I respect your opinion, but I lived through 90s computing and think dongles died the death they deserve and these phone manufacturers can go to hell for bringing them back or thinking that bluetooth audio is good enough.

Additionally most of the droids I have bought that have a jack are the perfect thickness in my mind. Weighted enough to stay in my hand and take a couple dozen drops without accident. Plus the headphone jack is used as an antenna and provides radio capabilities so I can listen to local news instead of whatever the tech industry wants to feed me. Which is a nice option.

What’s for dinner tonight mom?

Unborn chicken.

I have to contend with 70-80 year olds doing 30km in an 80 while swerving across the midline because they saw a bird across the street.

What I already see around me is more and more people moving their files and identities offline into home NAS and filesharing setups, like Nextcloud. Their conversations are moving to Signal, Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud Talk, or just plain text. For now its the more technically savvy, but even non professionals with low levels of admin experience are reaching out and asking now, and non technical people are looking for access to those private resources.

The snowball isn’t big yet, but it is rolling. How far it goes and how big it gets, we’ll see.

However what surprises me is that this did not happen sooner and due to ads, but rather it is AI and the complete uphill battle it is becoming to keep your private data out of the multitude of inbound AI vectors that is finally pushing people down the hill.

Many people have FODMAP sensitivities and confuse them for gluten.

Its what makes it more secure. Why do you need a chat app that allows your parents to accidentally stumble into a group of con artists or kids to stumble into things they shouldn’t be exposed to? It’s a messaging app, not gamer group chat.

This is what puts is way ahead of the others.

Unlike the other two, there are no servers that run discoverable group chats.

Man I miss Webrings.

It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.

I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.

Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought “Perfect… now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.”. And then the delisting.

This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.

Yeah, Im excited about the cards but getting a 1GB switch with a 10g uplink was expensive… 10g switches are… a lot.

I still have the Steam Link hardware console though, still rocking and letting me play my PC on the TV

I still have my original PS3. Had to replace the hardrive once.

Still have the Wii, which had a bad disk reader in the first 30 days. I had to send it to the repair shop in Toronto and they had it fixed and back to me within 48 hours for free.

My first XBox 360 lasted 2 days past it’s 1 year warranty date and died. Disk drive thought everything was a DVD. MS wanted $100 for repairs plus shipping. I bought a used 360 instead for $80. That one also died 1 year later, red ring. Next one I bought a replacement, one of the lower end models. Lasted 10 days past the 1 year warranty… Then thought everything was a DVD… This keeps going. By the time 2016 rolled around I had gone through 10 of those pieces of shit. I finally gave up on the games I liked on that system, and I’ve never bought a new MS system since. I honestly wonder what their true sales were if you deduped it by removing replacements from their tally.

I have my original PS2, PS3, PS4, GameCube, SNES, Wii, Switch.

There are quality gaming consoles out there, and then there’s whatever the fuck MS spews onto the market.

A tale of how a plastic eating bacteria moonlighted as a flesh eating one.

I’m not trolling. This is simply not an illusion.

Ok those rooms are certainly illusions. My mind was tricked and even after reading how they work I still cannot quite see how when I watch the video. A perfect illusion.

I still wouldn’t call the post for this thread an illusion as there is no trick, just pure perspective. You simply tilt your phone, you see what is happening, and you understand it because its basic physics you were taught in elementary.

This is like the amateur magician. A trickster that knows a few party tricks but is so bad at executing them they are no illusionist. But a master magician uses simple things like perspective and skill to create tricks that are such great illusions that the scientific mind cannot quite work out what has really just happened even though they know it’s a trick. This post is the amateur magician, the Ames room is the master. Both use perspective but in different ways on different levels.

There is nothing erroneous about this perception.

I have no context for this example, have a link? I’ve seen the crazy kitchen at the Museum of Science and Tech in Ottawa that has a similarly themed illusion, but in that one the floors are level but painted in a way that tricks your brain into thinking its angled, but its not, which is 100% illusion.

Thus what I am imagining for your example is that the floor is in fact angled, but the paint makes it look straight, so the short person is infact elevated above the tall person in a way you cannot tell, creating an effect where perspective due to a physical difference makes you think they are on the same level but the illusion provided by the floor messes with that, creating an illusion that is really just perspective.

But there is no trick in this post. You know you’re tilting the phone, there’s no illusion. Its pure angles and you’re completely aware of what is occuring, thus no illusion. The definition of illusion is pretty clear, what you are seeing must be false or erroneous.

noun

1. An erroneous perception of reality.

   “Mirrors gave the illusion of spaciousness.”

2. An erroneous concept or belief.

   “The notion that money can buy happiness is an illusion.”

3. The condition of being deceived by a false perception or belief.

   “spent months flailing about in illusion.”

Haha, ok I can agree with that take.