got a flat tire, I went around the parking structure with my box cutter slashing tires left and right. I figure I could fix my flat tire by testing flat tires in as many cars as possible.
Bro, do you have even the slightest idea how much easier it makes research to
a) Have an animal having the same disease, so that you don't need human autopsies / trials
b) Have another species develop the same condition the same way, which rules out anything exclusive to humans?
Symptoms may include increased vocalization, disorientation, and disrupted sleep patterns
I know im not the brightest but cats always seem random to me. Would I even noticed without going to a vet?
I had a cat with dementia when I was a kid, she didn't make it past 7 years old. Now I have a 16yo cat who is starting to show the same signs. Today she nearly ran out of the house when I got home, and didn't seem to recognize me. It's rough.
She's curled up next to me rn, but I'm still thinking those hard thoughts like when do I make the choice to put her to sleep? I'm not ready for that, maybe never will be, but she's always been a very frightened cat and she doesn't deserve to feel more frightened because of dementia.
Who were the Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel in Gaza?
Five Al Jazeera journalists were killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Sunday - among them 28-year-old correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who had reported prominently on the war since its outset.
[…]
The targeted attack on a tent used by journalists has drawn strong international condemnation including from the UN, Qatar where Al Jazeera is based, and media freedom groups.
[…]
Israel had previously accused Sharif of being a member of Hamas's military wing - something he and his employer strongly denied.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a media freedom group, said the allegations against him were "baseless" and called on the international community to intervene.
"Without strong action from the international community to stop the Israeli army... we're likely to witness more such extrajudicial mur
Who were the Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel in Gaza?
Prominent reporter Anas al-Sharif and six other journalists were killed when Israel targeted a tent used by media, the broadcaster said.Alys Davies (BBC News)
This article is so terribly tepid.
How can journalists write about the persecution of their calling so bloodlessly?
These people were more than innocent: they were so-gooders of the kind we all claim to support. They were not only supposed to be protected not only as noncombatants, but especially guarded by their attendance to a sacred mission. They, like aid workers and doctors and nurses and any care giver or person seeking to provide justice is a designated target when the goal of a military operation is extermination.
Has the BBC written an editorial confirming this?
I wanted to just add this article I just came across:
apnews.com/article/jazeera-gaz…
I think this captures exactly what I was describing. And I don't think it's a polemic or opinion piece, I think it's just better journalism.
I agree with you. I think that what most people think of as "objectivity" isn't a thing that exists in reality, but as an ideal that we can strive towards. In practice, there is no neutral journalism — especially in this topic, my instinct is to be extra cautious of pieces that appear objective at first glance.
The piece you shared is a good example of how the bias in reporting can be found both in the micro-level prose, and the macro level framing of the piece (in this case, the macro framing being that the killing of journalists sets a scary precedent).
I think you're partially right. It was a visceral reaction, but it's true that they have to keep the house style.
I disagree that I'm reading "too much polemic instead of real journalism". I think journalism is in crisis, and that the pursuit of "neutrality" in a post-truth era has severely weakened the fourth estate when it should be armed to defend its existence and fundamental values.
First, it's a myth that news is impartial. Conventional news absolutely has a system of values: it's inherently pro-truth, pro-freedom of thought, and democratic. Assassinating journalists out in the open and decreeing that they're legitimate targets is a direct attack on fundamental principles of journalism and free society. Journalism does not need to be neutral on whether assassinating journalists is wrong to retain their legitimacy.
Sadly, these institutions are not experienced or practiced at navigating the challenge of addressing this kind of story. The real story here is that because the practice of journalism undermines what the ruling coalition considers to be in the national interest, Israel has decided as a matter of national policy that it will no longer abide by Article 79 of the Geneva convention. They have not admitted it explicitly, but there is an obvious pattern of fact that goes beyond hundreds of assassinations all the way to their law against publishing news that undermines "national morale". That, imo, is the story. Really stop and think about what a monumental and newsworthy thing it is for a major world power to so publicly confirm a policy that has been until now a matter of dispute.
But the BBC can't within their current operating guidelines find a way to tell that very vital story. That's a tragedy.
I think you should really consider the main article from the BBC on the topic, which is here: bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqyyr… In comparison to this profile, it has a lot more context.
Here the BBC lays out the full facts, including the IDF's accusations, and the reasons why those accusations are to be viewed with skepticism. It relates statements by the IDF three times, compared to 5 separate quotes from Al-Jazeera, the UN and the CJP condemning the killing, plus a letter signed by the BBC about the situation for journalists in Gaza.
In the "post-truth era" we need journalistic institutions which resist the temptation to polarise their coverage, and instead to provide neutral and balanced output that can be trusted by everyone. The tragedy of the post-truth era is the disintegration of a collective understanding of the world. By relating the facts with a neutral tone, an outlet maximises the audience which can gain that common understanding, which is far more important than instructing the audience on how to respond emotionally to a subject. It's not like the BBC are burying the problems of Israel's targeting for their readers: they lay out how the world is reliant on Gaza-based reporters to get the truth out, and quotes the accusation that Israel wants to prevent the world from seeing their crimes.
My question to you when you read the BBC's coverage is: are you not outraged by the facts? I am.
Four Al Jazeera journalists killed in Israeli strike near al-Shifa hospital
Israel said it targeted well-known reporter Anas al-Sharif and alleged he was part of Hamas, which Al Jazeera has denied.Amy Walker & Tiffany Wertheimer (BBC News)
Villagers outraged over paltry land offer for $1.5B Trump golf resort
Villagers outraged over paltry land offer for $1.5B Trump golf resort
In Vietnam, villagers whose land is slated to be cleared for a $1.5 billion golf resort backed by the Trump family have reportedly been offered meager compensation by local authorities.Ailia Zehra, Alternet (Raw Story)
Israel rejects UN allegations that its forces have sexually abused detained Palestinians
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So, that was easy. What's the next step, UN? Hopefully more than a strongly worded email?
I remember protests outside torture camps for "the right to rape " Palestinian hostages.
aljazeera.com/amp/video/newsfe…
lemonde.fr/en/international/ar…
There was a guy who led a gang rape and then went on a tour of Israeli television talk shows to brag about it.
Netanyahu keeps low profile after far-right riots in Sde Teiman and Beit Lid
Following the intrusion of ultranationalists into these two military bases, the Israeli prime minister merely issued a statement calling for calm. The police made no arrests, despite the fact that the agitators are known.Lucas Minisini (Le Monde)
I really appreciate the work that AP news does. Good communication and reliable reporting.
I wish, in my heart of hearts, they would link the primary sources when they are online and publicly available. As far as I can tell, UN documentation on these abuses are mostly covered here: docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/59/26
(And committee page more broadly is here: ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-… , I think Israel is responding to their more recent report, or something near it.)
(I'm not terribly well informed, do let me know of better sources.)
Israel is in talks to possibly resettle Palestinians from Gaza in South Sudan
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The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp".[5] Christopher Browning, a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time.[5] "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental."[6] In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade.[7] There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia.[8] Raul Hilberg wrote that, in 1941, in the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews.[9]
From Wikipedia. Sounds a lot like what Israel is doing now.
>
>
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
Here we go, the final stage.
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Please learn to at least spell holodomor or just use the wider name, it makes it seem like you barely know what you're talking about, no offense
edit: even then, completely different situations and causes, not comparable imo
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I'm just learning about owncast, is there any way to login or subscribe to people so I can come back to their streams at a later time?
The set name dialog says I can authenticate with a fediverse account via the authenticate dialog, but that doesn't seem to work, at least not with my lemmy account...
But if I succesfully authenticated there's no indication that would let me "subscribe" to a given channel or something though, and that's really what I want
Afaik it is only compatible with Mastodon and similar software, not Lemmy.
You should be able to follow a video channel on Owncast from Mastodon etc. and get updates that way.
The login with Fedi feature is afaik only to join the chat that is displayed next to the video stream.
British Army in Kenya: Some soldiers using sex workers despite ban, inquiry finds
An investigation by the British Army has found some soldiers stationed at a controversial base in Kenya continue to use sex workers despite being banned from doing so.Soldiers at the British Army Training Unit Kenya (Batuk) used sex workers "at a low or moderate" level, a report said, adding more work was needed to stamp out the practice.
The investigation covered a period of more than two years, examining conduct at the base dating back to July 2022.
It was commissioned in October 2024 following an investigation by ITV into the behaviour of soldiers at Batuk, including allegations some army personnel were paying local women for sex.
British Army in Kenya: Some soldiers using sex workers despite ban, inquiry finds
Chief of Defence Staff Sir Roly Walker says the army is committed to stopping sexual exploitation.Stewart Maclean (BBC News)
Russia will ban calling on WhatsApp and Telegram, media personality Ksenia Sobchak says — Meduza
The Russian authorities have reportedly decided to ban the calling feature on WhatsApp and Telegram, well-connected media figure Ksenia Sobchak reported on Tuesday, citing sources in the telecommunications industry.
The decision “has already been made at the very top,” the sources reportedly said.
“They’ve banned calls ‘under the guise of fighting terrorists,’” one source told Sobchak’s Telegram channel. Final consultations on the issue are expected to wrap up this evening, according to a government source she cited.
Sobchak noted that the apps’ messaging and channel features will still remain accessible.
Russia will ban calling on WhatsApp and Telegram, media personality Ksenia Sobchak says
The Russian authorities have reportedly decided to ban the calling feature on WhatsApp and Telegram, well-connected media figure Ksenia Sobchak reported on Tuesday, citing sources in the telecommunications industry.Meduza
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People should be using Signal, which is also blocked.
I'm now frantically trying to cook up some way to be able to call my family back there. A VPN is of course an option, but also illegal.
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I will assume that you are saying that people should not be using Signal based on this (e.g. the United States are sliding into fascism and may fuck over Signal).
What would you suggest then? PGP? Ngl I'm happy that GnuPG is introducing post-quantum encryption in the new releases but I'm talking about calling my grandma.
In this particular case literally all I want is to be able to talk to my family members without risking the FSB arresting them for calling the "Special Military Operation" a war in a phone call. If using WhatsApp for texting isn't banned alongside phone calls, that is halfway okay for discussions of that nature, and I'll have to watch my tongue if I call them over the Roskomnadzor-Approved (TM) apps.
