d-RLY? @ dRLY @lemmy.ml

Mostly on my Lemmygrad and Hexbear accounts. But still like Lemmy.ml and t

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4 yr. ago

I don't think that anywhere near as many people that thought Trump was "compromised" would believe Biden has been. If anything Biden constantly demanding more and more money and arms stockpiles from the US to go to Ukraine is kind of a win for Russia. As it means less money and arms are being kept by the US. It weakens us in money and supplies. The constant cheerleading about standing with Ukraine until the end and all territories are returned, kind of makes it hard to save face and cut off the supply line. Trump being much more prone to impulses and thrives on attention is much more likely to change directions even if people scream at him about it. Just as long as he can be the centre of attention and not really care about the situation.

That being said, Putin is definitely fucking with everyone. It helps create chaos for both parties to constantly be too focused on accusing each other of being "compromised." And the best part is that he doesn't even have to actually do anything other than exist for this to happen.

He alone wouldn't have been able to do much. As instead of just having conservatives/Republicans against him, the Democratic party's members in Congress and in other fed and state level spots would also be against him. Until we get third parties in there to break up the eternal gridlock of never moving forward for real people. We just keep being pulled to the right and the centrists only care about not making the rich happy. Burn them and all of it to the ground.

Facts! If Netanyahu is removed, it will just be like the US where the next guy is still evil but just lesser.

Too bad he was vocally pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian liberation up until now. Ready to blindly believe the lies about the 40 babies, and somehow that Israel is allowed continued support every year with our money. Dude has lost all my support ever since bowing to Dems both times and not fighting. He allowed Dems to get what they wanted and all of us are assholes for not fucking around about withholding votes. Bernie got people excited about real change, and then allowed the very establishment we need removed to bring it to a hard stop (like always). Fuck him and his masters that enabled Israel's decades and decades of planned genocide started with the colonization of Palestine by Zionists! He is just doing what all the Dems do, good quotes/speeches and nothing changed.

Very hard to convince people to buy things "legitimately" and have any trust in any of the "legit" options when they just go away so fucking easily. Stuff like anime has been a real weird example of both how horrible the corps on the Japanese side just squeeze every single fraction of a penny from stuff (fucking like two eps of a show on a modern DVD or even Blu-ray). But also feel zero reason to expand options in the first place. They were so fucking slow to get digital or streaming options. Same goes for the foreign outlets that get rights outside of J-land, but I am sure they were more likely to want to combat piracy via stuff like streaming. Funny thing about anime piracy is that it is literally the reason so many shows and movies were even seen and is the main reason so many people got into all of it. Back in the early 00's when I made friends with people that had cable internet and ready to burn as many eps as they could fit on a CD-R and later DVD-/+R.

It was just so amazing to see all these shows that weren't just completely altered by lazy US companies or ever likely to be translated. No US companies thought that Americans would ever understand or get into this weird Japanese stuff and not put money into it. But they sure started caring when torrents got going and the numbers were growing. One thing that has really pissed me off with legal digital copies of anime comes down to how it is still behind on basic shit. We have had multi-audio/subtitles on pirate copies and even on legitimate physical discs. But the legal versions of digital copies still have to be either bought in sub or dub. It is a slap in the face of fans to have to buy two different copies just to have multi-audio in Japanese and English. I thought that shit would have been left behind with VHS.

All of these companies demand our money and often charge prices that are just too high for their target audiences (especially teens that don't have jobs like so many of us have lived through). And yet they seem to do everything possible to make the options for purchase so much less usable compared to pirate versions. I would take a fansub that might be a bit off but has actual passion for community and accessibility over legit copies every single time. But I am also more than happy to pay for things if I don't keep being treated like I already stole it and should be grateful for being "allowed" to pay for it. I would love to pay for these things and know that the actual workers are able to live, and not just so overworked and not able to afford rent. But the entire media industry treats both the workers and the customers so fucking bad. They are making things worse for themselves by showing how we can't trust our purchases to even be around from one day to another. So why shouldn't we just take it and know that we will have it?

Given how lots of smaller shows and other things will never get re-prints or re-masters on modern media. It is also our jobs to preserve these things that the companies feel aren't worth the money to do so if they aren't. If I ever have kids, I would like to be able to know I can show them my favorites. Looks like I will also need to show them how to sail the digital seas and that "legit" options should always be treated as liars that steal your money AND take away what you paid for.

