Yeah, talk about false advertisement!

I like that someone figured out half assing things can be just as funny or even funnier than putting in the effort to make it look more professional.

Now I’m curious about who first bottled that lightning.

Maybe the makers of Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Half the characters in there seemed like they were making it up as they went and is the earliest one I can think of where that was a common theme.

Home Movies came later but is the earliest where that’s applied to media produced “in-universe” that I can think of.

Home Improvement was earlier than both and Tim was often out of his league on his show, but that was more of a “ill prepared but at least trying to be professional” act than “making it up as we go and not even trying to hide it”.

Back in the day, when I fired up Mortal Kombat 3 for the snes, I’d usually end up spending more time in the space invaders game than playing MK itself, especially since the consoles kept the tuning intended to keep the quarters coming for the arcade version (first fight would be easy, next fight would be hard, then easy after continue, so it wasn’t just pay to play for the arcade but pay to win).

I’m curious if I’d remember each of the codes required for the secret menus, one of which contained the mini game. Can’t remember them offhand but it might be different with an snes controller in my hand.

Actually I think I do remember one of them (or maybe it’s the Konami code, or maybe those two are the same code):

Up, up, down, down, left, right, A, B, A

Or maybe it was right then left. Lol I also remember usually needing to try several variations before I’d get each code correct.

Yeah not to mention it’s not that hard to detect a shadowban if you’re aware of the possibility. Lemmy doesn’t even fuzz vote totals, so it would be trivial to verify whether or not votes are working.

I wonder if there’s a way for admins to troll back. Like instead of banning the accounts, send them into a captcha loop with unsolvable or progressively harder captchas (or ones designed to poison captcha solving bots’ training).

Reviews say it’s adding a giant QR code to downloaded videos to get people to pay a license fee but I do not see that after downloading something just now. Though tbf, they did update it yesterday and might have removed that because of the feedback they were getting.

Permissions look reasonable to me, based on my understanding of what they need to do for the functionality, though I suppose there is potential for abuse.

It requires a companion desktop program for some streams, which did seem sketchy at first but I wasn’t able to find any specific claims of it doing anything undesired, just people who noped out when they saw it wanted them to install something and others who said it does function as desired. Again, hard to say if it does anything in addition to enabling some streams to be downloaded, but I haven’t noticed anything out of place on my PC since installing it either from tool-based scans or manual checks of places where malware can put itself to survive restarts.

There were also claims that it didn’t work with YouTube in the reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me, since it does light up. Though maybe that was timing-based, too, where Google briefly managed to block it only for them to adjust.

So I haven’t seen any of those issues but YMMV. I’m going to keep using it but will also keep an eye on it. Either way, thanks for letting me know.

How so?

There’s also the video download helper add-on for Firefox that will allow you to download streams that aren’t just media files your browser can http get. Though your browser can still access those streams, it needs a script component to handle it, so the built in file downloader/saver won’t even see it as a thing to download.

Also you can just block elements you right click on in Firefox (though this might be an option added by an add-on). If there’s hidden elements you just need to go through each of those until you can click on the one you want directly (and you can tell by what is highlighted in the inspect element mode).

You can also hit delete in inspect element mode to remove that element. You can also edit whatever you want in the element. Makes me wish it existed back when I was doing more web dev work, would have made things a lot easier when debugging.

I’m just tired of people trying to sell me shit. Or beg. Like I know I’m not interested 3 words in to the spiel but still feel like an asshole if I just say no and close the door or hang up the phone.

Though I did eventually tell my phone provider to put me on their no call list for their internet marketing because I got tired of them trying to get me to switch to their less good internet package.

Hoping (but not holding my breath) that we, as a society, squash the whole data broker thing sometime relatively soon, though.

I remember a time when the phone or doorbell would ring and I would get excited to know who it was.

Now I seriously consider setting up a series of mirrors so that I can see who is at the door without giving up my ability to pretend like no one is home and my phone ringing causes an emotion somewhere between worry and rage.

A representative 300 sample would give a more accurate result than a biased 2.4k sample. Bigger number doesn’t mean better results.

That said, I’m not sure how to get representation from certain subgroups of the population, like the “never engages with polls” or “lies specifically to fuck with your data” subgroups.

Yeah, that script should only take a few days, most of which spent on creating an ascii pooping animation while it’s waiting for you to return.

If you want to set up a spreadsheet, the formulas are pretty simple:

Salary / 52 = weekly pay (approx, there’s a few extra days in the year but my bi-weekly pay is salary / 26, which actually works out to a slightly higher pay than if they did it by extact days)

Weekly pay / 40 = hourly equivalent (or 37.5 if you want to assume unpaid lunches, which effectively increases your hourly rate)

Hourly equivalent / 60 = minute equivalent

Time in minutes pooping * hourly equivalent = money earned pooping

For hourly pay, just drop that in to the hourly equivalent variable above.

Most of them were cases where I wasn’t surprised they had data but a bit surprised they shared it.

I think my phone came with a sonos app installed, though not certain about that. I got rid of it if it was, though I can’t say if the most recent update from them was before or after that.

But a few of them I’m not really sure why they are on there. There was another one that I didn’t list that just had the label “IDK”, not sure if that’s a real name or “I don’t know”. I’m assuming they came from effective fingerprinting/tracking.

I might look into an addon that fakes some of the information the browser sends like OS version and resolution. Maybe that will make fingerprinting harder.

Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

• Spotify
• bookings .com
• ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
• windy .com
• duolingo
• tinder
• my bank
• opera
• sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
• samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
• Uber eats
• calorie counter
• mediacom usa and euro (?)

Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.

From my perspective, things have shifted in recent years. In the past, there seemed to be a general consensus that both the right and left were interested in building a system that benefited society at large, they just disagreed on what that looked like. Seems like more and more people are realizing that all conservatives want to conserve is their power and access to wealth.

It’s also becoming more apparent that even conservative social issues aren’t intended to improve anything for anyone but are just about controlling people and making them more vulnerable. Like it’s no longer a secret that the drug war was more about racism than public health. The abortion ban and their plans for divorce laws are clearly about making women either more dependent on men or unable to leave them if they can’t prove fault.

All that plus the red wave that was supposed to take over Europe didn’t.

It’s too early to tell for sure and it might just be the pendulum swinging this way before it swings back that way. It could also be more of a reaction to the far right than conservatism in general, since the far right has seized so much control over conservative political groups. But I do hope that this sentiment sticks.

Guessing they are talking about it more loudly now to try to redirect the rising anti-conservative sentiment before it threatens the status quo.

I really don’t want it to become worthwhile for the Russian troll farms that want every discussion to turn into a shitfest.

Go around crossing all lowercase Ls into Ts. Or add serif and turn them into uppercase i.