I’m not setting that up for my aunt who lives 4 hours away. We did manage to get Plex running on her TV over the phone though.

I’ve said this exact same thing in the past and got flamed for it. The “grandma factor” is a very real consideration. My grandma lives almost 5 hours away. I’m not going to walk my grandma through side-loading the Jellyfin app onto her TV, because no native app exists on its App Store. She won’t understand what a Developer Mode for her TV is, let alone how to enable it. And even if it had a native app, the moment she has to input a custom URL for my server, she’ll shut down and say it’s too hard. But she already has a Netflix account, and understands the concept behind a login page. So I can easily walk her through Plex’s sign-in.

It’s also hard to understate how bad some of the Jellyfin vulnerabilities are. They’re straight up “people can completely bypass the login page to stream media from your server” bad. Sure, it requires knowing the file path ahead of time. And that might be a level of security… Except for the fact that basically everyone uses the Trash Guides to set their *arr’s up, which means they all have the same file structure and automatic naming schemes. And the Jellyfin devs have stated that they likely won’t ever fix many of the biggest vulnerabilities, because it would require completely divesting from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on. Jellyfin is wonderful for LAN viewing. But holy shit please don’t expose it to the internet.

Bean Soup Theory in full swing. I fully believe that algorithmic feeds have heavily contributed to the rapid decline in reading comprehension. One of the biggest parts of reading comprehension is being able to identify the target audience for a piece of work. And most of the time, the answer is not “me”. In previous decades, if you saw something that didn’t pertain to you, you would move the fuck on.

But algorithms changed that. People got used to having feeds that are laser-focused on their personal interests. And this has led to a decline in reading comprehension, as people simply aren’t using that part of the skill anymore. So now when they encounter something that isn’t meant for them, they have a tendency to try to make it about them.

The phrase “bean soup theory” comes from a recipe for bean soup, which was full of angry commenters asking things like “but what if I don’t like beans” and “what would you replace the beans with if you don’t like eating them?” The obvious answer is that if you don’t like beans, don’t make bean soup. This recipe is clearly not meant for you. You should move the fuck on to find a recipe you’ll like. But those commenters are so used to algorithmic feeds that they have lost the ability to recognize when something is not aimed at them. So instead of going “oh, this isn’t about me” they got angry and tried to make it about them.

To bring it back to the main post, there are several incredible games on this list. Many of them are absolutely worth playing. But the above commenter had to make it about them, instead of going “eh, not interested” and just moving on.

I have a catch-all email domain, and this is exactly what I do. Walmart gets “[email protected]”, Target gets “[email protected]”, etc… All of them go to the same inbox, so I always know which email address they think I have. If I start getting spam addressed to [email protected], I know Walmart sold my info. I can just filter anything addressed to that account straight into my spam folder.

Yeah, that shit would get auto-filtered straight into the spam folder.

It’s more than that. I’m friends with a diagnosed sociopath. Zero empathy whatsoever. And he is 100% without a doubt the most dependable and moral person I know. He always keeps his word, is always willing to lend a hand if needed, and is a champion for things like harm reduction as public policy - Gun laws, drug reform, police reform, bodily autonomy, etc… As a teen, he went through a satanist moral philosophy kick, and basically came to terms with the fact that empathy isn’t required for objective morality. Each person can choose to do good, simply because it is the right thing to do. I fully believe that he’d be a serial killer (or at least some high powered CEO who ruins lives for the people that work in his company) without that philosophy.

It actually makes him angry when conservatives do and say shit like this… Because he sees it as a complete moral failing on their part, not a lack of empathy. Basically the difference between “you’re doing bad things because you can’t understand others” and “you’re doing bad things because you refuse to do better.”

The former could be used as a crutch to explain bad actions, but he absolutely rejects that possibility because his lived experience has taught him that understanding or empathizing with others isn’t a requirement for morality. So he basically falls back to the opposite of Hanlon’s Razor, where he refuses to accept stupidity as a blanket excuse for malicious actions.