The trouble with those of course is that they don't always work well with non-Russian phone numbers (because of course fucking everything needs my number nowadays). And you have to hope they're not megaspyware. I am NOT downloading fucking MAX.
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The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.
ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It's crap.
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The workaround
Quit using YouTube directly and proxy your request through an Invidious instance.
Your requests are mixed in with everyone else’s, ad’s are blocked and most importantly only 1 machine touches YouTube directly and that’s the server hosting Invidious.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content?
I actually don’t watch a whole lot of YouTube anymore so I can’t really comment on this here.
The issue is that Invidious doesn't have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone,
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
Yes. Invidious and other programs, websites and anything else are useful for these kind of things. When you go to another house and in another computer you want to see some video but not affect the watch history of the user that uses the computer mainly. Or just simply watching some video that you wouldn't normally watch.
But most people who use YouTube actively on their main computer binge-watch. Sometimes they follow creators, sometimes they follow what the algorithm recommends them for the day. Invidious does not have such algorithm, since its a proxy. So, it is really not for everyone.
more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed
Why would you have an account in that hellhole?
Some of us made Gmail accounts long before Youtube even existed, and still rely on youtube for tutorials and other things of that nature that aren't found anywhere else.
Don't be a pretentious dick about it.
Most people don't even know what Invidious is, let alone the fact that there are other video hosting sites that aren't youtube (Vimeo, for one).
Invidious is always breaking, too, and most people will stop using it when that happens.
We are talking about most people, not the absolutely tiny minority of technical users who are aware that such a thing as Invidious even exists.
Firefox on Android has it.
But if you're on iOS you'd better speak to Tim Apple about it, assuming he's finished noshing off Trump.
Damn sure was clickbaity. No ads? Buy YT Premium they say.
Whoopee. Saved you a click.
I stopped using ABP years ago and switched to uBlock Origin. That and some *Monkey scripts.
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In firefox you can easily toggle off the studies telemetry bullshit in the settings. Librewolf is just firefox with those things ripped out right?
There's benefits to us not tweaking privacy settings. TOR explicitly discourages it. You don't (always) get fingerprinted by a single unique item, it's through an ensemble of data points that companies can identify who you are. There may be 10% of users with your same font library, and 1% who has the same monitor width, and 5% with the same time zone, and voila, when you multiply those percentages, you get close to one in a couple billion, and they've successfully fingerprinted you.
If everyone tweaks their settings from default Firefox, you reveal more information about yourself each time. You may think you're protecting yourself, but the reality is the opposite, you're creating a one of a kind browser config. This is where Librewolf can really reign supreme, if we all just use stock Librewolf, no one will be unique, and everyone will be anonymous.
FreeTube is a FOSS youtube frontend.
FreeTube occasionally has issues on videos with preroll ads where the video fails to play because the ad won't be fetched. This can sometimes be mitigated by running an ipv6 rotator script and blocking freetubes access to ipv4. The one I run reassigns my ipv6 address once every 5 seconds to a new randomly generated valid address.
Sometimes even this doesn't block the ads (again causing the video to fail to play) in which case selecting the share icon from the freetube interface and clicking "open invidious link" will open a web browser pointed to whichever invidious instance is set to your default.
The freetube folks are working on implementing DASH, which should eliminate the need for these workarounds once successful.
Brave is not a privacy company. They are affiliated.
But I don't think switching to Firefox is good enough, since Mozilla is adding bloats to it. Use forks.
Tom’s Hardware, Ad Block Plus, paying for YouTube Premium as a “work around”?
Guys this content was by boomers for boomers
Guys this content was by boomers for boomers
Tom's Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original "Tom", Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.
The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.
Stop using Adblock Plus and start using Firefox with uBlock Origin.
If you’re on iOS, swallow your pride and install Brave and just turn off the crypto features. You’ll thank me later.
So my parents use chrome even though I constantly install Firefox and hide chrome. Problem there is they end up with Edge so I stopped doing that. (Didn't windows get in trouble for this kind of market control in the 90's?)
So I had Ublock origin on chrome for them but it's "not supported" anymore and my usual method of ignoring what it says and turning it back on are now failing.
Any help?
Or if they just really don't like Firefox for some reason they could look into trying Cromite. It has worked pretty well for me and actually does better at blocking ads on sites like adblock-test.pages.dev/
than Firefox with uBlock origin does.
I added a user script to clear some of the URL trackers just in case I copy links anywhere as it like opera doesn't use extensions up front.
But on sites like that Firefox w/uBlock with score a 90 for me unless my Pihole is running, and Cromite will score 100 without it. Opera a 75, but I do like Operas interface on Android a lot.
AdBlock Tester - Advanced Testing Suite
Test your ad blocker's effectiveness with our advanced testing suite featuring smooth animations and comprehensive analyticsadblock-test.pages.dev
If they are technically inept, reduce their accounts to limited, lock down the admin account. That will prevent them from installing Chrome, and if the admin sets a shortcut on their desktop(s), they won't be able to remove it. Disable Edge (there are multiple ways to do so), install the necessary extensions on FF, then change FF's desktop icon and text to "Chrome".
Problem solved.
I see, but lite is much less effective. google has worked hard to make it lose its capabilities. it may still be effective at blocking youtube ads (though as it cannot use frequently updatable blocklists it probably has a higher delay for fixes when something breaks), but it cannot have specific rules for less popular sites, because of chrome's low limit on allowed filtering rules, and even though it can hide ads, that's not the sole function of ublock origin. ubo is a complex content blocker, with versatile tools to defuse site tracking on lots of websites. lite cannot do that anymore effectively, because both its capabilities have been reduced (e.g. it cannot edit network traffic anymore I think), and the number of filtering rules that it can load.
and even before lite, ubo could not be as effective on chrome as on firefox, because of slight differences in the extension api, with not so slight practical differences.
[Rant] Trying to run a cracked game on Steam Deck feel like trying to learn hollywood movie hacking, except I'm a side character
HOW do you do it?
I'm about to just run a Windows VM, why does linux suck so much.
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Install an all in one packages (visual c++, etc) (or this for .net too) into your wine prefix and run the repacks (like fitgirl or dodi) like in windows.
Put dxvk and vkd3d-proton on your wineprefix (automated like with cachyos or manually downloaded) and maybe create a lutris application to just select the exe to install the game.
Edit: Also jc141
Edit 2: Added one link for the .net ones, run the wine cmd for these packages and they autoinstall all the gaming dependencies, so you can install almost any games. Also, you can install dependencies (like those needed by some games like skyrim) using winetricks.
Edit 3: Updated the link
GitHub - abbodi1406/vcredist: AIO Repack for latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Runtimes
AIO Repack for latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Runtimes - abbodi1406/vcredistGitHub
Use Lutris. Install game. Run crack exe in prefix.
If you really need the Steam version, run the crack exe using the launch options.
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I downloaded a "pre-installed" version from one of the sites on the megathread here, then I added each of the _redist ".exe"s to lutris, intalled all of them except the dxwebinstaller that didn't work, tried to run the game on lutris using Proton Experimental again and it failed.
Honestly fuck microsoft too for creating the windows monopoly.
Not sure if this is rulebreaking tho, its RE4.
Yea something is different now, DirectX did manage to install, but game doesnt work.
Used the wine-staging to install alk of the _redist .exe files again, tried to run the game using wine-10.8-staging-x86_64, doesn't work, tried Proton Experimental again, and it did have a game crash dialogue box.
Is dxvk and vkd3d enabled in lutris? Maybe bottles will help you if it doesn't work in lutris. Protondb might be good to see too.
Edit: just saw this, there's a wine DLL override that might fix the game (in lutris you can config it on the wine configs) dinput8.dll=n,b .
GitHub - praydog/REFramework: Scripting platform, modding framework and VR support for all RE Engine games
Scripting platform, modding framework and VR support for all RE Engine games - praydog/REFrameworkGitHub
Also what is "Run crack exe in prefix" supposed to mean?
Am I too dumb for this?
I haven't used a PC in the last 5 years so piracy skills go a little rusty, and I've always done it on windows, never on linux
There’s a dropdown that lets you pick an exe to run in the wine prefix. The wine prefix is basically the emulated* windows environment that Lutris sets up for the game.
* Wine is not an emulator, but I don’t know what other word to use.
Takes care of all the technical wine stuff I don't understand and leave me with 1 "C:/" drive everything can be installed in to rather than having one for each app/game like Lutris does
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usebottles (@usebottles@mastodon.online)
81 Posts, 14 Following, 830 Followers · Run Windows software on Linux with Bottles.Mastodon
If you install Windows on the deck you might find it runs worse.
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BTW, I ran Freelancer (old Microsoft space game !) and I was impressed how well it worked and ran on lutris and all the magic arround it.
Nowadays, people get the habit that everything works out of the box, they just have to "press, swipe, click, that's it". Technology litteracy is taking a big hit on newer generation, while being flooded with some kind of "Artificial Intelligence" to do their homework... 😮💨
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.m.youtube.com
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I feel your pain man.
All the tutorials I have read and watched say to "just" do x, y and then z and it will all work fine! It never does. I have spent multiple hours trying to get a few different repacks to work in a few different ways and it never just works as it supposedly should.
I got one game to run once after 4 hours and thought j had it figured out then the next day it didn't work again xD
I now have two machines, one running Linux and one running windows for my DJ software and repacks, that doesn't help you but that is the best solution I found xD
Aside from finding a tutorial for that, of which there are surely hundreds or thousands online, I'd also suggest checking ProtonDB on the off-chance that the game actually just doesn't run on SteamDeck:
protondb.com/app/2050650?devic…
I assume you meant that one, looks good and commenters there also give some info on what they did to start it.
I've had pretty good experience with this. For the most part installing with Lutris and pointing it to the correct exe works. Generally games will not run due to actual compatability issues.
The real pain point is trying to install mods on certain engines/games where the modders assume a windows environment. Sometimes they ship precompiled binaries that will only work under specific conditions and it's hard to debug.
I'm just here to say to all the people here saying to follow a simple tutorial and everything is sunshine and rainbows on the Deck to go away forever.
I've been using various Linux distros or a flavor of BSD as my main driver OS for twenty years and just the endeavor to install simple Skyrim mods on the Steam Deck drives me insane.
