Lemmy.

Mom wanted me to go into music performance. I went into computer science both because “holy shit how cool is that” and to get out of music performance.

My alma mater had three computer departments: CSC/CompSci, CIS/Computer Information Systems, and Graphic Design. I’ve never been artistic, really, so I didn’t have a lot of interest in Graphic Design. But I didn’t know the difference really between CIS and CSC going into college.

I went to the head of the CIS department to ask about the difference and he was like “CSC is about building the plane, CIS is about flying the plane.” Misinterpreting that to mean CSC was about hardware and CIS was about software, I thought I wanted CIS. When I met with the CSC head, he met with me in a little lab in the CSC department. And on the shelves on the walls, there were robotic coin sorters and Lego robots and stuff. And that’s basically when I realized the CSC department was my people.

The costs of distribution aren’t really that expensive for big companies.

You can’t really trust that users are going to be willing to donate hard drive space and upload bandwidth to help your maps service or whatever work. (Though, to be fair, you did mention things like OpenStreetMap which is probably more likely for users to be willing to support that way.)

Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.

But also, there are newer technologes based on a very Bittorrent-like P2P way of doing things. IPFS is basically reskinned Bittorrent. And Peertube uses in-browser P2P to distribute videos. I don’t think there’s any standard in, say, HTML5 that allows for P2P without some hacks, but it sounds like there’s a good chance such a standard is likely to make its way into browsers in the relatively near future. Also, it sounds like Chrome supports more than Firefox in that area right now.

It’s wild to meet Any Austin fans in the wild. I was watching his stuff and supporting him on Patreon when he was really obscure. Now that he’s really popular, it’s a whole different thing.

Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.

I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.

Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.

Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.

• I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
• Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
• I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
• There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
• I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.

Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:

TTRPG:

• Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.

Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:

• Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
• Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
• gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.

Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:

• OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
• Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
• Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
• Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
• Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
• Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
• Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.

Tech/hacking:

• Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
• Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
• James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.

Satanism:

• The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
• Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.

Other creepy stuff:

• Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
• Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
• Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
• blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
• Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.

Vidja gaming content:

• Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
• Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.

I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.

Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.

Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.

But I don’t know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I’d try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.

If you’re ever able to and need to go no-contact with him, just don’t feel any guilt over it.

The IP address of lemmy.world is 104.26.8.209 which appears to be in San Francisco.

https://zombo.com/

Nope. I reply to bots quite frequently. I’m often the only commenter in the thread, but if I have something to say about what the bot posted, I’ll comment.

Often my comments are to make fun of blockchain or LLMs. But if the Hacker News bot posts a link to a blog post on underwater beekeeping and I have an opinion, I’ll post whatever I think adds to the conversation.

Nice try, Danny Ocean.

What’s wrong with the Fediverse exactly?

So build your own. ;)

Chicory. Be careful. It’s pretty potent.

I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.

What do Bitcoin and dark web add to the conversation, exactly? That can be done with fiat currencies on the regular-old internet. (It could be done with brick-and-mortor stores, and vinyl, for that matter.)

Whether it could “work” (as in, become popular) is another question, but darknet-only and cryptocurrency-only would make it harder for it to take off than just putting it on the internet and letting people pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal, etc.

Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won’t be swayed in any way, shape, or form

There’s no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I’m not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It’s not “disingenuous” to call FUTO software proprietary. It’s simply factual.