The concept of this album is genuinely hilarious and the execution is a testament to the other musicians he hired

That said one listen was enough for me

“we love voting for trump despite being poor as fuck because we are complete morons that have been brainwashed by andrew tate and joe rogan clips on tiktok” -gen z men

class issue, not age issue. though i do understand getting frustrated at people who fall for the grift

Theoretically possible but someone would have to reverse engineer the protocol and write a new service that works based on that

There are some projects but all that I’ve seen are open source head units that either: are terrible and aren’t android auto/carplay (eg they only have the most basic of integration, can show notifications and play music via Bluetooth) or they emulate android auto/carplay without the necessary licensing/hardware (so you still ultimately rely on google/apple)

When I was in high school (like 2001 or so) I started doing electronics stuff, hobby projects, console mods, etc. simple stuff at first like installing mod chips and building rgb mods for older rf consoles but then building pic and embedded stuff which was somewhat impressive in the pre arduino days (even though it was functionally the same thing, just slightly more difficult because there wasn’t a dev board or ide)

That led to learning enough to fix stuff, which I did through college to earn some cash. I kept doing it, and kept doing it.

At one point I was actually earning quite a bit of money. The early smartphone days were great. Lasted a decent clip too. Each iphone generation I would buy a 50 pack of screens and batteries from chinese wholesalers that sold very good quality ones. Would easily burn through those. I didn’t really like doing this but it was lucrative. I simply charged less then anyone else in town and still made a decent amount per hour because it was ultimately stupid easy to do and all the repair shops (including apple) grossly overcharged. I would do it for $50 and the parts were like $17. Took me like 12 minutes. I was just doing it after work and making an extra 15k a year at the peak just off phones

Then the oled phones came out and all of a sudden parts were like $200, so that sucked, so that dropped drastically

Then the iphone xs came out and if you changed the parts the phone would give a nag screen saying “these parts may not be authentic” and disable features, even if I pulled the parts from another iphone. This also caused another drop although eventually I found programmers from china that could defeat it (for $$$ but at that point it was about the principle)

Then Samsung started doing it too (though they later walked it back, but then unwalked it back maybe? I don’t pay it much mind these days. For that matter apple also finally allows you to program new parts as of ios 18 but they have to be genuine apple parts that aren’t locked and buying them from apple is $$$$$. Plus last I checked they won’t even sell you parts unless you give them the device imei/serial so you can’t buy in bulk, get discounts, and doing what I did is completely impractical)

Then I gave up on that. I still do some of what I always did: buy broken stuff, fix it, sell it online. This is more fun to do because it’s interesting, like solving a puzzle, but less lucrative because it’s far more time consuming. I also no longer have to directly deal with customers which is nice (aside from the occasional person on ebay who wants a refund without returning the item because I didn’t make it clear the item was refurbished even though it was listed as refurbished, the description says it’s refurbished with a description of how it was refurbished, and an image saying “refurbished item” as the primary picture on the auction).

I also sometimes do hdmi and usb c replacements on consoles and phones because they don’t serialize those (yet, probably)

And every once in a while I still pursue an actual hobby project. My current one is making a proper portable Dreamcast but instead of doing it based on a raspberry pi or whatever I’m using the leaked schematics to rebuild the board with only the necessities in a much smaller footprint and trying to integrate some modern niceties (replace the disk drive with either sd card or cf, modern efficient power supply, built in VMU, etc). But it would sacrifice an actual Dreamcast and reuse the cpu, gpu, ram, Yamaha sound chip, etc so it wouldn’t emulate anything and be 100% accurate. About 80% to a prototype but progress is slow (been doing it for years) because I do have an actual job that takes up much of my time. Also I lost some enthusiasm because someone in china beat me to it years ago; you can buy it on AliExpress for like $500 if you really want one (but theirs is ugly and doesn’t have a lot of the feature set I plan. It does exist though, so it beats mine quite handily)

Every game for the year?? That’s crazy

Highlights:

Tears of the kingdom: amazing game, sunk an absurd amount of hours into this

Like a dragon: infinite wealth: so good, favorite franchise, rgg consistently puts out quality and is the only studio ill bother to buy full price games from

Tales of arise: really good

Hi fi rush: extremely good, but no jet set radio

Bomb rush cyberfunk: not as good, much closer though. actually felt like next gen jet set radio. just wish they bothered to improve the formula at all from 2000 or whenever

Dead space remake: I found myself having to push through the end of this, got very tedious

Silent hill free game on psn (I forget the name, the suicide one): so heavy handed, awful writing, awful voice acting, but it was free so whatever

Silent hill 2: pretty great remake but wish I waited for a price drop.