I spent the entire month of July trying to unsuccessfully install Gate to Sovngarde mod collection and gave up because it almost becamea full-time job after my real job just trying to troubleshoot. One try in Windows in less than an hour wait and I'm playing it fine.
Sometimes it's fine to yell to the world "fuck Linux"
Yeah fuck the system created by people in their free time for free^^
Not the corpos that still exclusively develop for windows or the mod devs not willing to think about other platforms and building unportable shit that will only work in a narrow set of environments.
Seriously tho, expecting any random mod to work on a system the OG game wasn't even built for seems pretty insane to me 😁
Like, the fucking game works. That in itself is a marvel of engineering
You'll feel like a hacker if it ever works though ;)
Hah.
Steam has always been an anti-piracy tool. Gabe Newell is very much on the record about convenience (and inconvenience) being the key to the problem.
People were mad at them for a while, then they proved him wrong by forgetting that had ever happened.
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I've got a few to work, but I find gog releases work much better than anything else because there are no cracks.
Once you learn things like prefix=virtual machine (more or less) it gets easier.
Just run the installer with proton? You can do it by adding it to steam, adding compatibility in the settings then running it. Then do the same compatibility for the game exe.
Also acting like this is a linux problem makes you a moron
How much can I extend an OrderedCollection?
Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.
Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (/topic/12345
) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.
But... what if I passed in a preview
property a la evan@cosocial.ca's b2b8 and it contained a Note
? Maybe a note with a different id
? Maybe with a name
?
Waiting for trwnh@mastodon.social to tell me this is a terrible idea.
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Re: How much can I extend an OrderedCollection?
trwnh@mastodon.social yep exactly that's what I was going for.
If you paste an URL to an ordered collection into NodeBB it'll try to load the thread. That'd be ideal.
But I will settle for understanding name and summary!
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julian:
Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (/topic/12345
) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.
It would be really great if you got something useful when you look up a NodeBB topic in Mastodon!
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes
Money quote:
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector
It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division.defector.com
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There are things that could be done to improve Excel. For instance, fully integrate python and allow it to be used to create custom functions. Then, maybe one day, VBA can ride off into the sunset where it belongs.
Adding Copilot to Excel is not an improvement because Copilot and all other LLM based platforms frequently barfs out totally incorrect information about how to do something in Excel.
"You do that using formula."
No, I can't, you worthless pile of shit because THAT FORMULA DOESNT EXIST.
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It's been a big increase in workflow for me.
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Lemmy is propaganda against AI at this point. Not sure what paid for it but it has all the markers. Feels like being in the comment section of ny post articles.
Same energy as talking online about immigrants, nuclear energy or marvel
It's using a community to post toxic and dystopian articles over and over again. Lemmy technology communitys are extremely vile. Not sure why it happened but it's turned toxic
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No it isn't. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.
The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed to be toxic towards it. People who are influenced cannot see it, outsiders can though. It's like seeing right wingers talk about immigrants. They'll never be able to see how their news and media influence them. That is their truth and it's as true to them as hate towards AI is towards lemmings in places like c/technology
Look at the articles posted, the headlines, the appeals used, the comments. It has all the markers of an Astro turf campaign.
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No, I'd definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don't see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.
IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype. "We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything". It's wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.
People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.
Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren't yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They're a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating "therapy". They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.
All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.
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The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed
By who? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense. Why would anyone want to do that.
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You really can’t imagine why corporations and political groups who spend billions paying people to manufacture narratives and flood feeds might hate the idea of ordinary people suddenly having their own free, on-demand content factory, fact-checker, and megaphone?
That's on both sides of the political spectrum.
These AI tools are not just Google chat. You can build with them rapidly. Is it some revolutionary thing? No
But can it be a game changer in some areas? Absolutely.
They moved rapidly with the media on this. Compare headlines for AI to any other yellow journalistic topic. They're identical
In favour of AI absolutely, against it, no I can't. What group would want to disvalue AI, after all most of the big tech companies are developing their own. They would want people to use AI, that's the only way they make a profit.
You keep providing these vague justifications for your belief but you never actually provide a concrete answer.
Which groups in particular do you think are paying people to astroturf with negative AI comments? Which actual organisations, which companys? Do you have evidence for this beyond "lots of people on a technically inclined forum don't like it" because that seems to be a fairly self-selecting set. You are seeing patterns in the clouds and are insisting that they are meaningful.
You call it “patterns in the clouds,” but that’s how coordinated media campaigns are meant to look organic, coincidental, invisible unless you recognize the fingerprints. Spotting those fingerprints isn’t tinfoil-hat stuff, it’s basic media literacy.
And let’s be real: plenty of groups have motives to discourage everyday people from embracing AI.
Political think tanks and content farms (Heritage Foundation, Koch networks...) already pay for astroturfing campaigns and troll farms. They do it on issues like immigration, climate, and COVID. Why would AI magically be exempt?
Reputation management/PR firms (Bent Pixels, marketing shops, crisis comms firms) literally get paid to scrub and reshape narratives online. Their business model depends on you not having the same tools for cheap or free.
Established media and gatekeepers survive on controlling distribution pipelines. The more people use AI to generate, remix, and distribute their own content, the less leverage those outlets have.
Now why does this matter with AI in particular? Because AI isn’t just another app it’s a force multiplier for individuals.
A single parent can spin up an online store, write copy, generate images, and market it without hiring an agency.
A student can build an interactive study tool in a weekend that used to take a funded research lab.
An activist group can draft policy briefs, make explainer videos, and coordinate messaging with almost no budget.
These kinds of tools only get created if ordinary people are experimenting, collaborating, and embracing AI. That’s what the “don’t trust AI” narrative is designed to discourage. If you keep people from touching it, you keep them dependent on the existing gatekeepers.
So flip your own question: who pays for these narratives? The same people who already fund copy-paste headline campaigns like “illegals are taking our jobs and assaulting Americans.” It’s the same yellow-journalism playbook, just aimed at a new target.
Dismissing this as “cloud patterns” is the exact mindset they hope you have. Because if you actually acknowledge how coordinated media framing works, you start to see why of course there are groups with the motive and budget to poison the well on AI.
Consider these recent examples:
The pro-Russia “Operation Overload” campaign used free AI tools to push disinformation—including deepfakes and fake news sites—on a scale that catapulted from 230 to 587 unique content pieces in under a year .
AI-generated bots and faux media orchestrated coordinated boycotts of Amazon and McDonald’s over DEI reversals—with no clear ideology, just engineered outrage .
Social media networks ahead of the 2024 U.S. election were crawling with coordination networks sharing AI-generated manipulative images and narrative content and most such accounts remain active .
Across the globe, AI deepfakes and election misinformation campaigns surged from France to Ghana to South Africa—showing clear strategic deployment, not random dissent .
Because AI expands creative sovereignty. It enables:
It keeps people bypass expensive gatekeepers and build tools, stories, and businesses.
Activists and community groups to publish, advocate, and organize without top-down approval.
Everyday people to become producers, not just consumers.
The moment ordinary people gain these capabilities, the power structures that rely on gatekeeping be they think tanks, PR firms, old-guard media, or political operatives have every incentive to suppress or smear AI usage. That’s why “AI is dangerous” is convenient messaging for them.
The real question isn’t whether cloud patterns are real it’s why shouldn’t we expect influential actors to use AI to shape perception, especially when it threatens their control?
Lemmy isn’t just a random forum it’s one of the last bastions of “tech-savvy” community space outside the mainstream. That makes it a perfect target for poisoning the well campaigns. If you can seed anti-AI sentiment there, you don’t just reach casual users, you capture the early adopters and opinion leaders who influence the wider conversation.
I haven't checked my feed. But good money I can find multiple "fuck AI" posts that sound similar to "they took our job"
Increase in workflow? Like there are more steps to perform the same task? Because workflow isn't work volume or units if output. It's the process that gets the work done.
Did the increase in "workflow" get you more money or more work for the same money?
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Could result in some very cursed codebases.
"We dont use git, we just update the excel spreadsheet"
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It can't be ... but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I've never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.
Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.
Yeah, no doubt.
Having access to visual basic is dangerous enough, let alone Python
Definitely, but sandboxes can be escaped, and you can't protect everything via sandbox. Apparently its all cloud anyway, but if it were local and sandboxed, there are still exploits like rowhammer and spectre that may cause further risks.
Its taken years to get browser sandboxes to where they are, and even they get broken every so often.
Introduction to Python in Excel - Microsoft Support
Learn about using Python functions with your Excel spreadsheets.support.microsoft.com
Still sounds like you'd be shipping your data to the cloud, where it can be exfilled from there.
Would potentially be a great phishing tool, just need to trick someone into putting sensitive data into a precooked excel file, and it gets exfilled.
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Why would anyone use an LLM as calculator?
That just doesn't make sense.
It is like using a calculator as typewriter because it can spell 80085.
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So what you are saying is, my car is a typewriter?
Maybe 😛
It's a legal requirement when your car hits 80085 that you must take a photo, it supersedes all other laws.
I don't know much about statistics. I can (i assume) as the ai questions in natural language that I would otherwise have to research how to calculate.
Of course, I may get a result, but I won't be any smarter. If that was the goal, then great.
OK, I'm not really mad at this. I already used Copilot to design a table for me in Excel and it worked really well. It did everything for me, and I just had to copy-paste the formulas into their appropriate spots. If it's built-in, possibly will work better.
Not everybody needs to be an Excel expert, after all. Having that functionality might be actually beneficial.
I think the concern is that you can come up with a number of formulas that will get correct answers for some combinations of values and not others.
If you do not understand the logic of the formula, and what each function does, how do you verify they are correct and will always give you the results you think they will? Double check every result in its entirety?
That's my thinking
If you know what you're doing, it's significantly easier to do it yourself
You at least have some reassurance it's correct (or at least thought through)
Verification is important, but I think you're omitting from your imagination a real and large category of people who have a basic familiarity with spreadsheets and computers, so are able to understand a potential solution and see whether it makes sense, but who do not have the ability to quickly come up with it themselves.
In language it's the difference between receptive and productive vocabulary: there are words which you understand but which you would never say or write because they're part of your receptive, but not productive knowledge.
There are times when this will go wrong, because the LLM will can produce something plausible but incorrect and such a person will fail to spot it. And of course if you blindly trust it with something you're not actually capable of (or willing to) check then you will also get bad results.
