What's sad is even if you retreat to retro computing/gaming or only listen to old music, you'll likely still run into people online or at meet-ups vibe coding, making ai remixes of songs or generating music videos. Not even the old stuff is safe unless you do it offline by yourself. So you go out and try to find like-minded individuals and these spaces are still infiltrated and tainted. It reminds me a bit of radiation, how everything was just tainted decades ago, they have to salvage low background steel from sunken ships to make Geiger counters because everything else is irradiated.
I still use IRC on the daily, but someone mentions Discord at least once a month on there, and sometimes tries to whisk people away to that side. There are also people hooking up LLMs to IRC bots and joining them to channels without permission, then when you complain or kick/ban their bot you're somehow treated as the rude one. It's very hard to entirely get away from all the crap anymore.
If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
Tax filing in the US being so deeply intertwined with proprietary software is extremely unfortunate. I actually emailed Richard Stallman the first time I had to file to see what he does. He basically recommended grabbing the forms as PDFs, using xournalpp to edit/sign them, then print and mail them the old-fashioned way. I did do this but I found the process clunky and upsetting. I would kill to have some official government thing that's free software and covers all the common cases, or to have it automated like in other countries. I simply should not have to do this myself, it's ridiculous. I don't care about a tax refund either, just don't make me do this at all. Maybe leave the process optional for those who want to try to game the system and get some money back.
I don't see AI as a solution here as it's all rather murky and proprietary.
I've heard that a huge percentage of people on the Internet are lurkers and that those posting and commenting are in the minority. Not sure if that's still true in the age of smartphones. I'll often leave comments on YT vids and such if they were interesting or helpful, but I would say a lot of people I know probably wouldn't do the same. I would probably not do the equivalent at an in-person talk, so that's an interesting contrast to think about.
I was using Silence from F-Droid for a while back in the day because of these issues, but the lack of interop and needing to make everyone move again soured me on the whole thing. I would rather just get people on XMPP or Matrix and not use some sketchy phone-first app at all. For SMS I use Fossify Messages, which I think was a fork of QKSMS. I don't use SMS as primary or sensitive comms, only as needed. Same as email, basically, but less useful.
In software [copyright] terms I think this would be like you both have a license to use those books but you don't own the copyright to that book as you are not the author, so you can't change its license and you are somewhat limited in what you can do with it (plagiarism being one thing you can't get away with I guess). Whether something is physical or not seems to change how we think about things, and perhaps which laws/protections apply.
"own" kind of seems buzzwordy and divisive here. I noticed on re-reading my own post I said you "have" a license. I guess I could say you "own" a license, but that seems a bit weird. Do you own it if it can be revoked? Police/TSA can take your possessions legally.
I'm not on Sony's side here but I think fighting over "ownership" of intangible goods may be the wrong fight. It's a shame more games aren't free software and free culture as that seems easier to reason about and a better cause to fight for. When you go from the free software community bubble to the major video game bubble it feels like regressing 100+ years.
I guess the issue is that in Sony's walled garden they have near total control and we have to chip away at that control with legislation until it's closer to what we expect in other contexts.
I once saw a whole list of these like /j for joking and such, but they don't seem to be commonly used and it often feels forced when I do come across them. Maybe they're more common in certain communities.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL are doing the best they can in the current world. Abolishing copyright would not harm the free software movement.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
I'm not a fan of AI if that's what you're talking about, I still want copyright dead or drastically shortened. I'd say most people with an interest in free (as in freedom) software or computers in general should want similar.
Lots of good general soldering tips here. If the DualShock 4 PCB is half as complex as the DualSense PCB, good chance you scratched a trace whole removing the sticks. If you can locate the damaged area you can jump it with a bodge wire (think of it like a wood bridge that broke in the middle so you can't walk across, and you make a small path with planks enough for one person to still cross, restoring the connection). Also make sure you didn't introduce a GND short, you may need to cut a trace in 1 or 2 spots in addition to jumping the damaged area if you did. I had a hell of a time getting out the first analog stick on a DualSense and ended up damaging the PCB. A multimeter in continuity mode is a must here for checking that the signal travels the expected path or finding the issue if it doesn't. It is most likely fixable, it was in my case, though it may take you a few days of troubleshooting. Also I would recommend a desoldering gun if you're going to do this a lot, analog sticks are very difficult to remove with just an iron. Often just the tiniest bit of solder clings to the pins in the holes and it won't budge. A hot air station could also work, but these have a tendency to melt all surrounding plastic before the solder and IMO are a last resort.
Look at the traces that go to the stick or that are near that area, look for scratches.
There's an `adb sideload` command for installing an app on your phone from your PC, with the file on your PC, it's like a remote install. For some reason some people also use the term to refer to installing stuff via apks in general, but if you download an apk from your phone's browser and then open it and install it, that is not sideloading AFAIK.
>Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
RuneScape was very popular at my local public library, and as a kid I only played the F2P content. I knew maybe one or two people around that time that played WoW. The paid subscription made it not a realistic option for me at the time. Though one of those WoW players did once bring his discs over for me to install the game and play on a private server with him. I don't think I kept playing WoW long for whatever reason. I was more into MapleStory, Graal Online, and RuneScape.
Spaces, voice and video calls, custom emoji or stickers. Basically the stuff people coming from Discord are used to but the people coming from IRC/XMPP aren't used to.
Besides the TUI program itself, you also have your terminal emulator (unless in a TTY) and possibly a multiplexer like tmux. I use irssi inside tmux from my phone a lot and you can get pretty precise control with keyboard shortcuts that make up for some of the flaws of a touchscreen. Like instead of mashing or holding the arrows to go back and fix a typo, I'll use the readline binds and hit esc and b a bunch of times to close most of the distance, then switch to arrows at the end if needed. The tmux copy mode is also pretty friendly in the same way, you can vary gradually adjust your selection start/end without having to hold anything down.
That's a funny example, reminds me of how often fresh Windows 7 or older installs were missing the ethernet driver so you had to move stuff over on a flash drive to get started really setting stuff up.
In your situation, a couple possible solutions come to mind. 1) turn on "mouse keys" which lets you use the numpad to move the mouse and click, 2) a vim addon for the browser (e.g. vimperator or tridactyl) likely could've clicked the button via the hints mode.
It's in the past now so maybe these wouldn't have worked or you didn't know, of course, just fun to think of what I would've done.
I regularly use IRC, XMPP, and Matrix. I think your description fits IRC better. XMPP kinda has a Plan 9 or Amiga type of vibe, cult following "ahead of its time", but never took off totally how people hoped, or didn't stay relevant at least.
XMPP is somewhat popular on the fediverse, especially the Pleroma side. If you meet people there who want to chat elsewhere, they likely are on XMPP. Also if you have a Disroot account it comes with XMPP.
I think GP was speaking hyperbolically, because most new features hit Element/Synapse first and other clients lag behind implementing them. If you care about more than the basics working, it's kind of just the illusion of choice.