Stupidity can be used as an excuse for individual actions. “Oops, sorry I bumped into you. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” But it doesn’t work for explaining a long term pattern of behavior where the person has had opportunities to learn and improve. The headline statement is not an isolated incident where it can be explained away with stupidity or a lack of empathy. It’s more like “I go out of my way to shoulder-check people.” And that’s an intentional pattern of behavior, not an accident.

I like both for different reasons. The older SOTN style ones are great for small detailed movement. Dodges are measured in individual pixels, not perfectly timed I-frames.

But I also love the faster paced movement on display here. Ori and the Blind Forest, Afterimage, Metroid Dread, etc are all great examples of solid movement-based games. Where if you’re sitting still, you’re not playing the game right. Fights are determined by your ability to time attacks and abuse counters/i-frames, quickly closing to striking distance and retreating before the enemy can counter.

Navigating in the latter games often feels much better. Simply walking from A to B tends to feel like a chore in earlier metroidvanias, because it’s a pretty simple thing to move around. At most, you usually have a double jump or dash, but that’s about as far as your movement options go. But with more movement options (and faster, more fluid movement,) going from A to B feels like its own part of the game. The Spider-Man games are a good example of how simply navigating can be entertaining.

It’s both. Governments have started subpoenaing the push notification servers for data, instead of targeting individual devices. That little pop-in that says who the message was from, and maybe a little bit of the body of the text? Yeah, the push notification server handled that, and the government has access to that server. So any notification you see on your screen, you can be pretty positive that the government has also seen.

But this is about the notification data being stored in a part of the phone that isn’t encrypted. Signal is (or at least claims to be) E2E encrypted, so it shouldn’t be possible for a warrant to get access to the messages in the app. But since the phone is storing those notifications in a separate area (which isn’t encrypted), the warrant was able to read them.

The point is that there are two different attack vectors, and you should harden your device against both.

They only understand when it personally affects them in some capacity.

I keep this image saved on my phone, because it is relevant way too often:

The study asked participants to mark the farthest region from center that they cared about. For instance, marking 4 means you also care about 3, 2, and 1. Liberals largely marked high numbers near the perimeter. Things like “all sentient life” or “all life, including non-sentient”… While conservatives tended towards marking low numbers near the center. Things like “my extended family” or “my closest friends”. So yes, in fact, many of them genuinely don’t care unless it affects them (their family or closest friends) directly.

She was studying Japanese at Uni, and I am 90% sure she was writing fan subs for Death Note, as it was coming out.

Another solid data point for my “horse girl to elder emo pipeline” theory. My working theory is that all horse girls eventually evolve into (at least) one of the following two groups: Elder emo girls, or tail girls.

Umamusume is a gotcha game

Small nitpick, but it’s actually “gatcha” or “gasha” because it comes from the Japanese word “gatchapon/gashapon”. The word is derived from two different Japanese onomatopoeias:
Gasha - The sound of a toy capsule dispenser handle being cranked/turned.
Pon - The sound of a toy capsule landing in the output slot of the machine.

Basically, you know those little coin-operated toy capsule dispensers that you can find in arcades? The ones that have little toys, stickers, candy, etc. inside? They usually look something like this:

Yeah, these things are wildly popular in Japan. They’re colloquially referred to as “gatchapon”. There are massive stores full of these gatchapon machines. Brands will do promos for new anime, TV shows, band album releases, etc… Collectors spend a lot of money to get the rare collectibles from these machines, because not all the toys are the same rarity.

And a gatchapon game is the same basic concept, but in a digital format. You get pulls/draws/{whatever the game calls them} via some method (usually purchasing them, because that is usually how the game makes money), and then those pulls are used to get new things. Sometimes characters, sometimes equipment, sometimes new outfits, etc… It’s literally gambling, because the best stuff is virtually always gated behind some hilariously small jackpot odds.

Again, small nitpick. I just think it’s interesting (and horrifying, because it’s literally slot machine style “keep rolling cuz the next one may be a jackpot” style gambling) how much the mobile game market has come to rely on gatcha mechanics in recent years. There is a lot of (well deserved) condemnation of loot boxes in kids games, but somehow gatcha games have managed to skirt around it.

Well you got an account made, and that’s a start! Lemmy’s UI may feel familiar if you’re an old.reddit user. There are apps like Voyager that feel like spiritual successors to AlienBlue and Apollo, so if you used those apps before they were killed, you’ll feel right at home.