There's an old story about the lead developer at Texas Instruments saying "I want a computer that fits in my pocket". And then his staff dutifully measured the pocket to spec before proceeding to perform a feat of miniaturization that would revolutionize the modern world.
I'm trying to imagine one of the techies, from way out in the back, saying "Does it have to get the right answer?" Then getting fired, walking off the job, and walking into Microsoft with 10x the salary the next day.
"Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets."
Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.
Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.
What, you don't always work with 16 digit numbers that are automatically truncated? What could go wrong? We don't use 16 digit numbers for anything, really./
It's hard to believe that's still a thing but it is!
This is such a misguided article, sorry.
Obviously you’d be an idiot to use AI to number crunch.
But AI can be extremely useful for sentence analytics. For example, if you’re trying to classify user feedback as positive or negative and then derive categories from the masses of text and squash the text into those categories.
Google Sheets already does tonnes of this and we’re not writing articles about it.
Zuckerberg's Huge AI Push Is Already Crumbling Into Chaos
Zuckerberg's Huge AI Push Is Already Crumbling Into Chaos
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is already shaking up his "Superintelligence Lab" just months into his multi-billion dollar push into AI.Noor Al-Sibai (Futurism)
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The Kids are NOT OK.
Tech and Society Lab - The Anxious Generation
From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhoodwww.anxiousgeneration.com
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Our kids are in a mental health crisis, and it has to do with their phones. Author @jonathanhaidt lays out the facts in his new book #TheAnxiousGeneration
The Anxious Generation Out Now. Order the Book.
From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhoodwww.anxiousgeneration.com
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AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
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It looks like you're organizing a meeting, would you like with that?
Yes / No
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I started getting emails about meetings I'm invited to but never show up to, which was kinda helpful. Except it was just the first few bullet points, you had to click for the full meeting notes
So one day I did, and it somehow grabbed my info from Microsoft, created an account, and invited itself to the meeting. All without showing me the summary, because I didn't really want to set up an account
Now there's two agents listening to the weekly meeting.
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The only thing I love more than Vibes Coding is Vibes Management.
You get a meeting! You get a meeting! Everyone! Gets! A! Meeting!!!
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Battling deepfakes: How AI threatens democracy and what we can do about it
Battling deepfakes: How AI threatens democracy and what we can do about it
Open-source generative AI tools and certain apps put audio and video manipulation in the hands of anyone with a laptop. Here’s why that poses such a dire threat to democracy.The Conversation
Spotify Takes Down EeveeSpotify; 'Reborn' Version Immediately Surfaces
Responding directly to a takedown notice from Spotify, GitHub removed the popular EeveeSpotify tool that allowed music fans to unlock premium features without a paid subscription. Soon after GitHub complied with the DMCA notice, the tool's developer relaunched the project as 'EeveeSpotifyReborn', offering the same functionality but with a legal twist.
Spotify Takes Down EeveeSpotify; 'Reborn' Version Immediately Surfaces * TorrentFreak
Responding directly to a takedown notice from Spotify, GitHub removed the popular EeveeSpotify tool that provided access to premium features.Ernesto Van der Sar (TF Publishing)
Reddit profile privacy feature enables bot farms to conceal spam operations
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36038533
Reddit profile privacy feature enables bot farms to conceal spam operations
Perplexity's Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions
Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet
The attack we developed shows that traditional Web security assumptions don't hold for agentic AI, and that we need new security and privacy architectures for agentic browsing.Brave Software
After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6
After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6
OpenAI is looking to turn a new leaf, with Altman discussing how GPT-6 will usher in a revolution once again.Victor Tangermann (Futurism)
Sony makes the “difficult decision” to raise PlayStation 5 prices in the US
Price hikes go into effect August 21; standard PS5 will now start at $550.
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Air Canada Introduces "Exceptional Policy" To Expense Passengers Affected By Strikes
Air Canada announces a surprising new policy to compensate passengers after a cabin crew strike grounds hundreds of flights. The airline promises to cover transportation costs, but details are scarce. What's the catch?
Air Canada's New Compensation Policy for Strike-Affected Passengers
Air Canada introduces an 'exceptional policy' to cover expenses for passengers impacted by the recent cabin crew strike, including refunds and flexible rebooking options.Prachi Patel (Air Canada)
new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
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Re: new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
If we're seeing the wind down of new Star Trek shows but a resurgence of games, I am totally on board for this
Star Trek Armada reboot please 😁
The Steam page has a description:
Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown is a story-driven survival strategy game in which the fate of the iconic starship is in your hands. Take the helm, manage the ship and resources, and make difficult decisions. Will you be able to bring home the ship and its crew?“What if?” Scenarios
Did you ever wonder what would have happened had Captain Janeway decided differently? If an important crew member had followed a different path? Or what the outcome would have been had the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager embraced Borg technology to increase their chances of survival?
Wonder no more: Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown allows players to take control and shape the journey of the U.S.S. Voyager as they want. Take a risky approach or play it safe. Be diplomatic or let phasers do the talking. Research technologies that were shunned by the crew. But: Be prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions! The game features rogue-like elements, so in each run you will encounter different situations and even iconic characters might meet an early end if you don’t react accordingly.
Deep Ship Management and Research
After being moved forcefully into the Delta Quadrant, the U.S.S. Voyager ends up heavily damaged and in dire need of repairs as well as internal reconstruction. Restore destroyed rooms, secure life support and energy supplies, and start constructing. Ship systems, crew quarters, industrial and research facilities: You must decide what to build and when, to ensure the ship has what it needs for the perilous journey.
Expedite research into different fields. New technologies and improved layouts will not only strengthen the ship but also boost your crew’s morale. Exotic and dangerous research, like the technology of the Borg, is also within your reach. As captain, will you embrace it for the potential it offers, or will you omit it for the dangers it presents?
Exploration and Resource Acquisition
The dangers and opportunities of the Delta Quadrant beckon to be discovered by you and your crew. Scan celestial bodies to locate precious resources that fuel your journey. Find points of interest and oddities along your way, but beware: While the Delta Quadrant may reward the bold, it punishes the careless just as quickly. As captain, you have the final say in plotting a course and defining an approach.
Ship Combat and Away Missions
The journey of the U.S.S. Voyager would not be possible without both combat between ships and away missions to planets or space facilities.
For away missions, put together a team based on the individual talents of your crew. A team with skills that complement each other might be best suited for the task, but it is up to you to call the shots. Minimize the risk for the team’s members, rush headlong into danger, or take a scientific approach - you decide.
When diplomacy fails, the U.S.S. Voyager and its crew are ready to enter ship combat at your command. From the bridge, you give commands for offensive and defensive maneuvers, targeting enemy ship systems and using special weaponry. And even during ship combat, the individual skills of your crew members come into play: Assign battle stations to crew who bring precious skills to the table and trigger them in crucial moments to maximize your combat effectiveness.
Features
”What if?” scenario and storytelling: The ultimate platform to play out your course of action during the iconic journey of the U.S.S. Voyager.
Complex ship management: Repair, construct, and maintain an efficient and habitable ship to ensure systems and crew operate effectively.
Exploration and decision making: The Delta Quadrant is a fascinating yet perilous place that awaits exploration and demands decisive action.
Combat and away missions: Use the talents of your crew smartly to minimize risk during away missions as well as strike boldly during ship combat encounters.
My takeaway? This time, Tuvix lives.
Star Trek™: Voyager® - Across the Unknown on Steam
Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown is a story-driven survival strategy game in which the fate of the iconic starship is in your hands. Take the helm, manage the ship and resources, and make difficult decisions.store.steampowered.com
Re: new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
I enjoyed Elite Force, but it's more actiony than I want my Trek games to be. My favorites have always been the ones that try to put you into an episode—Judgment Rites, ST: 25th Anniversary, A Final Unity, and Resurgence. I think the adventure genre is a much better match with the franchise than strategy or action.
Sadly(for me), that doesn't seem to be the direction they're going with this Voyager game. Hopefully it turns out well, though.
Re: new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
oh gosh judgement rites... the fact they built a full on 2D dogfight simulator in that game was epic.
I got good enough at it that I could shoot down Trelane.
Spoiler alert — it didn't matter, he stranded you on the planet anyway.
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector
It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division.defector.com
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That's a great question! I'll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.
Here are a few ways you can improve indoor lighting:
That's a great question! I'll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.
This symbolizes the fact that for the last five hundred years white people have been victims of genocide in South Africa.
Would you like to learn more?
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
My math teachers always told me that "math is not an opinion".
I'd like to see them now defending that!
Microsoft announces new Chief Accuracy Officer, Jack Handey
Mr. Handey has released a statement:
Instead of having "answers" on a math test, they should just call them "impressions," and if you got a different "impression," so what, can't we all be brothers?
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
-Jack Handy
Oh shit, I always thought it was a fictional name that the writers used for the random stuff that come up during the writing process. Didn't know it was a real person!
Holy shit, he created Toonces!
Handey is also credited with creating Toonces the Driving Cat, the cat who could drive a car, although not very well.
This has completely changed everything I ever held dear and holy.
I always thought handy was a Hartman character and was him reading.
To find out it was neither Hartman's character nor his voice is .... everything was a lie.
"Hmm. I wonder. I was thinking of dancing trees. Now I'm wondering what's next. Screaming trees. Yeah. That's got to be the answer. Screaming trees." - private notes by Hans Reiser, filesystem designer and a convicted murderer
(OK, that's a fake quote. This one is real:)
"Trees have their roots pointing up. And if you cut a tree apart, you get a forest. No, I'm not drunk." - one of my computer science profs, on data structures
even then the number was actually stored correctly, it's just excel lies to you and shows you a different number.
This AI will stack wrong calculations on top of wrong calculations and cascade everything.
ITT: people who didn’t read the article.
Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions. You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column. I don’t really see the issue.
Of all the things to shove AI into, the first thing that came to my mind years back was Excel. It’s handy when I’m presented a spreadsheet of data at work and I just want to do something like “write a function to extract just the number from a column containing data formatted like LPF_PHASE_OF_CARE [PAF 304001]” because I just want to copy paste all the numbers somewhere. It’s trivial to verify it works correctly, I can examine the formula, and I don’t have to wade through numerous shitty Excel tutorial websites to try and teach myself something I’ll use once or twice a year.