Persona 3 reload: basically same as above

Ff7: solid overall, really liked it

Spider-Man 2: not as good as the first one but decent

Unicorn overlord: really good

Forspoken: not amazing but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on the initial reactions

Tekken 8: love it even though I fucking suck

Smt: vengeance: great

Dave the diver: played on a whim without knowing anything about it, sucked me in

I know there weee more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head

Excited to play metaphor, hellblade 2, Indiana jones, riven remake, erdtree dlc for Elden ring, cyberpunk dlc, Alan wake 2, god of war ragnarok dlc, new taiko no tatsujin, armored core vi, like a billion more

It was about a year ago and I’ve found general prices have gone up on basically everything, even stuff for parts, in the past few years, but more importantly it was also a local sale in person with a vendor I know. I find that’s the only way to actually get deals anymore. If you buy stuff like this and are stuffing a network rack at home it makes sense to befriend a local electronics recycler or two if you live in an area where that’s a thing.

I actually moved about two years ago to a less developed area but I will still drive to where I used to live (which is like 90-120 minute drive) 1-2x a year for stuff like this. It’s worth it bc these guys still know me and they’ll cut me deals on stuff like this where ebay sellers will list it for 2-3x as much. but if you watch 8x out of 10 their auctions never sell at those prices, at best they sometimes sell for an undisclosed “best offer” if they even have that option. It’s crazy how many ebay sellers will let shit sit on the market for inflated prices for weeks, months, or longer rather than drop their prices to promote an artificial economy in the hopes that eventually a clueless buyer with fat pockets will come along. They get that and they don’t want to waste the space storing shit for ages

Full disclosure: when I lived in the area I ran a refurbishing business on the side and would buy tons of stuff from them to fix and resell, that probably helped get me on their good side. From like 2013-2019 I would buy tons of broken phones, consoles, weird industrial shit, etc, fix it, and resell it. They loved it because it was a guaranteed cash sale with no ebay/paypal fees, no risk of negative feedback for their ebay store, no risk of a buyer doing a chargeback or demanding to return, etc. I wanted their broken shit and if I couldn’t fix it I accepted the loss, would bring it back to them to recycle and admit defeat in shame

You are the stupidest moron I’ve ever encountered on the internet

There is a chance whoever is doing this is kind of an asshole and is sticking the eyes on with some kind of absurd adhesive that is a total pain in the ass to remove. Like a blob of some serious epoxy shit that has to be carefully chipped off or melted with solvents to avoid damaging the sculpture

But in all likelihood it’s just a hugely inflated labor cost and they’re self adhesive with something mild

I’m old so things were easier but I remember in my middle school days I figured out you could bypass the schools content filter by using babelfish to translate the page from English to English in like 1998. Somehow accidentally stumbled across the concept of a proxy

Voice assistants have been great in my experience for smart home stuff. Dunno about ai bullshit

Few examples:

Come home in the evening with a bunch of groceries: “turn on the lights” is handy. I don’t see great and yet I’m irresponsible and will walk into a dark house with way too many bags in my hands

Cooking: again, hands busy. Change lighting, set timers, play music, etc

General laziness: sitting on the couch and decide to watch a movie, set a scene for optimal lighting. Granted this one is easily handled by using phone or just standing up, but voice is easier

Solid mic choice and placement avoids the repeat myself issue, for the most part. Can be an issue mainly during cooking tasks where there can be a lot of environmental noise and loud music playing. But worth the occasional snag, imo

Unless you’re going to refurbish them solely to use as decorative pieces those pianos are guaranteed trash

