Gen X here. When I was a kid, I knew a couple who had two bookshelves full of copied VHS tapes. They had a double decker and would rent and copy.

Blank tapes weren’t free, so they still had spent a few hundred dollars or more on their collection.

I asked this question at an electronics store. I was told “technically that’s a VCP, Video Cassette Player”. I asked if they had any. They said no.

My understanding is that they could all record. It seems like the technology to play is just the inverse of the technology to record. Like how a speaker can be used as a microphone.

Thanks. I saw someone else say that, and then I used Apple Translate (what’s built into my computer) to translate it. I’m part German but I’m not from Germany and I don’t speak German. I know a couple dozen words, mostly thanks to Rammstein, but my father taught me gesundheit.

Funny thing about languages, and I’m not sure English really does this. You sneeze in Germany, people say “health,” but what they mean is, “to your health” or similar. In Japan, you might be called an “otaku”, which is sort of a badge of honour in the west, as it is taken to mean you are a fan of something and very knowledgeable on the subject. In Japanese, it just means “house” or “your house” — as in, you never leave it. If someone calls you “otaku” in Japanese, they’re saying you never leave your house, you’re a basement dweller, you need to touch grass, and so on. Sure, in the west you can be a “homebody,” someone who prefers to stay at home, but not a “home.” It’s also early, so while I know a couple dozen words in German and like 5 dozen words in Japanese, English is my first language and it may very well have similar terms, I’m just blanking right now.

Furthermore, the whole reason achievements were created was wholly twofold: a sense of pride and accomplishment for the gamer, which is real and cannot be discounted by the second, which is a metrics and tracking system Xbox offered to game publishers. Since all achievements are dated and timed, Xbox was able to offer valuable insights to publishers as to how their games were played. That’s why most games gave you one for completing the tutorial and/or starting the game. That was the reference point: from there, how long did it take you to do other things?

The best example of this and its effects was Fallout 3 to Fallout 4. In Fallout 4, some players were upset you could only be a good guy. But in Fallout 3, there were none karmic achievements, for having good, neutral, or evil karma at three levels (8, 16, 24?). Since a vast majority of players got those levels at Good karma, they had the receipts to prove players mostly played good. Without achievements, they would not have had those receipts.

The reason GOG isn’t tracking pirates isn’t to spite them, it’s because they don’t want the data from them and can’t or don’t care to separate the data.

When PlayStation and Steam added achievements, I am not sure if they included the metrics for publishers or if they only copied the gamer dopamine feature from Xbox. I did not know GOG had them. I don’t use their launcher; never have.

I like how Animal Crossing did achievements on Switch. Local only and you get tickets for a vending machine for them. Only now I have 189K I’ll never spend. Oh, you also get title keywords you can select from to make your profile title (you can’t just put whatever, e.g. on my old Enya themed island, my title was Wild Child, after the song, because I’d unlocked the title keywords Wild and Child). Silly pointless game. I’m now playing the 3DS version on my MacBook, and it’s way better. Also silly and pointless. Still love it.

I was raised to say gesundheit. It’s German and basically means something like “here’s to your health.” Apple’s translation service says it just means “health”.

Atheist here. No, I don’t. The religious person who put in the work still put in the work, through their faith in God. The Atheist does it through their faith in themselves. It’s the same energy, because the religious person doesn’t think they have it in them. They do, but God makes it manageable. I get that. So when they say it about you, they’re just using tense they understand.

Like when they say “bless you” when you sneeze. They’re wishing you health in terms they understand.

Time to learn Jellyfin (not hard) and Tailscale (if you want access outside your network, as I understand it) if you don’t have a Plex Pass. If you do… still might wanna brush up, because this feels like “if this doesn’t work we shut down.”

