Chobbes @ Chobbes @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

There's at least two animated versions that I'm aware of! Apologies for the URLs that contain dates...

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1978_film)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_King_(1980_film)

Interstellar is an amazing movie followed immediately by a terrible sequel.

Ohhhhh, yes, but I think you’re thinking of the other one. It’s the one with a few casual one liners.

This was exactly my thought… Some of the ent scenes are really rough now. Fantastic movies, though!

You didn’t like the one where there was a bad guy and they fought the bad guy and then won against the bad guy?

I’m probably going to hell for saying this, but… I’m not that worried about plastic pollution? Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize single use items and plastic ending up places it shouldn’t, but if it’s the best option for food / medical safety or cheaply producing something with a lower carbon footprint… we should probably just use it without too much guilt? The world is almost certainly better because of plastic in my opinion.

I think you're just not the target market. If you're not somebody who has the luxury to keep up on whatever the nerds on the internet are making, you're probably happy to have a first party product to buy. Honestly part of the appeal of products like this is just the luxury to not have to research the thing to figure out if you can make it do what you want --- that's clearly not something you care about, and that's fine...

I still can't get over how much of an obvious blunder it was to only have one analog stick on the PSP.

I don't think this is a completely fair comparison. I have a Steam Deck OLED and I don't have a PS5 or a Portal, but I can see the appeal of the Portal (though initially I thought it was kind of dumb too). The screen is bigger and higher resolution, it's a first party device with pretty much the same ergonomics as the controller you'd be used to, and it is significantly cheaper than any OLED version of the steam deck and roughly half the price of the base model LCD steam deck (with the caveat that the 64GB LCD version can currently be had for $350 "while supplies last").

Is the Steam Deck a great device? Absolutely! It does more than the Portal in that it can play games on its own (and is kind of a full computer), and the price of the Steam Deck is actually insanely good for what it is. The fact that you can set one up for remote play on a PS5 is also pretty cool, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if people did opt to spend a little more for a Steam Deck vs a Portal...

But realistically if you're a busy parent or something and you just want to play your PS5 around the house (which I thought was a stupid use case, and was a reason I held off on getting a Steam Deck... But it's actually really nice), I can totally see the appeal of just getting the Portal because it's cheaper than a Steam Deck, has a bigger and higher resolution screen (though not OLED), won't need any tinkering at all, and will just have the layout and features you're used to in the controller. It's definitely a relatively niche device, but I don't think it's insanely priced for what it is and I think a decent chunk of people will be happy with it... But if you're not in the target market it might seem a little silly.

As I get older I value money less and time and not having to mess with stuff more. I think the Portal really isn't targeting younger people who are less willing to spend money, and more willing to put up with jankier solutions like just using your phone... It's targeting older people who just want to buy a decent quality thing that will just work out of the box so they can play games while they watch their kids or whatever.

I’ve never heard of this and… why? You shouldn’t cite your sources if they’re too old? What? I get that you should try to find more recent sources for certain things, so the age of a source can be relevant if we’ve learned more in the meantime… but having a cut off is stupid. Evaluate the sources and if it’s outdated information criticize that.

Every digital system is also secretly analog.

Wait… was this ever good? I hate it so much on my TV.

Yeah. You'll probably have access to a calculator these days, but that doesn't mean it's not worth knowing some basic arithmetic. Playing around with arithmetic is a good way to gain an understanding of the fundamentals and have a better sense of what the operations mean and how they work, which helps even when you do have a calculator.

I mean sure, but realistically if you’re worried about the government knowing when you received a push notification you should be worried about your ISP or cell provider being able to provide that information as well. Hiding this metadata completely from the outside world is really hard. You can obfuscate it with garbage packets (e.g., signal could randomly send you push notifications when you don’t have any new messages giving you plausible deniability, or maybe signal could add some random delays to push notifications to make correlation of senders harder), or you can try to hide by not using push and connecting over Tor or something, but I’m not sure the government knowing when you connect to Tor is much better than them knowing when you receive a push notification, haha.

I’m personally not too worried about this particular metadata. I can imagine situations where it could be problematic (maybe you can use timing to guess whether two people are messaging each other), but I think it’s essentially the least valuable information you can leak from a messaging service, and I think mitigating against it isn’t super easy if you consider the whole network to be adversarial. There’s definitely things you can do, but they all have tradeoffs.

What metadata are you worried about specifically?

You leave NixOS alone!!

I keep getting tempted to try it, but honestly it doesn’t look like it would be my jam. I don’t want to build bases, and I don’t want to grind and collect resources. I’m kind of not into sandboxy stuff anymore. Maybe there's more to the game, but that’s all it looks like to me as an outsider.

The signal servers will absolutely have public and static IP addresses. You would not be able to connect to them reliably if they could change at any time and you had to rely upon DNS updates to find the server. AWS is not magic.

And yes, AWS has IP ranges allocated to it that they pull their public IPs from, that's all that link is talking about --- this page even provides the context that the IP ranges are available in order to identify which traffic is coming from AWS in order to allow / disallow it. Of course the AWS IP allocations won't tell you which IP is associated with which service (and indeed many IPs, particularly in the IPv6 space, are probably not in use at all).

There’s not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers

Why? Yes, IPv4 address exhaustion is a thing, and yes AWS only has a slice of IPv4 addresses to give, but you absolutely can get static public facing IPs from AWS that will be unique to your server. You can even pay for an elastic IP so you can hold a particular address and move it between instances. There is no way Signal does not do this.

Signal has native support for proxying via Tor in that case.

Yes, though the use case is mostly for getting around censorship. Realistically if you don't want the government to know you're using Signal... Do you want them to know you use Tor?

AWS is not a black box from the outside. The signal servers will have their own external IP addresses that you will connect with, your ISP could keep track of those connections. Furthermore, if you are worried that the government is using your ISP to spy, what makes you think that AWS wouldn’t be subject to that as well? Signal is absolutely a target in this respect too.

Of course you can do various things to potentially hide your connection to signal, for instance by using tor, but in some sense there’s no guarantee if you don’t trust anything external to you. I’m personally not too worried about the “this person uses signal” metadata, though.

Seems like it might be fine: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextclouds-push-notifications-for-ios-and-android/