🏴‍☠️

Does the iPod Classic support variable playback speeds and open audiobook formats? I genuinely don't know much of anything about them aside from how to play regular music whenever my friend that had different Nanos over a few years back in the day. Also can stuff be loaded without iTunes? If so, then I would certainly look into them again!

Auto-moderation is both lazy and is only going to get worse. Not saying there isn't some value on things being hard-banned (like very specific spam like shit that just keeps responding to everything with the same thing non-stop). But these mega outlets/sites want to just use full automation to ban shit without any human interactions. At least unless you or another corp has connections on the inside to get a person or people to fix it. Just like how they make it so fucking hard to ever reach a person when calling (or trying to even find) a support line.

This automated shit just blacklists more and more shit and can completely fuck over people that use those sites for income (and they even can't reach a person when their income is cut off for false reasons and don't get back-pay for the period of a strike/ban). The bad guys will always just keep moving to a new word or phrase as the old ones get banned. So we as users are actually losing words and phrases and the actual shit is just on to the next one without issues.

I agree with you is the TL;DR, and the rest is just my mad ranting opinions about companies being allowed to just auto-censor us. So feel free to completely ignore the rest. lol.

It is like just banning words and phrases just because bad people use them has just become the norm. I really really can't stand the way that channels on YT constantly have to self-censor basically everything (even if the video is just reporting on or trying to explain bad shit that is or has happened). And it never seems to actually stop the actual issues from happening. Just means the bad people just move on to a new word or phrase that is then itself banned. It isn't about actually stopping fucked-up shit from happening. It is just about making sure advertisers and other sources of money don't throw a fit.

We always hear about how places like China are bad in-part for censoring words and speech. But in the US and other western nations we pretend we are allowed to freely speak uncensored. We have always had censoring of speech, it is just that the real rulers of the country are allowed to do it instead. Keeps the government's hands free from legally being the enforcers of doing it to us. Shit like CP is fucked, and it should be handled for what it is, but allowing for-profit companies and especially their algorithms/AI to decide what we can and can't say or search for without any level of human interactions that very much lead to false bans is also fucked.

It is waaaay too easy for all the mega corps to completely take down channels and block creators from revenue of their own work just completely automated. But the accused channel can't ever get a real person to both get clear understanding of what and who is attacking them, and to explain why their strike/bans aren't valid. I have heard that even channels that have gotten written/legal permission from a big studio to use a clip of music or segment from video (music being the worst) will STILL catch automated strikes for copyright violations.

We don't need actual government censors, because the mega corps with all the money are allowed to do it for them. We have rights but they don't really matter if they can say a private company or org made up of people from various mega corps are allowed to do it for them.

Will be needing to check-in on this over time to see if anything is changed or default functions expand just a bit. I have been looking for a good media device for loading my archived podcast episodes/seasons and audiobooks without having all the extra bloat and/or possible malware that can be on lots of similar and cheaper Android players (or the overkill of using an old phone that doesn't have a aux port). Main thing for podcasts and audiobooks is variable playback speed settings and stuff like understanding audiobook formats with chapters.

Sadly I (for now) have settled on a sketchy Android device that I would love to root so I can remove a specific flagged app that the Play Store always pops a notification about that is not uninstallable like so many companies do. But since it is a no name brand without firmware images to download from their site. I just I only ever put it online long enough for my favorite podcast app to pull new eps or Audible. Though I am planning to eventually just download and strip DRM from my library for having backups.

So if this thing can get variable speed for podcasts and support open/free formats that are specific to books. Then I am sold. I never got to have an iPod back in the day, so I very much like the throwback look of this thing! I do wish it had more RAM though, as I would imagine that it could limit some higher quality formats/codecs (but I am not a dev so maybe it wouldn't matter). The price seems fair given it isn't from just another global mega-corp. I hope they pay their devs well to make sure their official firmware updates stay active, and/or put some profits into future revisions and whatnot.

They really went hard on VCRs before all of that for the same reasons. Fortunately the time shifting argument was able to be backed by the courts. Otherwise TiVo and so many other formats would've basically been banned from the general public being able to have anything nice. Was especially important rulings for forcing most content providers and/or studios into using new ideas and technologies. They are the ones that hold back on everything that could actually make it easier to legally enjoy content.

They make things require so many hoops to go through and like a punishment for wanting to enjoy anything legally. While also making it cost more on their end overall. If these companies were to embrace stuff like torrenting tech, then it would mean less overall costs needed to always be running. We have so many ways of getting stuff from here to there and making sure media is not lost. Copyrights should at best last like 10 years imo. These companies still can't even be bothered to allow me to buy movies and shows digitally that maybe got a DVD release. So if they won't give options, then they forfeit the right to claim any "damages" or "lost sales."