Quick shitpost images I share with friends and Excel functions are where I get the most utility out of AI, which in general I think sucks and is massively overhyped.
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Well, the article is covering the disclaimer, which is vague enough to mean pretty much whatever.
I can buy that he is taking it to the level of if it can't directly be used for the stuff in the disclaimer, well, what could it be used for then? Crafting formulas seems to be a possibility, especially since the spreadsheet formula language is kind of esoteric and clumsy to read and write. It 'should' be up an LLM alley, a relatively limited grammar that's kind of a pain for a human to work with, but easy enough to get right in theory for an LLM. LLM is sometimes useful for script/programming but the vocabulary and complexity can easily get away from it, but excel formula are less likely to have programming level complexity or arbitrarily many methods to invoke. You of course have to eyeball the formula to see if it looks right, and if it does screw up the cell parameters, that might be a hard thing to catch by eyeballing for most people.
If it didn’t use 100 gallons of freshwater and like 600kW of definitely-non-renewable-sourced electricity then ML trained to excel at Excel would be most welcome.
Does it run locally?
Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions.
This distinction is immaterial. This is like a big child grabbing a smaller child's hand and slapping them with their own hand saying "quit hitting yourself". It's like trying to get out of a speeding ticket by saying all you did was push the accelerator... Truely it was the fuel injectors forcing the vehicle to an illegal speed.
Just because you've adjusted the abstraction layer at which you've ceded deterministic outcomes, doesn't mean AI isn't doing it.
You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column.
This may be appropriate in some scenarios, specifically:
- When accuracy isn't important
- When you will never need to justify what is being done to anyone (including yourself)
This, however, covers a decidedly small portion of professional work done using Excel.
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This is totally expected and also absolutely peanuts compared to Intel, who once released a processor that managed to perform floating point long division incorrectly in fascinating (if you're the right type of nerd) and subtle ways. Hands up everyone who remembers that debacle!
Nobody? Just me?
Anyway, I totally had — and probably still have, somewhere — one of the affected chips. You could check if yours was one of the flawed ones literally by using the Windows calculator.
I remember too, buddy. It's important to never forget.
Edit: oh, I guess it's important to forget.
A lot of people are fine with getting wrong answers about shit they don't know already. That's what gets spread in social media and what was used for a large portion of the training data and what is available when AI does a web search.
It presents something that looks right, that is what most people care about.
This is only one study, but I saw an article a few months ago talking about a study by a major phone company that found that the vast majority of people (80% or more IIRC) either didn't care about AI features on their phones or actively disliked them.
I think most people don't really care one way or another but hate that it's being shoved into everything, and those who know the stats on how often it's wrong are a lot more likely to actively dislike it and be vocal about their dislike.
That sounds quite possible, AI features on phones/OSs go mostly unused –according to my study, which has a sample of size who the hell knows and a methodology of I feel–.
But llms I think, although burning money, are quite accepted by the people who touch them, and do not understand what is actually going on or don't care if the thing is wrong often.
I sometimes use llms, but only to burn thru monkey work that I can fast and easily review and do if the result is too shity. But that is the extention of my ai use.
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Man, all those saps that started studying AI thinking it was necessary are in for a rude awakening.
I'd almost feel bad for them, if they weren't so eager to follow the memes while making the digital space worse for all of us.
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Somewhat off-topic, but that’s the first time in a long time I’ve read a random article on the internet and just instantly liked the writer’s writing style without respect to the topic.
That was a depressing article, but a very enjoyable read.
G/O Media fires Deadspin's Barry Petchesky for not sticking to sports
After a memo telling Deadspin to "stick to sports," and after Deadspin didn't do that, G/O Media fired Deadspin deputy editor Barry Petchesky.Andrew Bucholtz (Awful Announcing)
I also enjoyed their writing.
Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick
Loved this 😂
Apple wants to bring Touch ID to its watches starting next year
Apple wants to bring Touch ID to its watches starting next year
It would make payments more secure and more hassle-free. According to a new report purportedly based on internal Apple developer code, the company is...Vlad (GSMArena)
Apple's Greed Is Finally Backfiring
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Apple's Greed Is Finally Backfiring
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Honestly, the downfall of Apple would be good news in my book.
I know Google is not the greatest about it, but at least on Android, you can install third party app stores and custom operating systems.
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I would rather have Linux phones, but while those exist, they are not mainstream and ready quite yet.
So, custom Android, such as Lineage or Graphene, is about the closest we can get for now.
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They've just been deprecated to doing it the same way that every other custom operating system has been doing it for a long time. It makes it slower, but it doesn't make it impossible.
If these were seats on a plane, they got bumped from first class down to coach at the very back. They'll still get there. They just won't have the nice leg room and the extra peanuts.
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I've been using an iPhone for the past 6 months or so, an older iPhone 12 Pro my wife used until she upgraded to the 16 Pro. I can't say too many bad things about the os itself, since it feels like a walled garden android and the software quality is actually worse on IPhone, but it might be the aging chip on it.
I can't wait to go back to Android though, because of all the reasons you mentioned.
Good news would be them strategically repositioning in favor of their mid-90s image. Would be hard, but doable.
Green energy, autonomous devices, openness to tinkering, friendliness, "other companies mess with you and we don't", perhaps some retrofuturism. It wouldn't even be out of character, they sort of hold the window open, with the kind of series on AppleTV they are making, and part of their advertising, and even honestly with their devices being not yet as enshittified.
Just do that for real.
And honestly, Apple is not the worst of these companies. Perhaps they were just worse at baiting.
In general, over years I'm slowly becoming more and more appreciative of Apple. Their advertising is just atrocious and their stuff is very expensive in, eh, pretty outrageous ways (like a charger costing like some devices together with their chargers), but that's pretty open and honest. "We sell you that for our humongous price, we say it's miraculous and magically cool, and it seems like a scam, but you can say no". While with Google and Meta and such they first sell you something looking normal, and then farm and abuse you indefinitely.
So I'd wish for Apple to survive the bubble bursting (for which I hope they don't go the AI way) and become a more general-kind computing company. Maybe hold closer to 50% of personal computing in the world, not the luxury niche they are holding now.
All these tech giants have their own area where they are the absolute worst, and other areas where they're not as bad as some of the others.
Apple sucks on app store restrictions, but on the desktop OS, the respect user privacy more than Google and MS do. Google is the absolute worst on ads, tracking and using search to leverage their monopoly, but they've also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android. MS makes the worst piece of shit OS and forces everybody to use it while they make it worse, but I'm sure there's also something they do right.
but they’ve also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android.
Symbian and Maemo were better.
Also Nokia was the only non-US company of these.
Yes.
I'm not watching a fucking YouTube video.
No judgment if that's your thing. I just don't enjoy it.
The very tl;dr is that Apple has been catering to shareholders first and foremost to the point that all else suffers. To elaborate a lil more:
The video shows an internal email from the iPhone VP of marketing that basically says they should only add features that are good enough and that what the iPhone already offers could be considered too much. “ Anything new and especially expensive needs to be a rigorously challenged before it’s allowed into the consumer phone”
Then there’s the thing where Cook allows stock buybacks which Jobs didn’t. I am not sure what this means exactly but it plays into the broader point that Jobs was a product genius and Cook is a financial genius. (also, they spent $77 billion on stock buybacks, this will be relevant in a second).
Lastly there is AI. Apple is lacking in AI chips so there was a request to double their amount, which would’ve cost about $10bn. But this request was denied. So they had to not just work with their own aging chips, but rent cloud computing infrastructure from Google.
tl;dr Cook is cooked or something idk
Quasarr Hostnames
So I'm trying to setup Quasarr (direct downloader for sonarr+radarr) but I'm not sure what hostnames to use.
I added some from the suggested pastebin but most of them serve German content and I haven't heard of any of these websites (new to DDL)
Can anyone help me setup some good English sources? Or at least tell me what the rest of the abbreviations mean?
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Just look and figure it out. It’s really straightforward name matching. You don’t need someone to spell everything out to you, if you make a mistake just try something different. You can do it!
OPs_cops_post.html ass post. “Please explicitly tell me what illegal websites these initials refer to!” Guaranteed you are British 100% because only British cops would be stupid enough to do this.
Ddl is gonna be mainly stuff for poor Europeans who are scared of getting caught sharing files and are relying on the “loophole” of “I never actually shared the file, the file was shared with me and that’s substantively different” (it’s not, they’re just using it as an excuse to haul you in for some other reason or frame you for something).
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Well at least your username is fitting...
Im gonna be blunt, this dude wanted to learn how to use something that interests them. Getting slapped with 'just figure it out' and some unsavory comments about where you think they're from is a surefire way to kill someone's interest in ever interacting with a community.
Do better for fucks sake
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My response: you can figure it out! Just try a little! Don’t ask such cop ass questions, also ddl is the realm of non-English stuff.
You: unsavory!
Just looked into this a bit. While I don't know exactly what each one corresponds to, I did find that pastebin has some lists of urls you can use.
This one has English and German-> the comments should differentiate what's what. Hope this helps!
Quasarr Hostnames English German Latest - Pastebin.com
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.Pastebin
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How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World [404 Media]
How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook.“We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea - Women’s Dating Community’, that could be a perfect transition for the ‘Are we dating the same guy’ facebook groups since it sounds like those are on their way under… Tea has all the safety measures that Facebook lacked and more to ensure that only women are in the group,” Burns said. “We are looking for a face and founder of the app and because of your experience, we think YOU will be the perfect person! This can be your thing and we are happy to take a step back and let you lead all operations of the product.”
The Tea app, much like the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, invites women to join and share red flags about men to help other women avoid them. In order to verify that every person who joined the Tea app was a woman, Tea asked users to upload a picture of their ID or their face. Tea was founded in 2022 but largely flew under the radar until July this year, when it reached the top of the Apple App Store chart, earned glowing coverage in the media, and claimed it had more than 1.6 million users.
Burns’ offer to make Sanchez the “face” of Tea wasn't the first time she had reached out to her, but Sanchez never replied to Burns, despite multiple attempts to recruit her. As it turned out, Tea did not have all the “safety measures” it needed to keep women safe. As 404 Media first reported, Tea users’ images, identifying information, and more than a million private conversations, including some about cheating partners and abortions, were compromised in two separate security breaches in late July. The first of these breaches was immediately abused by a community of misogynists on 4chan to humiliate women whose information was compromised.
