iirc, their trial tier was 100 searches total, or something like. I could never adequately test it so I never converted to a paid user.

This is what I felt about Neeva, too. Metered searches meant I only used it when I “needed” it… By which point I was mired in search results and focused on my Google Fu and completely forgot about Neeva.

I get that it costs money to run, but they needed a long free trial to get me hooked, then a reasonably priced unlimited tier. I was never going to use a site that restricts my search volume.

Which only affects companies doing business in the EU. Granted, that’s most of the big players.

Very grateful for the EU to unfuck most of the world from a lot of American regulatory capture.

On a rooted phone, they can still fail attestation, apparently. That’s why Magisk Hide (or whatever it’s called) became a thing, to hide that the device is rooted. Google Pay also apparently needs Magisk Hide to function.

I don’t trust my phone to store my payment details, so I don’t care about Google Pay, and my bank’s app works fine while rooted, so I don’t have any personal experience with it, just what I’ve seen in every single root guide I’ve used in at least the last 4 years (if not longer; I don’t remember how I rooted my previous phone.)

If I’m reading this correctly (and you need to read between the lines a bit), it’s not that they literally don’t work, it’s that they aren’t capable of getting security updates. For playing Minecraft, who cares, but schools are legally obligated to keep private student information (like all their schoolwork) secure.

It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.

This is just a shit sandwich all around.

From another perspective, several schools I’ve worked at have had so much vandalism and theft of Chromebooks that they won’t even consider replacing them with more costly future-proof tech. It doesn’t matter if they get 8 years of software support if students break most of them in years 1-3.

DS flashcarts are great and cheap, and the DSi can be soft modded to work directly from an SD card. If you can afford it, get a DSi XL for the best DS experience.

Q3A was released October 22, 2000.

2000 is a contender for retro gaming “best year”.

Diablo 2 (still the best one, imho)
Q3A
Jet Set Radio
Baldur’s Gate 2
Deus Ex
Paper Mario
No One Lives Forever
Counter Strike
Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver

Anyway, late 90s early 00s had a lot of banger years with awesome new IPs dropping regularly. The last 5-10 years have been amazing for indie games, but AAA games are just fancier versions of what we already have, for the most part.

FFT has an active modding scene, too. Lots of rom hacks are still being made for the PS1 and PSP versions of the game.

The two communities I’m most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my “fun” book recommendations from those subs.

I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I’m not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

I don’t think I’ve ever had any issues with a mod. I got mad at one back in the 90s on GameFAQs, but, in retrospect, they were completely in the right and were kind in their response to my complaint about their moderation.

I was banned from a sub for mass editing my comments, but that’s totally fair; I had no idea it was spamming their mod queue.

Anyway, agreed. I have complete respect for the mods that make the online spaces I frequent safe.

People go camping twice/year and buy a trailer and F350 to haul it, leaving the trailer vacant 50 weeks of the year and using the F350 as a commuter vehicle. But they nEeD a tRuCK fOr HauLiNG.

It’s insanity.

Not in general, maybe, but if someone posts their first name in one place, post about their neighborhood in another place, and mention their job in a third place that’s enough to uniquely identify them. Or who’s to say there isn’t a comment with someone’s full name and address?

Unless they manually scan all comments for PII, there might be PII in any comment. Even something innocuous like a picture of a sign can doxx someone, so it’s not obvious, either.

Related, but the Mass Effect protagonist can be male or female, but most people say the female voice actor is better, so it’s not just a cosmetic choice it’s actually the superior experience.

Or so I’ve heard. I only played as the female protagonist based on hearing this.

I also think it’s important to have hope for technological advancements. Carbon capture technology exists and is improving rapidly. We need to get to net zero, of course, but we can also go negative and cool the planet to pre-industrial levels.

The world is changing rapidly, both for the worse and for the better.

Yes, there is going to be a mass extinction event. But mass extinctions have happened before and biodiversity recovered. We also have technology to save species and reintroduce them later, too. A hundred years from now, when CO2 is back under control, who knows; maybe we’ll be able to “print” extinct species’ zygotes from saved DNA code.

Agreed on all points, but re: Lemmy.world, not Kbin.

I just installed the Liftoff app which defaults to showing Lemmy.world and posts there are just like /r/popular from the last few years, with lots of shitposting, low effort comments, and mean-spirited memes. That side of Reddit is why I was only subbed to niche communities.

Here feels like Reddit circa 2010, where people use upvotes to highlight thoughtful/insightful content.

It was particularly jarring on Lemmy.world seeing thoughtful posts supporting a different view being downvoted.

Anyway, fully agreed. Beehaw is my Reddit replacement. I just need to start posting more links again, which I mostly stopped doing on Reddit like a decade ago.

That’s not a workable solution. Since Meta’s algorithm was leaked, there has been such rapid advancement on the open-source side of LLMs that the tech has diverged too far to ever be detectable.

You can now spin up a custom, targeted LLM in a few hours on low-power consumer hardware. And it beats the massive incumbents within the narrower scope of the training.

Think, a Facebook comment bot, targeted specifically to sound like pro-[VIEW] comments, complete with typos and Internet slang. Or a high school essay bot, trained exclusivity on 5-paragraph essays.

The tech right now gives a bet high false positive rate, and there are also AI tools that rewrite text to avoid detection by the existing detection tools.

Exactly. Said it better than I could have.

There’s a societal view that play is for kids. We need more adults playing! Play is so important for mental health and building social bonds.

It’s a shame some adults only play when there’s the “excuse” of playing with children. Even worse are parents who won’t play with their own kids.

I think “fun books” fall prey to the same cultural bias.

The term “boomer shooter” is terrible though.

idk… That seems very descriptive and has memorable assonance. I immediately knew the type of games that implies, even moreso than retroFPS since “retro” is such a moving target, it could mean things like Half-Life, which is about as far from boomer shooters as you can get.

I highly recommend Pleasant Dreams: The Welcoming Play of Kirby’s Dream Land. I got it in one of the mega Itch.io charity bundles and was intrigued. It was the highlight of the bundle for me, unexpectedly.

I’d never played Kirby’s Dream Land, but I loaded it up the next chance I got, and Couture nailed it. It’s an absolutely perfect introduction to gaming for non-gamers.

Great game. Especially if you have a gamepad.