I did fail to mention it is US only (my bad in that). Though it could get expanded if it is popular enough and it can be pointed to as "reducing piracy." But international laws being complicated from nation to nation is also an issue, or at least something they might say. I haven't been out of the country since setting it up, so I am curious if I would need a VPN to access my licensed stuff. Maybe would work for folks that have made accounts in the past with VPN? Idk.

It does work with some very limited sets of shows. But like I said, they aren't really about that and the shows tend to be from studios like HBO. But not helpful for most anything other than movies.

It is a unified interface, but if I buy a MA labeled movie from say Vudu. It will also show-up in my iTunes, Microsoft, YouTube/Google Movies, Amazon, and of course MA. They have some additional connected services via Direct TV and Verizon, but I don't use those. But the point is that if I get it on one of the services I connected, they become available on all of them. Even when the UltraViolet service went down, I didn't lose the things I had bought. Though I think that Disney must have bought their connections and the UV stuff was migrated. Though I am not sure of those details. Either way it didn't lead to me losing anything.

It also does require that you periodically sign back into their site to re-connect each provider similar to how you have to sign back into other sites. But again, I at no point have lost access to what was in my account if I haven't signed in to re-verify. It isn't as cut and dry as having the physical discs or a torrented copy on a NAS. But it is still worth knowing about if you have "legit" copies. I really wish that there were a way to link my Plex account and be able to watch them in the same front-end as my local stuff though. But no way that is going to happen unless Plex completely stops supporting the Plex Server and works out deals to use APIs of stuff like Vudu, Amazon, iTunes, etc..

I haven't ran into a situation where any of the digital copies of things I bought have been pulled. So I can't speak to what happened with your friends. But I will say that if you have any purchased digital copies of movies, you should at least setup Movies Anywhere and link all accounts you have. It isn't like how Steam will still allow you to download a pulled game. But it does give you copies of things on multiple sources once linked. So if you got something on Amazon, it would also be linked as "purchased" on other services like Vudu, YouTube/Play Movies, Apple, etc.. It won't apply to everything you have got but would likely cover most big name items.

It used to be marked with the old "Ultraviolet" branding, but when that was shutdown the basic underlying service was transferred to Movies Anywhere. Most of the time you can see which things would count because they have the MA logo. Not great for smaller releases and most shows won't be part of it (atm at least). Though some shows might also show up, as I have seen things from HBO and some other ones.

All that being said. You are very much correct about "buying isn't owning" these days. And even when there is something like MA, there are still thousands of movies and shows that will only ever get a digital "release" from torrents/P2P. Sad that some cool shit will never get a real HD re-master for Blu-ray (let alone streaming). I very much feel that studios should have at best a 10 year window to make whatever sales before the masters should be copied to public archives. If the studios won't do it, then there are more than plenty of people out there that would do the job for the love of keeping old media preserved and accessible. Also bullshit when I try to go the "legal" route and find a show on one service in HD but only in SD on others. It is pretty infuriating to see that in some cases I can only get like season 2 of something on say Vudu for example, but season 1 is seemingly exclusive to Amazon. And one is in HD and the other is only SD.

Seeing how history repeating itself is doing so from multiple centuries at one time. If you are a leftist, then you NEED to be arming yourself and making efforts to join orgs/groups of comrades. The far-right and the constantly enabling centrists are doing the same song and dance done before the Civil War and all of the Red Scares. They don't wish to fight the rich elites/capitalists that profit from the constant repeating of history and gaslighting the masses. They are going to welcome fascism as their methods of keeping power. It is the centrists/moderates that allowed Nazi Germany to happen. It is the centrists/moderates that allowed slavery and segregation to stay around. They are what allowed child labour and complete disregard for workers' safety and health to continue. They want you to just ignore it all and tune-out (unless it serves them to call attention for their political theatre). We keep us safe!

It is also crucial that leftists be where the masses are in order to make whatever pushes that can be made. There can't be class awakening if leftist aren't there to speak-up, otherwise it is all just reactionaries and bootlickers spreading their lies.

SponsorBlock is really good for dealing with the "this video was brought to you by" ads. There are also some other extensions that will either auto-press the "Skip Ad" button when possible, and others that will treat it like a podcast app and just change the playback speed for the ads to some really really fast speeds. So the ads are still present, but are over in seconds.