You’re preaching to the choir on that one. I mainly use Apple stuff — I feel like, between Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Apple is the least evil. Some disagree. I always liked Macs though, and once GPU prices started going up… I bought one. Pretty good deal if you’re willing to give up PC gaming. But I also realise Apple isn’t that much better than the others, if they are at all. Linux is the real winner here. If I didn’t need a whole new computer, I probably would have switched to Linux.

S8 and S9 were good. I liked my S3, but the capacitive buttons outlived their usefulness and should have been gone way before the S8. S7 seriously tempted me, but that was the year I switched to iPhone (not that the 6s’s home button was any better; it wasn’t).

My wife has an S22 and it’s nagging her to upgrade. I told her to come to Apple. She won’t. Maybe we can find a deal on an S24.

Unfortunately, “several” means they pump out so many phones a year… it doesn’t mean Galaxy S flagships more than a couple years old are getting the update.

That’s one thing that’s always fucked me off about Android. The hardware is capable, but after a year or two of updates, they just cut you off, expecting you to buy another one. And that’s fine if, for all the data collection and for how far behind iPhones they are in terms of performance (sorry, I know that’s a sore spot among Android enthusiasts… but the numbers do not lie), you were paying much less for them. But for iPhone prices, if you can’t expect iPhone performance, you should be able to expect a longer period of support. They say they offer 6 or 7 years of updates, but they aren’t going that far back. My own Samsung phone is a Galaxy S10 from 2019, or 7 years ago. Let’s see it get the update. But they won’t do it. They could — the phone is certainly capable enough — we’ve all (iPhone users included, and perhaps especially) been sold on this lie that you need the newest phone every year. It’s horse shit. The S10 is still a capable phone, and I imagine its iPhone contemporary is, too. (And I imagine that iPhone is still being updated, as it should be.) But they won’t, because they just want you to keep buying them.

Android users deserve better.

At least the value depreciates faster than iPhones, so you can get a gently used one from a year or two prior for a whole lot less than an iPhone from the same year. Like for example a Galaxy S24 vs an iPhone 15. Or an S23 vs an iPhone 14 (except then you don’t get USB-C, so I wouldn’t recommend it, the hassle of getting Lightning cables has to be factored in).

Twitter was always about limiting yourself, originally to posts about as long as a text. That was kinda the point. They increased the post length a while ago, but as a long time fan of long form forum conversations, I never saw much point in Twitter. Then this crazy nutjob bought it and it appealed to me even less. Still, these limits seem reasonable as he paid so much for it and it hasn’t made him a profit. So yeah, I think anyone who wants to use it more than that should maybe pay… or find another service to post on.

I ran a forum once, about 20-25 years ago. I got caught up in some bullshit and I banned a guy for speaking out of turn and daring me to. I got a lot of respect for the guy, it was people I mostly know (mostly online though) but whether or not he lost any for me, I lost some for myself. What I should have done was said, we’re all adults here, fucking act like it. But no, I had a ban hammer and I swung it. It didn’t fix anything.

I started a community on the instance I’m on yesterday. I hope I don’t have to do any moderating. But I may. Who knows. Fortunately it’s on dbzer0 and they’re pretty free-speech unless it goes directly against their politics, I’m not sure if that’ll be an issue. I hope it won’t. This shit that’s happening overseas. I made a music community. We didn’t have one for some reason, I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the fediverse. (I know there are music communities on other instances. I wanted to support the one I’m on.)

So, I don’t think a lot of people need to be moderated. I think the voting handles most of it, you can set your Lemmy client to ignore people with so many downvotes, and I think that’s fine. Or at least you could on the red site.

But also, to the OP, do you think people are just handing out moderation jobs? I think what you maybe want to ask is what’s preventing people from starting a community. In which case I would say start one on your instance. However OP is on Lemmy.world, which is the biggest instance. I think you can only start them on your own instance? So it’s different for World users. You don’t really want to divide the Fediverse and if something’s already on your instance and you love it, I think you should support it with content and/or comments, and if the community likes you, you should moderate if asked, but you shouldn’t seek it out if they don’t ask/open applications. On smaller instances, I feel like we have more options. I will for sure join comms on other instances (for example the ones on World tend to be the busiest), but I also like to support my local instance with traffic/content first. As any smaller instance user should.

