Snot Flickerman

Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware?

I know this might seem like a strange answer, but… IRC channels on private torrent trackers. Many of the people on these sites actively have large and complex setups running. There often is a lot of talk about hardware for servers and networking in those IRC channels. Or at least there is on the trackers I am on.

I know that’s not necessarily a helpful answer to anyone not already in the private torrent tracker community, since its often quite a task to get involved if you aren’t already. However, it’s one that I have had great success with, personally. To anyone who already is on a private torrent tracker, if you haven’t checked out the IRC, give it a shot and see.

Oh and don’t forget you can self-host The Lounge for a self-hosted web-based IRC client.

Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.

Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.

I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.

Same thing happened with music.

It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.

More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.

How Valve sounds right now: “It’s totally cool to rip off kids with blind box stuff and get them addicted to gambling mechanics!”

I’m with you OP, we need to stop it in physical games as well. Just because Magic the Gathering does is and Labubu does it doesn’t make it okay. It actually just creates artificial scarcity and pushes children and the families providing them the money to gamble ever harder to get the rare drops, on the off chance that those are valuable.

Even Beanie Babies never stooped that low.

Security through obscurity isn’t security.

There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.

I just want to say thanks for reminding me to play The Stanley Parable to get the Go Outside achievement. I beat it by 6 years! I hadn’t played it in 11 years!

This is fucking amazing. I’m gonna go out and get a weed vape right now! I mean, for hosting a website on, yeah, that’s why, sure, let’s go with that.

For sure, but that always gives advanced users the option to ungate it through the registry. The benefit to them of having it be “modular” would to be able to completely restrict even power users from being able to free their OS to use how they actually want to.

Once again, the original article was debunked, so we’re talking hypotheticals here anyway, a modular version isn’t coming.

I mean, I would argue that having to pay for access to different parts of Windows, like say access to PowerShell or access to more advanced features and settings has been part of the way they make money for a long time. That’s why their used to be “Home,” “Pro,” and “Enterprise” versions all with various levels of capability. So while it looks like the original article has been debunked, I would think that offering stripped-down versions of Windows would just serve as a way to push upgrades to more full featured versions the same way they press you to upgrade to Office 365.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3079754/we-messed-up-with-the-windows-12-article-what-we-got-wrong-and-how-it-happened.html

More importantly, it looks like PCWorld is retracting the article and has issued a post mortem on how it got published.

AI slop

They definitely didn’t use that terminology though, with how hard they’re pushing back against the “Microslop” term. Thanks for the update, however.

EDIT: As @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world has pointed out, that Windows 12 article has been debunked, not just by outside sources, but by PCWorld itself at this point. The article itself has a large disclaimer on it now, and they have a breakdown on how the story got published in the first place:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3079754/we-messed-up-with-the-windows-12-article-what-we-got-wrong-and-how-it-happened.html

Original Comment:

This actually tracks completely with the news about an incoming Windows 12 announcement and in particular the claim about Windows 12 being modular. The description has claimed that it will make certain aspects of Windows able to be added or removed at will. Meaning options like a “minimal” desktop installation that has very few options, no PowerShell, no Terminal, no access to a majority of common Windows features, and very little control of the OS other than changing the desktop background.

In other words, this new “Project Helix” or whatever will be a stripped-down version of Windows 12 with everything non-gaming-related removed, including access to half the system settings I’m sure.

So glad Stellar Blade Goonerstorm 2 will be more widely available to legitimize chuds claiming they need unrealistically proportioned half naked women to enjoy a game and that anything less is “woke nonsense.” /s

(I’m sure the gameplay itself is fine and all, just the shitlords who hyped this game gave me an overall ick for it)

Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.

To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn’t let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it’s locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.

Even if they cannot hoard that much themselves, anything they hoard will contribute to the death of the PC space and I don’t think Sony is just going to let their consumer electronics division, which has been a huge part of their brand for decades, go quietly into that good night. They might not have as much money to spend on it, but they’re not going to just stop making PS5s and other consumer electronics devices. That also means that if there’s PC hardware shortages for the foreseeable future, that they’re waiting for those shortages to strangle the PC gaming industry and revert a lot of those PC gaming converts back to console.

My guess is they’re watching the PC parts supply issues due to AI and have decided they will use their institutional weight to also hoard parts to push consoles back to the forefront since it’s harder to pirate on consoles and easier to resell the same game on new console generations.

Sony is and has been a big institutional player and I would not be at all surprised to see them moving on hoarding parts themselves: for AI, for consumer electronics, for game consoles. They’ve been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.

How sad for Obsidian Entertainment to go the same way as Black Isle Studios… but they probably will when the Xbox division completely fails.

They’re too busy making more money-sink Spider-man movies without Spider-man.

It’s Morbin’ Time!