Proton Down apparently, pretty much the whole thing minus the VPN, due to a "critical cooling failure" in their Frankfurt data center.
First time this is happening and really feeling it. Email, docs and spreadsheets via Proton drive, Lumo AI, all snookered (for the moment.)
It might be privacy-preserving, but still centralized... 😬
Wonderful... So Brave on Linux shows a "white screen" for all Youtube videos *unless* you Disable hardware acceleration... And people are like, "awesome, there's the solution!"
But I'm just thinking, WTF, I have to basically break the ability to do any in-browser 3D rendering just to watch Youtube?
"But that's where the conversation is" 😑
View quoted note →On my new Linux desktop, been using Firefox as a daily driver but now seriously considering Brave... So many sites just won't load, and I realize it's because it's a non-Chromium browser and that's tripping up some kind of security check or other...
All the standard stuff, Youtube, news sites, etc work fine... It's mostly a problem with government sites and other large bureaucracies, undoubtedly because they've got some bespoke "enterprise web solution" that's brittle outside of very standard use cases.
Problems you don't find on day 1, but day 30 😵💫️
Hit "random" on RetroArch and it came up with Equinox ( #snes ), which is the sequel to classic isometric #nes dungeon-crawl Solstice, a game that befuddled me in my youth but in my mid-age dotage I recently took the time to play through completely. I had always wondered about this sequel, so I hit "play" on Equinox.
It's ... kind of a hot mess. The game opens on a splash screen that looks like it was made with MS Paint, playing simple music that sounds like some DOS game from 10 years earlier. Click "Start", and there's no story intro, no control guide, you just get dumped onto a heavily pixelated overworld map being chased around by yellow monkey monsters and flying bat things.
OK, great, so what can you do? At the start, two things and two things alone: Play a harp, and jump super high. These abilities appear to do literally nothing, at least at the beginning.
If you're not attacked by the spastic enemy sprites running around the overland map, you can eventually figure out that you need to jump into beehive-looking structures sprouting from the ground, wherein the *actual* game takes place. This is a series of interconnected dungeons, where you have to solve puzzles and collect various keys and potions, similar to the original Solstice game, but with the key difference that you can actually get weapons to fight the various dungeon ghosts and creatures.
Anyway I've gotten to the 2nd world and definitely starting to hit the wall of non-obvious puzzle solutions, so maybe I'll play around with it a bit more, but overall it's still a bit "mid." It has the feeling of a half-finished game, certain sprites and graphics are richly detailed taking advantage of the 16-bit SNES, but then the overland map and intro screen look almost sub-8-bit.
#retrogaming #review
Normie web is getting more and more annoying to use with privacy-preserving tech... OK, is the page not loading because of Firefox's anti-tracking tech, or is it my VPN?
LOL I got the Imad Spam Clanker to respond in RE to strategies for its own filtering... Let's see how far I can push this towards prompt injection 😆️
View quoted note →@Nostria needs filtering words by *profile* not just *post body*. That's the only way to stop certain spam vectors, like this Imad from Gaza guy.
The spammers can spin up a new npub and even (apparently) lightning address trivially, but they tend to all want you to go to some website or other for the monetization, which they can't change. So that needs to be the filtering point.
Contemporary liberals: "Those evil Libertarian Capitalists of Silicon Valley...."
Contemporary libertarians: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with modern social media companies, and people need to just shut up and take the data centers."
🙄
I wonder if, something like this but it's (a) upfront that it's just scraping Instagram, and (b) the point is that it can't be stopped and you're making money from it.
Let's just go full pirate, what's the point of a decentralized censorship-resistant protocol if nobody's trying to actively censor it?
I envision a massive bot operation, "InstaMirror" or "InstaLeak" or something, like XCancel... Just spitting out Instagram npubs onto Nostr. All labeled so it can be easily muted as desired by users. Zaps are active, and go to the pseudonymous operator. The point is, "this is the money you could make by switching to Nostr," and there's a mechanism for the Instagram creator to take over their own Npub should they desire.
View quoted note →Starting to get my hopes up about *Lanterns*, I'm liking what I'm seeing in the first 2 episodes...
Space/CGI stuff is used sparingly, but it looks good when it shows up.
I'm pretty good at showing up right after the "cool kids" have left, but before the crowds have shown up.
Sometimes I'm amazed by how much FOSS has developed over the past decade or so (c.f. desktop Linux), and other times I'm amazed by how many stuff is still nigh-unusable crap...
Take Open Street Maps, which *has* to get better if people are going to leave the GooglePlex InfoContainment Dome... I type in "mexican restaurant" into the search bar and it literally finds places called "Mexican restaurant". No category or semantic searching at all. Like, WTF.
I love all the development around #amethyst, but one long-running issue that still bugs the heck out of me is the persistent "media player" card that shows up in Android, and just stays there forever... Even if I literally just scrolled past the media preview for some video or other.
This gets served up to basically everything that uses the Android media player, SmartWatches, car audio, etc, even when I'm currently listening to a podcast or music being served by another app.