You keep going on about the original post. I was replying to you dude, who said everything is mobile games and live services. I never said all games are movie games? I just said you are wrong and not all games, AAA or otherwise, are mobile games and live services. And you are still wrong, and that’s still true

Only some of those are movie games, sure. I was more responding to your “everything is mobile games and live services”, which is just untrue

The only one I haven’t played yet is wukong. Also I agree the spiderman games are totally awesome. I strongly disagree about fromsoft games though, sekiro alone is amazing

Every yakuza game, baldurs gate, every fromsoft game, the insomniac games like spiderman, Sony stuff in general like horizon, god of war, last of us, etc, black myth wukong, the endless remake games (some of which are very solid) like ff7, silent hill 2, persona 3 reload, etc, rockstar games even (rdr2 was 2018 and gta6 is supposed to come out this year, maybe). The sea of jrpgs like shin megami tensei v vengeance, trails through daybreak, granblue fantasy, unicorn overlord, etc. And that’s literally off the top of my head

Mobile games and live services dominate for sure bc they shit money and are easy to develop but decent games still exist (though tbf a lot of them are starting to pull serious bullshit too. Love yakuza but sega locking new game+ behind a $15 dlc. First yakuza game I didnt do a new game+ run on and the lamest one to platinum because you don’t have to beat the hardest boss or run it on legendary)

I refuse to calm down and I demand help

uh, dunno if people have noticed but the Mediterranean is kind of goin through some shit right now. Also Italy has a pretty notable history of bombings and assassinations

But also what the other person said, dude is american. I’m so sick of my family members talking like sopranos characters because our grandparents were actual Italians. Plus they 100% definitely didn’t say gabbagool and proshoot before like 2003

It’s to fill dead air. I would bet the overwhelming majority of cable subscriptions are people who just watch sports. That’s why it’s such a nightmare to pay to watch sports online, it’s the last draw to actually purchase a cable package and for a lot of people it actually is worth the insane $120 a month or whatever bullshit they charge.

An ever shrinking minority are extremely tech illiterate people who actually watch that content and refuse to adapt from the system they learned in 1996 but those people are literally dying out.

But the channels realize the majority of cable subscribers don’t actually give a shit about watching cable. So they don’t bother with the expense of churning out content, instead going with endlessly regurgitating syndicated shit.

I haven’t had access to cable since like 2003 when I lived with my parents. I, like many others here, pirate a bunch of stuff (plus some physical media for independent media and stuff I want to support)

That said I recently got an iptv subscription bc my partner got into sports and the available options are either stupid, prohibitively expensive, or both. NBA streaming package is not crazy at $10/mo but it has a blackout for your local team, so you can’t watch games of your team, forcing you to a cable provider if you follow them. Anything for local sports is minimum like $60 a month and often double that. absurd. Iptv is super piracy but it’s like $70/yr for all the games of all the teams of all the sports plus all the channels of all the countries plus a huge library of content.

I watched tv for like a day with it and it was insane how terrible it was. Most networks just marathon random episodes of mid shows with obnoxious ad breaks. So it’s like comedy central- 6 hours of family guy, 3 hours of american dad, 4 hours of south park, 3 bad movies, 6 more hours of family guy, 4 hours of infomercials, repeat. Maybe there’s like one episode of new content every few days, and it’s something low effort like the daily show. Or another network like hln that literally just shows forensic files and informercials 24/7.

The news is toxic bullshit. Hyper focus on rage bait and propping up anything that gets ratings (which is basically trump and elon nonsense).

It’s insane. It’s just streaming networks where you can’t pick what you watch. They realized people like binge watching and leaned into that, hard. The advantage they had is creating new content but there’s none of that the overwhelming majority of the time. They’ve given up and are propped up solely by sports

I will say some of the other countries have decent programming at least. Tbs from Japan has some good shit (although you have to speak Japanese of course). They tend to have better news too

Often the high deductible options do financially make sense if you are in a place where spending the deductible each year isn’t a burden. They can even be advantageous if you are healthy; in that scenario they are essentially “hedging your bets”. You can save a substantial amount over a ppo if your utilization is low and typically if you just spend to the deductible the cost is about the same.