A 404 Media investigation now reveals that after Tea failed to recruit Sanchez as the face of the app and adopt the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, Tea shifted tactics to raid those Facebook groups for users. Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app.
404 Media’s investigation also discovered a third security breach which exposed the personal data of women who were paid to promote the app.
“Since first creating these [Are We Dating The Same Guy] groups, I have avoided speaking to the media as much as possible because these groups require discretion and privacy in order to operate safely and best protect our members,” Sanchez told 404 Media. “However, recent events have led me to decide to share some concerning practices I’ve witnessed, including messages I received in the past that appear to contradict some of the information currently being presented as fact.”
Burns is no longer with Cook or involved with Tea, and she did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But messages from Burns to Sanchez show that Cook changed his story about why he created Tea after they broke up. 404 Media also talked to a former Tea employee who said she only knew Burns as “Tara,” a persona that also exists in the Tea app and on Facebook as an official representative of the Tea app. This employee said that when Burns left the company, Cook took over the persona and communicated with other Tea users as if he was Tara.
Overall, our reporting shows that while Cook said he built Tea to “protect women,” he repeatedly put them at risk and tried to replace a grassroots movement started by a woman who declined to help him. As one woman who worked for him at Tea told us: “his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people.”
Tea did not directly answer a list of specific questions regarding 404 Media’s findings and the facts presented in this article. Instead, it sent us the following statement:
“Building and scaling an app to meet the demand we’ve seen is a complex process. Along the way, we’ve collaborated with many, learned a great deal and continue to improve Tea,” a Tea spokesperson said. “What we know, based on the fact that over 7 million women now use Tea, with over 100,000 new sign ups per day, is that a platform to help women navigate the challenges of online dating has been needed for far too long. As one of the top apps in the U.S. App Store, we are proud of what we’ve built, and know that our mission is more urgent than ever. We remain committed to evolving Tea to meet the needs of our growing community every day.”
How Tea Tried to Recruit a Female “Face” for the App
Sanchez started the first Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group in 2022 after her terrible experiences dating. The basic premise—a space for women to share information about men with other women—has existed in various forms before, but Are We Dating The Same Guy quickly became an online phenomenon. Today, Are We Dating The Same Guy is comprised of more than 200 different Facebook groups dedicated to different cities across the U.S. and Canada and has more than 7 million members. The groups have many volunteer moderators, but Sanchez is still the administrator for most of them.Women in the groups, who can also post anonymously, share a wide range of experiences, from relatively benign complaints about men they didn’t like, to serious accusations of infidelity and physical assault.
The popularity of Are We Dating The Same Guy groups is evidence that its members find them useful, but that popularity has come with a cost. Sanchez has become increasingly cautious after several attempts at retaliation from disgruntled men who are organizing on Telegram to dox women in the group and at least one lawsuit. In that case, a man accused Are We Dating The Same Guy of libel after a user in the Chicago group called him “clingy” and a “psycho.” Sanchez also said she had a rock thrown through the window of her family’s home by a man who wanted to stop Are We Dating The Same Guy, that she pays for a service to wipe her personal information from the internet, and that she generally keeps a low profile. This is the first time she has talked to the press.
By the time she was first approached by Burns in October, 2022, Sanchez was suspicious of Tea’s interest in Are We Dating The Same Guy because of some of the negative attention the groups already got.
“I’m a huge fan of all the work you're doing and I think it will have an ENORMOUS and important benefit on the lives of women,” Burns said in a Facebook message to Sanchez on October 25, 2022. At the time, Burns’ Facebook profile picture was a photo of her and Cook smiling. “My fiance and I have been working on a similar project due to my own dating woes and thought you’d be the perfect person to collaborate with on it.”
This is an entirely different origin story than the one Cook tells about Tea today. On Linkedin, Tea’s site, and interviews, Cook says that he “launched Tea after witnessing his mother’s terrifying experience with online dating—not only being catfished but unknowingly engaging with men who had criminal records.”
Before starting Tea, Cook worked at a couple of tech companies in San Francisco, including Salesforce, where he held a “director” title and rapped and made songs about Salesforce products during presentations he shared on Linkedin.
0:00
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1×A video Sean Cook uploaded to Linkedin
There is no mention of Burns on the Tea site, but in 2022 she persistently asked Sanchez to join Tea.
In addition to messaging her on Patreon and Facebook, on December 2, Burns sent Sanchez $25 on Venmo along with a message thanking Sanchez for her work. “Sent you a PM on Facebook re: Business collab when you get a chance! 😊” On December 7, 2022 Burns sent Sanchez $15 on buymeacoffee.com along with a message about a “business opportunity,” and “an app with a similar concept to the facebook groups you manage that I would love to collaborate with you on!”
In April2023, after Sanchez didn’t respond to Tea’s requests, Are We Dating The Same Guy group admins started banning a set of Facebook accounts posting links to the Tea app over and over again. For example, Are We Dating The Same Guy moderators banned one Facebook user named Crystal Lee from 25 groups across the country after the account repeatedly encouraged members to use Tea and suggested that information about the men they’re asking about was available there. Lee’s account was clearly hijacked from a woman with a different name sometime around 2016. While the account name is Crystal Lee, the name in the URL for her page is Kimberly Ritchart. I found Richart’s new Facebook account, where her first post in 2016 says she lost access to her original account. 404 Media couldn’t confirm who was in control of the account, and saw no evidence that Tea was behind it, but activity from similarly hijacked accounts indicate that there was an organized effort to stealthily promote the Tea app in the Are We Dating The Same Guy groups.
Two other Facebook accounts, Norma Warner and Morgan Ward, were banned from 23 groups and five groups respectively for spamming Tea app promotions. Warner and Ward also shared identical replies two weeks apart. “If I remember correctly, I think he’s been posted to Tea. I maybe [sic] mistaking him for someone else but looks pretty familiar,” both replies said in response to different posts in different groups.
Veronica Marz told me she was hired in April 2024 to be Tea’s partnerships manager. Her job was to manage the affiliate program that would pay people $1 per user who signed up to Tea via their unique affiliate link. She also moderated a number of groups named “Are We Dating the Same Guy | Tea App” for different cities, which were started by and owned by the Tea app and could obviously confuse Facebook users. Marz also reached out to admins of the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups to ask if they’d be willing to join the affiliate program.While reporting this story, 404 Media discovered that Tea’s data about the affiliate program, including who signed up for it, their real name, how much they have been paid, their emails, phone numbers, Venmo accounts, and charities they wanted to donate to if they didn’t want the money, were left exposed online. All a hacker or other third party had to do to view all of this data was add “/admin” to the public Tea affiliate site’s URL. Tea turned off this site and the affiliate program entirely after 404 Media reached out for comment for this article on August 13.
On December 1, 2024, Marz noticed an account named Nicole Li who was spamming Tea app promotions in one of the Facebook groups she managed for Tea as part of her job. Li was not part of the affiliate program that Marz managed, and unbeknownst to Marz, moderators of the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups would eventually ban the Li account later. At that point, Marz was reporting directly to Cook, and she flagged the account to him because it was suspicious and spamming several groups at the same time.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara."
“Just wanted to check and see if this person was working with the Tea app?,” Marz said in a text to Cook along with a screenshot of the account seen by 404 Media. “I’ve noticed that they’ve joined all the groups regardless of location and they’ve been promoting the app, but they aren’t a part of the affiliate program that I saw.”Cook replied: “Not sure what’s going on there but as long as they’re not bothering anyone, I guess let’s just let them do their thing!”
All of the Facebook accounts that spammed Tea promotions were either deactivated or did not respond to our request for comment. None of the accounts were officially part of Tea’s affiliate program, according to the exposed data.
404 Media has seen several messages from Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook group members and moderators confused about whether the Tea app was the official Are We Dating The Same Guy app, and whether Sanchez was affiliated with it. Several people also wondered if the Tara persona, which reached out to them on Facebook, was associated with Tea or if Sanchez was behind it. One review of the Tea app on the Google Play Store from January, 2024 also seemed confused and disappointed by the app.
“A girl in a FB group referred me (I think she was actually advertising 🤷),” the review said. “She called it a free app. It’s not free [...] The fb groups should have raised MORE THAN ENOUGH to cover app costs that are referred to in other reviews [...] I find this gross. Maybe I’ll come around or be back, but for now I’ll stick with fb.”
Marz also told me that several users in the Tea-owned Facebook groups were confused, and thought that they were in the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups owned by Sanchez.“Maybe five to seven people in different groups asked me about Paola Sanchez, and I had to explain to them, like, ‘Hey, this is not Paola’s group. This group is owned by the Tea app,’” she told me. “I had to explain to them the difference between the two.”
Tea’s promotion strategy clearly managed to poach and confuse some members of the Are We Dating The Same Guy community and get them to join the app. Later, its strategy was to undermine Are We Dating The Same Guy directly.
Today, Tea’s website credits an influencer named Daniella Szetela as helping to widely promote Tea: “One day while scrolling, Sean discovered a viral creator, Daniella, whose content resonated with millions of women—and saw an opportunity to bring that same energy to Tea. What began as a simple idea quickly turned into a social media movement.” The site says Cook was so impressed with her voice and following, he made her “Head of Socials.” A March, 2025 archive of the same page on Tea’s site tells the same story, but at the time Szetela’s title was “Chief Female Officer.”
“Together, Sean and Daniella have transformed Tea into more than an app—it’s a movement,” Tea’s site says.
In September 2024 Tea started posting videos to its official TikTok and Instagram accounts named @TheTeaPartyGirls. Some of the videos are of Szetela showing the app and talking about how great it is. Other videos are made to look like they’re coming from other Tea users, but in reality are produced by a company called SG Social Branding, which describes itself as a “Gen Z Creator Powerhouse Delivering Short Form Videos to be used for YOUR Brand’s Paid Social Ads.” According to its site, SG Social Branding has a team of “over 35 gen Z creators” who create videos for clients. These videos are made in the the style of common social media posts, like an influencer talking directly to the camera, doing man on the street interviews, or videos that look like they are clips from podcasts, but are from podcasts that don’t actually exist.
On a “case studies” page for Tea on the SG Social Branding website, the company says that Tea’s “ask” was to “Develop the narrative that Tea is the go to for Women who like to stay safe while dating.”
