Russ

That’s a tough one. While I do think AI can be fun to play around with (though I personally prefer the ones I can run locally), there’s always a sort of “monkey’s paw” element to it. Text generation? Hallucinations. Image generation? All sorts of weird artifacts, and are heavily influenced by the training data (yes of course they all are, but what I mean is, if you pick a model that is heavily inspired by NSFW content for example, then you’re very likely to get NSFW content - sounds “common sense”, but nonetheless).

So I suppose in a world where it’s “perfect” then I’d want it to make some form of media that can make everyone happy. If everyone on the planet were happy, then it’d be a much better place.

Or if we’re talking less altruistic desires, probably a continuation of some TV series that I enjoyed which ended on a cliffhanger.

Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I’ve always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure “can u see me in the dark?” has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now… Lzzy’s vocals are fantastic in it!

Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I’ve been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.

I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.

Yeah, blizzard games have pretty much always worked for me on Linux, they were among the first games to “just work” on Linux without a lot of hassle for me.

I absolutely love Moshidon!

Why hello there! 👋

This hit me like a truck. I lost my father at the beginning of the month due to some tragedy that occurred.

We weren’t on speaking terms (a decision I made), but I’d always planned to one day see if I could turn things around, which will never happen now. Never in a million years would I ever have expected it to come down to this.

You’re thinking of install-time permissions, which technically does still exist, but pretty much most of the permissions you’d actually care about are runtime (or special) permissions - the application must request these from the user.

There are three main types of permissions on Android:

• Install-time, these are permissions granted to an application upon installation
  • In this group is also signature-level permissions, which are only granted to applications that are signed by the same party as the OS itself (usually your OEM)
• Runtime permissions (also known as “Dangerous permissions” within Android internally), which are permissions that the application must request from the user. The system draws the permissions dialog, not the application itself. Permission can also be granted one-time only, or permanently (unless the user revokes the permission)
• Special permissions, which also need to be requested by the application - except for these the system will not draw a permissions dialog, instead the application must send the user to the “Special App Access” menu within system settings, and the user must turn on the permission there. The best way I can describe these types of permissions is, “permission that the user really must think about before granting” - such as giving an app the ability to bypass DND rules, drawing over other apps, installing APKs from unknown sources, accessing all device files, etc. IIRC, Google also requires that developers provide justification for requesting these permissions when submitting to the Google Play Store as well.

Runtime permissions were introduced in Android 6.0, which was released in 2015, I am not sure when the special permission system was implemented however.

Hate? No, I do not hate Google. I still use a Pixel phone (and photos/assistant on it), my Gmail is still my primary email (I also self-host a few other domains but those are primarily used for automation and a few other one-off things), I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I still utilize my Stadia controller as my primary game controller, I use a Google TV set top box, etc.

I don’t use Search (I use Kagi instead), I don’t use Chrome (Firefox), I don’t really utilize Gemini all that much (I just run ollama for the few times I want to use an LLM).

Really I just use their products that work well for me, and don’t use the ones that don’t. There’s no love/hate about it.

I have a weird one! The smell of one of the hand sanitizer brands (“Germ X”) always brings me back to Kindergarten when we’d all line up for some hand sanitizer before lunch and after recess, then right before going home for the day. Times were so much simpler back then.

I don’t have a lot of “visual” memories left of those times, but the smell of that specific hand sanitizer brand seems like a memory that will never fade for me.

Turbo Golf Racing

It’s pretty much “Rocket League meets golf”, with two different types of modes:

• Racing: Everyone has a ball that they’re pushing in real time as quickly as they can to the goal
• Golf: Everyone has a ball that they’re trying to get into the goal with as few turns (its a turn based mode) as they can

Doesn’t have any microtransactions in it (aside from a couple of supporter packs that grant you a few cosmetic items), has an in-game “store” but they’re cosmetics that you unlock with currency that you get from playing and doing challenges (they can’t be purchased with “real” money).

I enjoy the fact that I can pick it up, play a few matches, and then put it down, which is one of the reasons I like to play Rocket League every now and then.

Do note that for the most part the game is multiplayer-only, like Rocket League. It has a time trial mode that can be played offline, but that’s about as far as it goes for offline/singleplayer content.

Runs fantastic on the Steam Deck (it is Deck verified) and I can easily reach 90FPS on my OLED Deck. It also of course runs perfectly on desktop as well via Proton.

Looks great, nice job!

Of course! I don’t know if my ramblings will help at all, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to share regardless :)

Yes, unfortunately. It’s something that I’m working on with multiple doctors and practitioners, and so far we’ve gone through some of the usual suspects (Vitamin D levels, checking thyroid function, making sure I wasn’t diabetic - already had my doubts on that one but I’m not the one with the medical degree I suppose…, etc).

My mental health isn’t always the best, so I’m trying to get that worked on as well because bad mental health can cause lethargy and chronic fatigue (it’s a two-way street though, the reverse applies too)… Unfortunately a lot of mental health meds have fatigue as a side effect which doesn’t help my case. It also doesn’t help that I have Crohn’s disease, and any autoimmune/chronic condition in general can also cause chronic fatigue.

I don’t know, I still feel like the root cause of it is an imbalance of something, but that’s my best “gut instinct” guess - I have nothing concrete to base that off of. It feels like all of the things I’m trying are just attempting to “brute force” the issues away, rather than treating whatever is the root cause, but I digress… All I know is, it feels like the game was rigged against me from the start.

Context switching is the reason why. There’s “downtime” where I work at because of the times I work (night time / I believe its called a “graveyard” shift). However, its never nothing for the whole shift, its intermittent. So lets say I decided to play a game (or work on a personal project, or any other number of things) I’d have to get into the mindset of whatever I’m doing, then see that a ticket has come in, switch my mindset back, answer the ticket and perform the work required for the ticket… and then switch back again.

As @toomanypancackes said in their reply, I honestly just either want to go back to bed, or not have to worry about work and do my own thing (uninterrupted). Those aren’t options unfortunately, so I’m just left to be in that weird purgatory of “There’s not a lot of work to be done, but there’s some every so often… so I can’t completely go away”. I prefer it over it being absolutely slammed with tickets because that’s just exhausting.

Every so often I’ll put on a rerun of a show since it doesn’t matter if I “get into” the show or not, but actually doing something significant isn’t usually an option unless its actually dead during my hours.

Friday is our staff meeting, in which we get a free lunch for attending - so somewhat, yeah!

Congrats to the GNOME team for another great release!

500 down and 40 up through Spectrum (east coast of the US). I’m always quite surprised with how well WiFi 6 works, I can pull down the full 500 from my Steam Deck and PC - ironically the network transfer is implemented badly as I’ll get about 100 down over the local network so it’s faster to download over the Internet.

$60/month so, not bad!

I guess the best way that I’d word it is, Lemmy (and the Fediverse at whole) is run by people - not a for-profit company.

Also, having decent mobile apps again is very nice.

For what its worth, while its not viewable on the Flathub website anymore, it can still (at the time of my writing) still be downloaded/installed through the flatpak command.