The best way I’ve seen to describe the platform is to think of it like email. An @gmail account can send email to an @yahoo account just fine. The specific platform is agnostic because they all use the same email backend. That’s essentially how federation works, with a bunch of different servers/instances agreeing to use the same data sharing backend.

So you’re on lemmy.zip, so you’ll be able to see and interact with any instances that lemmy.zip is federated with. Federation is simply the decision to actively share that data. And defederation is when a server chooses not to share data with another instance. One of the biggest impacts your server choice makes is which instances it is federated/defederated with. That will determine which communities you can access, as you’ll only be able to see communities on local or federated instances.

The one big caveat is that defederating from an instance won’t stop you seeing posts from those users on another instance. For example, I’m on dbzer0. Let’s say dbzer0 and zip decide to defederate. You’d stop seeing communities on dbzer0, and vice versa. But if I posted to lemmy.world, you’d be able to see my post as long as you’re still federated with lemmy.world. The third instance (lemmy.world, in this example) essentially acts as a proxy to allow both to see each other. So defederation isn’t the same thing as a filter or block, as it only stops you from seeing things that are posted on that defederated instance.

They’re only “really cool” because the ml admins are so heavy handed with moderation. From the outside looking in, it looks like calm waters. But dig into the modlog, and you’ll quickly discover that it’s only calm because the admins only leave a very small and tightly controlled window for discourse.

There will inevitably be some YouTube video that explains how to do all of this, and it will be followed without question by thousands of 12 year olds who don’t understand the security implications. They just want to play the new shiny game, and their parents told them they’d only buy the game if they got all A’s on their report card. So now their computer is orders of magnitude less secure (and likely running some mining/botnet in the background) because they wanted the game for free. This is just going to be the current generation’s version of “accidentally nuked the family computer with LimeWire downloads.”

Exactly. And that’s honestly why I doubt it will ever truly contend with Plex. It’s fine for sharing with friends who can figure out how to connect via VPN, but it’ll never be robust enough to share with your tech-illiterate grandparents on the open internet. Plex wins handily in that regard, because their sign in process is basically the same as Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc…

Plex has problems of its own, but (at least as of me writing this) it doesn’t have any major known security vulnerabilities. They had some level 10.0 vulnerability last year, but they followed standard CVE protocols and patched it before the vulnerability was actually released.

There has been a known “anyone can access your media without authentication” vulnerability for seven years and counting, and the Jellyfin devs have openly stated that they have no intentions of fixing it. Because fixing it would require completely divesting from the Enby branch that the entire program is built upon. And they never plan on refactoring that entire thing, so they never plan on fixing the vulnerabilities.

The “don’t expose it to the internet” people aren’t just screaming at clouds. Jellyfin is objectively insecure, and shouldn’t be exposed.

No, a machine won’t even contact the pihole if it finds the address in its hosts file. Hosts is step 0 for DNS, so if it finds something there it doesn’t even bother with contacting an external server (like a pihole).

They’ve stated that they have no intention of ever fixing some of the biggest “anyone can access your media without a login” vulnerabilities, because it would require completely divesting from the Kodi branch that they initially used to start the entire project. And they never plan on rebuilding that from scratch, so those vulnerabilities will never be fixed.

Implying you have access to some major Docker 0-day exploit, or just talking out of your ass? Because a container is no more or less secure than the machine it runs on. At least if a container gets compromised, it only has access to the volumes you have specifically given it access to. It can’t just run rampant on your entire system, because you haven’t (or at least shouldn’t have) given it access to your entire system.

My wife’s contact photo is a candid of her absolutely demolishing some chocolate covered strawberries, while dressed in full cosplay. She’s in the middle of taking a massive bite, and has a look of absolute focus, like she’s eating these berries to save mankind.

She hates it, and I absolutely refuse to change it because it makes me chuckle every single time she calls.

Yeah, “I’m cheap/broke” is a reason to pirate, but so many people shy away from admitting it. Simply because they feel the need to morally justify it in some other way. I guess because saying “I took this shit for free. I could pay for it but I don’t wanna” doesn’t feel good.