“We deployed creators for street interviews in locations such as NYC during daytime and the Nightlife scene on college campuses. Additionally, we made entertaining podcast clips of girl talk that is truly un-scrollable,” the case studies page says. Under “results” it says “The TEA app went #1 in the app store on July 23rd, 2025 and is now viral! Videos deployed from SGSB creators crossed over 3.4 million views with over 74k shares and rising.”
In these videos, the influencers don’t only promote Tea and talk about it as if they actually found information on it about men they know, they also repeatedly disparage Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook groups.
“Instead of using that Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy, what girls are doing now because it’s so much easier is they’re downloading Tea,” a woman holding a microphone says as if she’s talking to someone off-camera. The text overlaid on the video says “Tea Party Pod.” The woman, Savannah Isabella, is an influencer who works for SG Social Branding. She goes on to talk about how one of her friends found a guy she was seeing there and all the red flags other women have posted about him. “Miss me with that. Boy bye. And it’s so much easier and faster than that Facebook group.”
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A post shared by Tea - Dating Safety App for Women (@theteapartygirls)
In another video, Isabella is at a bar, demoing the Tea app. “Girls, forget about Are We Dating The Same Guy,” she says.Isabella and SG Social Branding did not respond to a request for comment.
Marz told me that she was hired to Tea by a woman named Tara and that initially she only communicated with Tara. Marz did a Zoom interview with Tara before she started to work for Tea and the woman identified herself as Tara over text and email. In November 2024, Marz said that Tara left the company, at which point she started reporting directly to Cook. When I showed Marz a photograph of Christianne Burns, Cook’s then fiancée, she said that was who she knew as Tara, who first interviewed her over Zoom.
After "Tara" left, Marz said Sean took over the “Tara Tea” account which was used to communicate with Tea users in the app and on Facebook.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara,” she told me. Essentially, a man is posing as a woman to an audience of women who are trying to protect themselves from, at best, deceptive men.
How Tea Deleted Posts About Men
Tori Benitez has a private consulting business for victims of domestic violence who are in Family Court for high conflict divorces or custody battles. She told me she joined the Tea app because it promoted digital safety, talking about abusers, and protecting people by letting them share information anonymously.“I'm in the dating scene and on dating apps, and have had my own experience, so I first joined as a user, and then I saw them post that they needed help with escalation claims,” she told me. The escalation claims were complaints both from men about what women were posting about them in the app as well as complaints from other users. She thought her experience as a paralegal would be useful, and she could use more remote work, so she sent Tea her information.
“I had a Zoom call with Sean, and he wanted to know not only a little bit about my business and how I help people, but I had to tell my own personal story.” Benitez said. “I had an ex who literally threatened to kill me and told me how he was going to kill me, even after a restraining order. My story is deep and scary, and he kind of interrupted me and started crying. And I was like, ‘Oh, are you okay?’ Looking back, shouldn't I have been the one crying? It's kind of weird.”
Benitez said she took the job because she wanted to help women. During the interview and at several points while working for Tea, Benitez said that Cook wanted to make her consulting business part of Tea. Benitez said Cook floated having a tab in the Tea app that would send women to her consulting business if they needed help, or having her run workshops for users.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people, and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Benitez started working in April of this year but said the job wasn’t what she expected because it made no use of her experience as a paralegal. She said the work was more like customer support, and mainly had her filtering through complaints, responding to them according to a strict script she was given, and keeping a record of the responses.If a complaint contained words like “defamation” or seemed legally threatening, she would find the post in question and the user who posted it. At times she would contact the user and ask them if the post was true and if they had any evidence to prove it. Sometimes users would respond and say the accusations were true, and the post would remain. Sometimes the users also provided supporting evidence, like court documents. Sometimes the users would delete the posts themselves, or Tea would delete the posts if the users didn’t respond to Benitez’s questions after a certain amount of time.
“That's when things would get deleted and literally no longer exist on there,” she said. “Nobody could find them. They did not go into an archive. They are just poof gone.”
She would record all the complaints and responses in a spreadsheet for Tea’s internal records, but said it didn’t always make sense when Tea decided to delete a public post on the Tea app vs when it decided to leave one up. In one interview in May, 2025, Cook said the Tea app receives “three legal threats a day from men,” and that Tea has a full legal team that helps it manage those situations.
Benitez said that in one case, Cook told her he would handle a complaint from a man regarding what was said about him on the app himself because Cook knew the man personally.
“He [Cook] seemed to side with or randomly choose to delete things that just didn't make sense and felt really concerning to me,” she said. “But I felt I had no room to complain, because every time I brought up a concern his response was either ‘ignore it,’ or ‘I will handle it,’ and there's no HR, so it's not like I can go anywhere to say all this stuff's happening. I didn't have any other point of contact other than him.”
Benitez also said she raised concerns about users’ behavior on the app. She said that at some point earlier this year Tea went viral in one town in Louisiana, where Tea users started going after each other and the number of complaints exploded.
“There was a lot of fighting in the comments between users. There were a lot of threats between users. It just turned into a chat room,” she said. “They would be fighting each other. Like, ‘Where are you at? I’ll pull up on you.’ I was like, ‘holy shit.’ There would be racist posts. It just started getting bad, and I mentioned that to him [Cook] as well, and I basically got the answer of let them say whatever they want. And like this whole like, you know, ‘It's free speech.’ I thought this was about protecting people,” Benitez recalled.
In May, Benitez said Cook was late to pay her. When she asked about it, Cook said he didn’t have the money, and asked her to keep working until he did, or work for less pay. At that point, Benitez said she wouldn’t work until she got paid for the work she already did. Eventually Cook sent her the money for the hours she already worked, but Benitez never came back.
There are currently two class action lawsuits in motion against Tea accusing the company of failing to properly secure users’ private information. After these complaints were filed Tea updated its terms of service, which now require users to waive their right to participate in class actions against the company, and agree to attempt an “informal dispute resolution” before suing the company.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people,” Benitez said, “and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Tea’s Security Breaches Put Users at Risk
On July 25, 404 Media broke the news that Tea made an error that completely exposed a database containing at least 72,000 thousand images from its users, and that a misogynistic 4chan community downloaded them and shared them online in various forms in order to harass and humiliate women. On July 28, 404 Media revealed an even worse security breach to Tea, which exposed more than a million private messages between Tea users that included identifying information and intimate conversations about cheating partners and abortions.After the first hack, someone created a website modeled after “Facemash,” the site that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously created while he was a student at Harvard to rank the attractiveness of female students at the university. This new site, based on Tea data, took the selfies women uploaded to Tea in order to verify they are women, presented them to visitors in pairs, and allowed them to choose which they believed was more attractive. The site used the votes to create a ranking and also highlighted the list of the 50 most and least attractive women according to votes.
The second breach was far more dangerous not only because the direct messages between Tea users that were exposed included conversations they thought were private about sensitive subjects that could become dangerous in the wrong hands, but also because those conversations included details that could be used to deanonymize users. Direct messages between users often included their real phone numbers, names, and social media handles.
“I posted on the app about a man who groomed and abused me as a minor,” one Tea user whose direct messages were exposed in the second security breach told 404 Media. The user asked to be anonymous because she’s heard about “incel dudes” doxing Tea users. “I joined Tea because I appreciated the premise of a ‘whisper network’ for community safety—because a huge amount of men are, in fact, unsafe individuals, and most of the time those impacted don't find out until it's too late.”
This user added that they felt safe enough to share intimate details on Tea because it was advertised as a “safe space” for women with a strong emphasis on anonymity.
“My reaction to the breach is anger, just anger, and some disgust,” the user said.
Kasra Rahjerdi, the researcher who flagged the second security breach to 404 Media, said there were signs he wasn’t the only person who may have accessed more than a million of private Tea messages. Every Tea user is assigned a unique API key which allows them to interface with the app in order to log in, read public posts, share posts, or do other actions in the app. Rahjerdi discovered that any Tea user was also able to use their own API key to access sensitive parts of the Tea app’s backend, including a database of private messages and the ability to send all Tea users a push notification.
This access also allowed users to create new databases, and Rahjerdi told 404 Media he saw someone else doing just that while he was looking at Tea’s backend. Most of these databases were empty, but one contained a link to a Discord server with a handful of users which shut down shortly after 404 Media tried to join it on July 26. This activity indicates that someone else found the same security breach as Rahjerdi and could have accessed more than a million private messages of Tea users as well.
In a podcast interview in April, 2025, Cook said he doesn’t know how to code, and that the Tea app was built by two developers in Brazil. According to Tea’s Linkedin page, both developers are contractors who are available to hire via Toptal, a platform where software developers offer their labor as remote freelancers. Those two developers did not respond to our request for comment.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that the private Tea messages could be especially dangerous to Tea users who talked about abortions or specific men.
“I would be particularly concerned about posts about abortions in say Texas, where SB 8 grants a private right of action to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion that violates the law,” Galperin said. SB 8, also known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” bans abortion after the detection of a “fetal heartbeat,” which is usually six weeks into pregnancy. The law also allows anyone to sue anyone else who performs abortions or “aids and abets” performing or inducing an abortion in violation of the law. “I’d also be concerned about DMs containing information of sexual orientation or immigration status, or details about sexual assault that the survivor was sharing in private.”
Galperin said she would be “extremely concerned” if the messages got out, not just because of the men who are named in the messages, but because “There are people who think that anyone who has an account on this platform is fair game for harassment,” referring to some of the harassment we’ve already seen from 4chan.
Despite the risks the Tea app has already put users in, Tea has downplayed the impact of the security breaches, and has continued to grow in popularity. On July 28, Tea said in a post to Instagram that “some” direct messages were accessed as part of the initial incident, and that it had temporarily disabled the ability for users to send direct messages. The statement does not acknowledge that more than a million messages were exposed, and also misleads users that those messages were leaked as part of the initial breach. The messages were exposed in an entirely separate breach around different security issues. On July 26, after 404 Media reported about both Tea breaches, Tea said on Instagram that it received over 2.5 million requests to join the app. The replies from users on Instagram are filled with people who are on the Tea app waiting list to be approved. Again, even after it said it has hired a cybersecurity firm to address the two previously reported breaches, 404 Media found a third security issue that exposed users’ private information that Tea wasn’t aware of until we reached out for comment.