I am really going to miss the old settings when they finally remove what is left of Control Panel. So far they have removed things or moved shit to force the Settings app. But they keep failing to make the new things have anywhere near the level of control. The power settings from Control Panel still matter way more than Settings and seem to actually stick when applied. And I just really have no idea how they have made stuff like resetting networking/connection issues worse over time. Fucking right-clicking on the networking icon on the taskbar and picking "repair" would actually get shit working again 8 times out of 10. But just seems to be a placebo at this point. There are still so many times that using different resets in Internet Options fixes more stuff I see regularly than the resets in Settings->Networking.

And the newer Troubleshooting options never fix any of the Windows Update issues I come across. Just a glorified verification of the failures I already know are happening. I never thought I would so badly miss being able to tell Windows Update to ignore updates if they were bugging out (not to avoid them all together but at least stop the OS from just constantly going through the motions of installing and failing during each reboot/shutdown). So many of the updates that used to give me issues were really either down to them trying to install out of order or due to a fuck-up on MS's end that pushed bad updates.

The push to so deeply embed these AI models into everything so fast is really pissing me off. Shit is known to have issues with just outright making shit up. Which is IMO reason enough to not be adding them to end-products (especially since the end-products are also still not finished with removing old versions of things). One thing that really worries me in my job with fixing people's PCs is the AI and search that pushes web content (and the now inescapable placement of ads) above local resources/programs/settings/etc. The main issues people have aren't actual viruses like in the past. It is the massive levels of scams and fake alerts followed by fake "repair techs." If the average person is so easy to trick when it is people scamming them. AI is going to blow shit up waaaaaaaay worse and will be able to do it so much faster and completely. Average people are still under the impression that these AI chats are giving completely real and accurate information (reminds me of how people used to believe that if something was said on TV that it was real).

Shit is fucked and going to get much worse at a dramatically faster rate due to rushing things in order to make as much money as fast as possible. Even Microsoft used to ship things in a more complete state. But gaming has made shipping broken products completely normal. So no reason to care about keeping any level of quality.

Maybe what they meant was that there isn't a rule about needing to seed individual torrents to a certain point? Seeing how they also mention "maintain a global", which is pretty normal for lots of private trackers. But that is my guess, even though it still counts as a "seeding rule."

Facts! It isn't just anarchists and black movements either. Communists, socialists, and socdems (so basically most flavors of anti-capitalism) are arming-up or at least learning how to shoot or breakdown a weapon to make inert (Socialist Rifle Association/John Brown Gun Clubs/Redneck Revolt). Also seeing more pro-2A orgs/groups for various minorities (two examples being Latino Rifle Association and Pink Pistols) getting more members. Now is the best time to support and/or join whichever ones that are active in the areas that folks are.

It is also a smart idea to get at least one or more guns and learn to use them. Also in the event that the libs somehow start banning things again, as the fascists and conservative bootlickers most certainly have plenty on their side already. Not about to let them have an easy time if any of them start pulling anything thinking the left is defenseless (as they still think real leftists are the same as the centrist libs). Even then, there are more liberals also starting to get guns too.

I think that given how frequently this argument is brought up (and it is of course true about it not being completely there yet) so this is just my opinion on the situation (and I am not a dev so I am fine with being wrong and corrected). It is kind of needed for more projects/distros to start actively using it. As a lot of the stuff kind of needs the band-aid ripped off to start forcing it to get there faster at this point. Otherwise it just keeps being held back as people on the coding end of things will keep focusing on X11 issues instead of getting things ready for Wayland.

Kind of like the conundrum of mobile OSes that aren't Android or iOS. It is hard to get people/companies to even try the new OS because the lack of apps (specifically the most common ones used by the most people). But app devs don't want to spend time re-building or starting new apps for an OS that isn't being used (or on devices people are buying). So at a certain point it needs both sides to interact and make progress. The OS needs the apps more at this point, and getting feedback and data from those devs makes it known where things are and aren't working. But it is also true the devs for the apps might end up finding out the OS is actually easier to work with compared to what they have been doing/dealing with on Android/iOS.

Getting a replacement for X11 has been needed for a long time as the OSes and features keep needing something new to better work for how computers have advanced. And it isn't something that many devs would want to take on given how easy it is to just use what is already known. Since Wayland has finally gotten to the point it is now, it is time for more devs to start learning/moving to the new thing to get attention to the stuff that they need. The hardest part is this in between period for users as it can and will cause random issues (like the ones you have seen). Stability is important, but Linux is great because there will always be distros and projects that keeping the old thing running well is the main objective. So we are in some great times for the new to be pushed hard so it can become the stable future needed.