It’s the coinsurance afterward that can be a killer, especially if you have a chronic illness that requires a lot of expensive stuff. A PPO caps everything at a copay amount (which, tbf, can sometimes be quite high), but coinsurance can be 10-30% sometimes (maybe higher but that’s the highest I’ve seen). And if you have cancer, or some other nasty thing that requires expensive scans, medications, bloodwork, etc, paying 10-30% of the bill is still a shitload of cash. Thankfully there’s still an out of pocket max but that’s often quite high

And tbh I took your statement as judgey. I’m glad it wasn’t, thanks for clarifying. But that’s one of the issues with such a system. My colleagues who don’t do what I do are absolutely judged. But at the same time I do not judge them (usually, lol). This is not a sustainable setup. It is not sustainable to ask individual practitioners to take on the financial burden. It harms the relationship between practitioner and client, it’s destructive and can breed resentment. It results in quality of life issues for practitioners like wildly unpredictable pay. I could go on.

Ideally we would just be paid an actual salary, an actual living wage, with benefits, to work with a set number of clients, but with the current system this is functionally impossible. If we had a single payer system this would be easily feasible, all healthcare staff could be government employees basically. Good luck getting most doctors to support this though. They love padding billing under the current system

I have an ibm qualstar lto8 drive. I got it because I gambled, it was cheap because it was throwing an error (I forget what the number was) but it was one that indicates an issue in the tape path. I was able to get the price to $150 because I was buying some other stuff and because ultimately if the head was toast it was basically useless. But I got lucky and cleaning the head and tape path brought it back to life. Dunno how long it will last. I’ll live with it though because buying one that’s confirmed working can be thousands

You’re right that lto8 tapes are pricey but they’re quite a bit cheaper than building an equivalent array for backup that is significantly more reliable long term. A tape is about 12tb and $40-50, although sometimes they pop up cheaper. I generally don’t back up stuff continually with this method, I back up newer files that haven’t been synced to tape once every six weeks or so. It’s also something that you can buy a bit at a time to soften the financial blow of course. Maybe if you get a fancy carousel drive you’d want to fill it up but frankly that just seems like it would break much easier

More modern tapes have support for ltfs and I can basically use it like an external hard drive that way. So it’s pretty much I pop a tape in, once a week or so I sync new files to said tape, then as it gets full I swap it for a new tape. Towards the end I print a directory of what’s on it because admittedly doing it this way is messy. But my intention with this is to back up my “medium critical” files. Stuff that if I lost I would be frustrated over, but not heartbroken. Movies and TV shows that I did custom muxes of to have my ideal subtitles, audio tracks, etc. all my dockers so stuff like my Jellyfin watch status and komga library stay intact, stuff like that. That takes up the bulk of my nas and my primary concerns are either the array fully failing or significant bit rot, and if either of those occur I would rebuild from scratch and just copy all the tapes back over anyway so the messy filing isn’t really a huge issue.

I also do sometimes make it a point to copy harder to find files onto at least 2 tapes on the outside chance a tape goes bad. It’s unlikely given I only buy new tapes and store them properly (I even go to the effort to store them offsite just in case my house burns down) but you never know I suppose

The advertised values of tape capacity is crap for this use. You’ll see like lto 8 has a native capacity of 12tb but a compressed capacity of 30tb per disk! And the disks will frequently just say 30tb on them. That’s nonsense here. Maybe for a more typical server environment where they’re storing databases and text files and shit but compressed movies and music? Not so much. I get some advantage because I keep most of my stuff in archival quality (remux/flac/etc) but even then I still usually dont get anywhere near 30tb

It’s pretty slow. Not the end of the world but just something to keep in mind. Lto8 is supposed to be 360MBps for uncompressed and 750MBps for compressed data but I don’t seem to hit those speeds at all. I’m not really in a rush though and everything verifies fine and works after copying back over so I’m not too worried. But it can take like 10-14 hours to fill a tape. If I ever do have to rebuild the array it will take AGES

For my “absolutely priceless” data I have other more robust backup solutions that are basically the same as yours (literally down to using backblaze, ha).