Today, Tea’s site boasts that more than 6.2 million women use the app.
Joseph Cox contributed reporting.
A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
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"Best practices" (?) with laptop battery driving me crazy
Ok, well, to start with, my Lenovo X1 Carbon 10th is known for not having the greatest battery life.
Despite this, to preserve battery health, I have notifications set to warn me when a charge goes under 20% or over 90%, so that I either plug in or unplug when I get them, which TTBOMK constitutes "best practices." Very possibly I'm just getting old and getting lost too deeply in whatever I'm doing, but I feel like I'm constantly getting these notifications, and they're really starting to get on my nerves!
I've tried tlp and auto-cpufreq without any noticeable difference in performance, and usually I'm on "Power Saver" in Mint.
Mrs. Erinaceus has a gaming laptop and just keeps it plugged in all the time, battery health be damned. Is that what I should do? Maybe time to get a new battery? Or is there just some way to tell it to stop charging and leave it plugged in?
Palestine was the problem with TikTok - Congress seemed to think a scrolling video platform was a national security threat. What changed?
Palestine was the problem with TikTok
After pro-Palestine content flooded the app, Congress treated TikTok as a national security threat. What changed?Sarah Jeong (The Verge)
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They appointed an exIDF instructor to determine what's hate speech...
Suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore
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Wyoming launches first state-backed stablecoin on seven blockchains
After years of research, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission has unveiled the mainnet launch of its first official state-backed stablecoin. The so-called Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), marking the first time a U.S. state has issued a blockchain-based, fiat-pegged token meant to be used by retail and enterprises alike, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
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The Frontier Stable Token is overcollateralized by cash and short-term U.S. Treasurys, holding a minimum reserve of 102% to ensure stability at Franklin Advisers.
Wonder how long this will last until we start the fracturing of US currency at the state level again. That'd get pretty turbulent.
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The problem here is whatever value the US dollar has, it is decreased by the participation of Wyoming, so why would I want to trade US dollars for a currency hinged only on the negative liabilities the US dollar has?
I guess this coin is for those committed to the blooming collapse of the rural US, who cares if it goes belly up if the landscape you live in is so existentially screwed for water, healthcare and livable housing that money won't be of any use when shit hits the fan anyways.
How The Mooching WorksIn that vein, understanding Wyoming’s finances is important for us to become educated voters.
Wyoming is a very unique state because it figured out a long time ago how to make people from out of state pay our essential taxes. In other words, we mooch off of other taxpayers to pay our bills.
Here’s how the mooching works. According to a 2022 analyis by the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division, a three-person family with an income of $68,000 and owning a home with a value of $320,000 pays about $4,340 in taxes, including sales tax, fuel tax, tobacco tax, alcohol taxes, vehicle registration and property taxes.
That same family recieves about $23,900 in local and state government services.
...
Some politicians are running around and saying Wyoming should just stop taking federal funds. The obvious question, when faced with the above numbers, is how are you going to replace $3 billion per year when the state stops taking that money?Before one answers that we don’t need those funds, it might be prudent to see where the state of Wyoming spends those federal dollars.
Remember, some of the funds are direct federal payments that are labeled “federal funds” in the graph above. The federal mineral royalties are included in the “general fund” as well as “other funds,” which are appropriated differently.
Combined, the “federal funds” and “other funds” contributions equal 31% of the state’s budget.
cowboystatedaily.com/2024/01/0…
Does this sound like a better holder of value than the US dollar?
Tom Lubnau: Like It Or Not, Wyoming Depends On Federal Money
Guest columnist Tom Lubnau writes, “We are at a crossroads in our state. We must insist on thoughtful analytical folks with discernment to make our policy decisions.Tom Lubnau (Cowboy State Daily)
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I don’t think I’ve read a clearer illustration of how red states would fall apart without money from other states. But that’s on me.
Thanks for posting this.
If we settle for slogans, we are going to get our private parts sucked into a toilet at 34,000 feet.”
Amazing intro.
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Can’t say I’m surprised.
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Just great.
Obviously the customers don't need to know that their audit logs not only could have been turned off for conversations without any extra authentication, but also are so easy to turn off that it happens by accident without any extra intervention.
Also their entire Vulnerability disclosing guideline is security/compliance/image theater.
Microsoft Still Can't Say How Much the ROG Xbox Ally X Will Cost Due to "Macro-Economic" Conditions, Despite Announcing Release Date and Availability Details(Leaked prices $549.99/$899 for Ally/Ally )
Microsoft Still Can't Say How Much the ROG Xbox Ally X Will Cost Due to "Macro-Economic" Conditions, Despite Announcing Release Date and Availability Details - IGN
Microsoft has confirmed release date and availability details for the ROG Xbox Ally X, its upcoming gaming handheld made by Asus, but notably held off on confirming how much the device will cost.Tom Phillips (IGN)
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I think the idea is hilarious that in 2025 people would still trust Microsoft to competently launch a product and then not enshittify it until it is nearly unrecognizable.
Microsoft has zero capacity, competency or even desire to stand behind this over things like game streaming.
It’s both. It was co-developed by the companies.
No, the actual hardware wasn't. That's the point of the entire exercise to not develop the product in-house. Microsoft only develops Windows game mode. 8bitdo.com/ultimate-3-mode-con… is not a Microsoft product (or "co-developed with Microsoft) either. It's yet another 3rd party product with Xbox branding and why would Microsoft have a say on the price then?
8BitDo Ultimate 3-mode Controller for Xbox | 8BitDo
Designed to play cross platform. Officially licensed by Xbox. Available in Jade, Black, and White editions.www.8bitdo.com
Well I hope Microsoft has next to no input on it then
Microsoft develops Windows game mode, so the user-facing bit of the system and of course such a major sponsor surely has general "don't do anything that hurts our brand" clauses in the contract with Asus but other than that there has been not a single piece of evidence that the handheld will be anything but a more high-profile version of 8bitdo.com/ultimate-3-mode-con… which is also just branded 3rd party hardware. IMO there is a decent chance the identical hardware will also launch as a SteamOS version with the buttons then carrying Steam branding.
8BitDo Ultimate 3-mode Controller for Xbox | 8BitDo
Designed to play cross platform. Officially licensed by Xbox. Available in Jade, Black, and White editions.www.8bitdo.com
That doesn’t make it any better
Whether or not it's better wasn't the question. The claim was that Microsoft was launching the product and being in charge of defining the price. They aren't because it's an Asus product with Xbox branding, just like 8bitdo.com/ultimate-3-mode-con… is a regular 8bitdo controller with Xbox branding and not a Microsoft product.
That's all.
8BitDo Ultimate 3-mode Controller for Xbox | 8BitDo
Designed to play cross platform. Officially licensed by Xbox. Available in Jade, Black, and White editions.www.8bitdo.com
It was about Microsoft botching a launch
And Microsoft isn't launching the product because it's not a Microsoft product.
That’s almost worse, Asus also makes a lot of garbage.
That's not the point. The point is asking Microsoft about the price of a branded 3rd party product.
Microsoft has zero capacity, competency or even desire to stand behind this over things like game streaming.
Said like someone who doesn't understand why Microsoft are in gaming to begin with.
To rip people off, apply surveillance capitalism to kids and strangle associated competition from gaining a foothold?
Honestly it seems like Microsoft is making enough profits from aiding Israel in its Genocide of Palestinians with Microsoft Azure I am actually not sure why they bother with the comparatively less lucrative video game industry.
I also don't know why Asus would want to brand their gaming devices with a label deeply associated with genocide.
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Just imagine what they’ll have to name the sequel.
It’ll be like Street Fighter games in the 2000s. Get ready for Super ROG Xbox Ally X Turbo HD Remix Plus Alpha Double Upper.
Asus and Acer have some of the biggest dipshits in their design departments.
"Republic of Gamers" is cringe, and Acer settled on having "PREDATOR" written in all caps across their gaming laptops.
Gamer aesthetic is not, never has been, and never will be cool.
I've got an old-ish Acer Predator and thankfully it doesn't have quite that level of dogshit branding but I did have to go into the bios to disable the boot screen and obnoxiously loud boot up noise. I like the metal and the RGB isn't that bad, but if I buy another gaming laptop it's probably not going to be from the Predator line since that seems to be all NVIDIA and I use Linux now, lol. Also who the hell thought Predator was an appropriate name for any commercial product, it's pretty yikes.
(Also my laptop has always been an RGB space heater but that seems to be a problem with gaming laptops in general).
Also who the hell thought Predator was an appropriate name for any commercial product, it's pretty yikes.
As in not prey. A line of gaming stuff so superior that it exploits the market and eats the competition, competition like the Alienware line. Alien vs Predator, and all that?
The world was a slightly more innocent place two decades ago.
I got the "not prey" bit and the Predator movie franchise when I bought it (if the first thing I thought of was the other definition, I probably would have bought a different laptop), but I'd completely forgotten about Alienware, the Alien vs Predator angle is kinda funny.
Still, at some point you think they'd go for a rebrand, because you don't want people to think about your line of gaming laptops and go "wait... yuck".
If I remember correctly (from my mom who grew up in Taiwan) asus, acer, and msi(?) used to be one giant company that was split into three. so it doesnt really surprise me that their design teams share some cringe similarities ( okay i mean like ik this split was a long time ago but like they all do the same thing).
i always thought rog (republic of gamers) was just a play on roc (republic of china aka taiwan). Im just waiting for gigabyte to come out with peoples republic of gamers
Sony just announced a USD$50 increase to all their PS5 models literally the day MS said this. MS are just waiting to see what the market is doing so they can jack the price up to meet it. They don't want to announce $500 if everyone else jumps up to $600.
These are premium, low volume, enthusiast devices - the exact price doesn't really matter before it releases. The people that are buying one are already going to buy one, and we know the general price range that it will be in.
CLEAR Launches Biometric eGates At Airports, In Partnership With TSA
CLEAR is rolling out eGates at TSA checkpoints for members, which will simplify the security process. Here's what to expect.
gravitas_deficiency
in reply to cyrano • • •phutatorius
in reply to cyrano • • •Putin barks out orders, Trump listens (to the extent he's capable).
But as for "exercise," well, Trump doesn't believe in that.
MuskyMelon
in reply to cyrano • • •