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stryk

1,258 karma · joined November 14, 2015

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stryk··on Chuck Feeney: a billionaire who gave it all away
Incredible. There are far too few people like this guy in the world.
stryk··on “We’re committing Twitter to increase the health and civility of conversation”
IRC still works a treat
stryk··on Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting
Hey man, this is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I have to mention that I got one of the Elevation Lab Anchor under-desk mounts when they were on sell for like 10 bucks a week or so ago. It's great, it works better than I was expecting (my main concern was the longevity of the adhesive, but I did some research into the 3M VHB and it's legit!)

Now for the part that's not off topic: to remind myself how long ago I bought it, I just clicked on the product link from my order confirmation e-mail from Amazon. I landed at a listing for the product, but "Sold by suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd" (not making the name up). That's not right I know for a fact that when I placed the order it was listed properly as "Sold by Elevation Lab". I just clicked around some more and eventually I got to the listing that is "sold by Elevation Lab" but both of those pages have the gray 'you bought this item on...' box at the top. That seems.... off that doesn't pass the sniff test.

stryk··on How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
Close, but they were more the "older" style Bic pens from WAY back in the days. These:

http://www.bonvan.com/images/up_images/officepen/229.jpg

The end of the piece that sticks out from the cap worked just like a tiny plastic shovel

stryk··on How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
I can only speak for what I saw done first-hand. Some guys used their own shanks/shivs/whatever you want to call it, basically any old piece of metal. This was obviously done in their cells on their own. Much more frequently [and out in the open] though was guys using the plastic butter "knives" that came in the dinner trays (think KFC, individually wrapped sets of 1 plastic spork, 1 wetnap, and 1 plastic butter knife with a kinda serrated edge - though still dull as all hell). For doing the divots we used the end-tip of the long piece on the cap of a typical old-school style Bic pen - this worked extremely well and quick.
stryk··on How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
At the prison I was in (northern Indiana), dice were banned as "tools for gambling" -- yet playing cards were OK. Yea, it didn't make sense to any of the staff either.

We carved our own out of bars of "state soap" (the cheap Barker brand inmate soap that gets distributed in just about every institution). We carved out the little divots on each side for the numbers and used Kool-Aid to stain them. Some of the older guys who had been incarcerated for a long time were so good at making them[1] that they were damn near indistinguishable from the real thing until you felt them of course (they were made out of soap after all). They actually rolled fairly true as well.

-----

1: they could also carve out some very intricate chess pieces. I mean these were damn near works of art. You couldn't use state soap for those though, it's far too thin and brittle. You needed the good Ivory-brand stuff from the commissary.

stryk··on Peter Thiel Is a Flawed Messenger with a Crucial Message for Tech
Him and Hulk Hogan got in a tag team fight versus the online version of a supermarket checkout aisle tabloid. And won! That's pretty cool I guess...

I agree the obsession with the guy is weird, but then the entire cult of celebrity thing never really made a lot of sense, imho.

stryk··on Disney loses bid to stop Redbox from selling its digital download codes
Could this have positive ripple effects into the right to repair as well? that would be nice
stryk··on A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company’s Servers
No, they would deserve a hefty, HEFTY fine and regulation barring them from providing services to anyone under 18 years of age, and then they deserve to delete all the relevant data themselves (with oversight). However Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Photobucket are not in the business of selling shady ass spyware whose sole reason for existing is for stalkers, creeps, jealous ex-lovers and helicopter parents to invade people's privacy and personal security, so they have at least a little bit going for them over this sleazeball company. _Very_ little, but a little still.
stryk··on Growing a company that sells miniature construction supplies to $17k a month
This kind of thing seems perfect for group buys like massdrop, etc. Low production runs of these have got to be expensive. after all, they need to create the design, molds, form them, QA (hopefully), etc. Honestly that much money for some little plastic squares kinda makes me do a double-take, even though I realize why they cost what they do.
stryk··on Flight Sim Company Embeds Malware to Steal Pirates’ Passwords
By giving the same malware to all their customers??? And all those people are supposed to just take their word for it that they didn't use it on everyone else? This is about as non-frivolous as a lawsuit can get. if I'm the customers of this product I would sue them into the ground, there's no way they take this to court. And with that public statement they made flat-out admitting to it's use that's evidence at this studio's boss' criminal proceedings. What kind of goddamned morons OK the use of a tactic like this?
stryk··on Flight Sim Company Embeds Malware to Steal Pirates’ Passwords
OK, so what were they going to do with the evil cracker's passwords.... steal from him? I'm no lawyer but how in the hell is this not a felony? They intentionally distributed malware that steals passwords. Jesus christ, some people, man... some people...
stryk··on Twitter and the Internet War
I don't know nearly enough about large scale projects or the startup world maybe this is a silly question but when it became apparent that it was blowing up far beyond what you were expecting, was it not an option to have another team (hire or split existing) in parallel, to start writing a re-implmentation in another language or system that would work better for your new quickly expanding needs? Was that just not feasible?, no doubt it was a crazy hectic time for you folks back then, I can't even really imagine what that was like.
stryk··on A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company’s Servers
??!? Their 'data' includes all the photos YOUR KIDS take on their phones. Do you not realize how much absolutely idiotic shit kids do with their smartphones these days? Which they store in an an obviously unsafe way, as evidenced by the fact that they've been hacked via a super-super-super obvious software flaw... twice (that was widely reported on, most likely many more times). They deserve, and they should get, no sympathy. They sure as shit don't deserve to make any money off of it.
stryk··on A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company’s Servers
> " Friday morning, after the hacker told us he had deleted much of Retina-X’s data, the company again said it had not been hacked. "