What is Louisiana getting for those $3.3 billion in tax breaks?

To be fair, it’s easier to emulate Switch stuff on an ARM64 device like the Steam Deck (or a Mac) because the games themselves are not that far removed from the platform. The Switch itself is just a modified Nvidia Shield tablet, and the OS was originally an Android fork (apparently, no production version was, but before it released that was the plan, since they were and did use an Android tablet). Translating to x86-64 is more work (but also not impossible because in 2016 when the Switch launched, it wasn’t a terribly complicated machine to start with).

I mean, Drake is a trader… he just dropped three albums. So what’s wrong with that?

And Drake literally is an ephebophile, which most Internet commentators say is functionally the same as a paedophile, without understanding the differences. The former being attracted to adolescents who lack adult maturity and the latter being attracted to preadolescent children. The fact is, Drake groomed Milly Bobbie Brown (aka Eleven, from Stranger Things) when she was like, 15-17. So, Kendrick was right to say “Say, Drake, I hear you like ‘em young. You better not ever go to cell block one. To any bitch that talk to him and they in love, just make sure you hide yo’ lil’ sister from him.” He probably wasn’t wrong to say “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor” (that’s an old joke), but “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles” isn’t technically correct, but we allow it because “paedophile” (or Kendrick’s American spelling, same thing) is way more inflammatory than “ephebophile”, and, hey, both are illegal!

And all Drake has to say for himself is something about how Kendrick raps about being from the hood but goes home to his house in the hills? Does Drake still live in the hood? Do any rich and famous rappers? Fucking doubt it. It just seems like such a stretch. Kendrick owned him fair and square.

That said, Drake is still one hell of a singer. It just remains to be seen if his fans will forgive him after he diddled (or at least groomed) a teenager. But I mean, Chris Brown still sells records after beating his girlfriend within an inch of her life. (He is also one hell of a singer. I enjoy his music but I cannot in good conscience support him. It’s fine if it comes on the radio, but if it’s on my paid streaming service, I’ll skip him every time. I wouldn’t pirate his music because I feel then I’d have to put effort into listening to his music, and I don’t want to do that either.)

I’ve had an IMDb account longer than some Netizens have been alive. I feel like the Fediverse angles older, though, so I should be careful how I word it here. Popular social networks, though? Easy claim. Though, I feel like when people capitalise the B at the end, they might be younger? But I just checked and the B is definitely still lowercase, so I’m not sure where they got that it was upper.

That said, I got rid of the app a while ago. I just browse to it in Safari (iPhone) or Firefox (Mac) now. The app is trash. I’ve migrated my data to TMDB, but the site’s not quite as good and lacks information, so I use both. (TMDB does not have an app. There’s an app on the App Store, but it’s not official and it sucks. So it’s browser-only for now.)

Yeah, it might be whatever frontend dbzer0 uses. Also, Firefox (latest) and macOS (26.4.1).

Or the instance you’re on goes down for a minute (maintenance or the server gets overloaded).

Do what we used to do back in the day, type your long posts in notepad/textedit/whatever, then copy them over. The Lemmy post editor is pretty crappy in fact, with the URL constantly updating as you type, not sure what that’s about but the flickering of the URL bar annoys me, so if it’s more than a couple lines, I’ll just open textedit, type there, then copy/paste over. If the site is acting up, well, I still have my text.

Post about how paedophiles should face stricter punishments (such as life sentences, or what Louisiana does in the US, reversible chemical castration, that way if they’re found not guilty later, they can take drugs that reverse the effect). That’s what got me banned last time.

VPNs have always been a loophole… how about listening to what your citizens want, rather than shareholders, mostly of American companies?