I have to admit that, despite all the seriousness of the actual SPYware this obviously terrible company sells, that one sentence brightened up my normal depressing morning experience of reading the weekday morning news on the Internet. That's just funny.

stryk··on Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
Wowwieee, I have to stop reading about this, it's depressing. This is a school bus fire. It sounds (according to Mr. Damore, and I'm not finding any disputes of this fact) like he posted this paper internally @ Google a long time before any of the hubbub and only when it became public did anyone have a problem with it. He claims to have gotten responses both positive and negative internally, which I can believe -- that sounds normal regardless of the issue at hand.

This is all PR bullshit. Is this what we've become?? If you can't have a reasonable, adult, calm discussion or debate on a topic then all hope is lost, almost everything else is moot at that point because the entire bedrock of modern society is crumbling. He presented a reasonable argument, and did it the right way (IMO). He wasn't spewing hate speech or name-calling or anything of the sort. He laid out his argument, cited sources from reputable studies in a professional manner, and asked for input/rebuttal. Only because he's asking questions some people may not be comfortable with did this go down the way it did. This is very, very sad, if we continue down this road it is not going to end well. for anybody.

stryk··on Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
Wow I've only just seen this part (i was only familiar with the headlines of this story I never bothered to look into it until now) Whatever anyone's feelings on the issue one way or another, Gizmodo totally fucked this Damore over and I have to think it was deliberate, it doesn't make sense otherwise. I just browsed the original paper and there are citations all over the place - to strip those out is a deliberate move to influence the narrative, it has to be, I mean hell they edited it. They changed the nature of the guy's argument and there's no way in hell they didn't realize how big of an impact that would make (they're not going for a Pulitzer @ gizmodo, and they never claimed to that i know of, but still they aren't total journalistic imbeciles they had to have thought about it)
stryk··on Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
source? (not trying to be snide or anything, I'm actually curious if there's a source for that)
stryk··on Learning to program is getting harder
IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi
stryk··on Show HN: Gnomecast – A Linux Chromecast GUI with transcoding and subtitles
Is there something amiss with VLC's Chromecast abilities? I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but was really happy to see it in the changelog
stryk··on VLC 3.0 release
Here you go: ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/vlc/3.0.0/win64/
stryk··on Save the CR100
Their main concern sounds like a liability issue (they cite the aging Li-ion battery heavily). They're not selling it anymore, so why not bundle together some internal docs and release some sort of technical manual or detailed repair guide to give users the option of replacing the battery? Of course this would be a "you people are on your own if you screw it up" but that's to be expected.
stryk··on VLC 3.0 release
I can't seem to find the 64bit build of the 3.0.0 release on the web nor on the FTP. Is there not one? Further, are there any advantages of using the 64bit versions over the 32bit? Any disadvantages? [edit - just saw this in the changelog: * 64bit version of VLC for Windows is recommended. And there is another post in this thread about it which I did not see, apologies, it looks like they will be arriving in a little while.]
stryk··on Brainjunk and the killing of the internet mind
A lot, most even, of the channels I subscribe to do not even care about YouTube monetization any more. They get most of their operating revenue from outside sources like Patreon, merchandise sales, affiliate linking to e-commerce sites, etc. The general consenus seems to be, in a nutshell: It's just not worth it -- YouTube/Google's algorithmic approach to monetization and what is and what's not "advertiser friendly" (whatever the hell that means, I don't think Google themselves know at this point) is an absolute schooolbus fire. Also how they handle "strikes" is a hot, hot mess. Google can pull the rug out from under you overnight on a whim for quite literally no good reason and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no one to call, e-mail, or talk to unless you're one of the big channels that have millions and millions of subscribers.

I get that the scale of YouTube is far too big to do it by human hands & eyes, but the approach they're taking currently is flat out failing.

stryk··on VLC 3.0 Media Player release
It's also pretty great on Windows 10 Phone, here's hoping that version gets the 3.0 upgrade too.
stryk··on Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites
I do not, but that's not an invalid concern.
stryk··on Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites
That's OK, I figured he or she may not want to publicly reveal details, that is understandable in this case imho. As I said I was just curious if it was maybe a simple solution that could be implemented elsewhere.
stryk··on Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites
May I ask how you're detecting it? If you can't say [or don't want to] for whatever reason that's fine, I'm merely curious is all.
stryk··on Mixpanel analytics accidentally slurped up passwords
I don't disagree, but China was just an example of a country that could feasibly tell them to get bent. What would they do about it? Trade sanctions? Most of the shit in Europe is made in China, too.
stryk··on Mixpanel analytics accidentally slurped up passwords
I have not much more than a cursory understanding of this new law, but holy shit do I hope somebody breaks the web. Fast. This is out of control with the tracking and the monitoring and every other website seems to pull in 14 or so different javascript analytics with who-knows how many 3rd party companies that you had no idea you were interacting with when you went to the original site.

I still don't understand how they plan to enforce this law worldwide, though. The EU is powerful, sure, but if I was China I might just tell them to piss off when they come knocking.

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