MrMcGasion

MrMcGasion , 20 days ago

I think it was an interview with Seth Meyers, but somewhere Heidi said she had seen them in costume, but Mikey's lip prosthetic/makeup was much more extreme in the live performance than in rehearsal, and that was what caught her off guard and made her break.

MrMcGasion , 1 month ago

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the "udm=14" trick to remove Google's AI results now, as if that won't be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

MrMcGasion , 1 month ago

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

MrMcGasion , 1 month ago

Maybe the meme was made by a dog, who smells war criminal on 47, but that's just because 47 assassinates so many war criminals.

MrMcGasion , 1 month ago

Ratchet when Clank makes a bad pun.

MrMcGasion , 2 months ago

I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it's loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn't wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.

Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there's some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.

MrMcGasion , 2 months ago

I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn't enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn't anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it's probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more "permanent" than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it's probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a "there shouldn't be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field." Which on one hand, I can see where they're coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don't all look like that. But some do, and they're probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.

MrMcGasion , 2 months ago

Just to add a bit of clarification, the image wasn't just a headshot, yes that's the part that was originally scanned and used, but it's a cropped in section of the centerfold, a 3-page fold-out image in the magazine. If I remember the story correctly, they needed a large image to scan, and several people brought in images to scan in, and one guy brought a Playboy.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it's been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the "newer, right way" to do what I'm doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

That's a big reason I actively avoid docker on my servers, I don't like running a dozen instances of my database software, and considering how much work it would take to go through and configure each docker container to use an external database, to me it's just as easy to learn to configure each piece of software for yourself and know what's going on under the hood, rather than relying on a bunch of defaults made by whoever made the docker image.

I hope a good amount of my issues with docker have been solved since I last seriously tried to use docker (which was back when they were literally giving away free tee shirts to get people to try it). But the times I've peeked at it since, to me it seems that docker gets in the way more often than it solves problems.

I don't mean to yuck other people's yum though, so if you like docker, and it works for you, don't let me stop you from enjoying it. I just can't justify the overhead for myself (both at the system resource level, and personal time level of inserting an additional layer of configuration between me and my software).

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

I think that my skepticism and desire to have docker get out of my way, has more to do with already knowing the underlying mechanics, being used to managing services before docker was a thing, and then docker coming along and saying "just learn docker instead." Which is fine, if it didn't mean not only an entire shift from what I already know, but a separation from it, with extra networking and docker configuration to fuss with. If I wasn't already used to managing servers pre-docker, then yeah, I totally get it.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

Maybe I'll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I'm sure my python scripts that I've used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

Meanwhile, their robots.txt doesn't disallow GPTBot or Google Bard. So apparently they're okay with content being stolen by for-profit companies.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

At the executive level, no I don't think they care or pay attention, but considering both have said "here's how to block our crawler," I do hope that that some mistreated developer did actually program a check in to the crawler. I still think it's worth doing, even though I don't fully trust them.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

Yeah, based on his robots.txt it seems to be a Wordpress site, so he's probably just installed an ineffective plugin to prevent copying. At least he can take solace in the fact that most of us probably aren't any more relevant than he is.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn't actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.

MrMcGasion , 3 months ago

Agreed, there's also plenty of people who think that just because they have a large vehicle, that they're immune to the snow. Obviously there's a quantity of snow that trucks are more necessary for, but I'll admit to feeling a bit smug when I see ditches full of abandoned trucks and SUVs, as I drive by in my little front wheel drive sedan.

MrMcGasion , 4 months ago

So, I in no way want to argue that algorithms are better, as they are often used to manipulate and their design to drive engagement at any cost leads to plenty of their own problems.

That said, I was raised in a pretty strong echo chamber (that a good portion of my family is still firmly in). If I had been solely responsible for curating what content I got via RSS (which I did for a short period in the early 2010s). I never would have been exposed to content that challenged the worldview I was given. Ironically, it ended up being the YouTube algorithm that while it was simultaneously feeding people down the gamergate conspiracy tunnel was opening my eyes to the realities of climate change, making me less bigoted towards LGBTQ people, and helping me find the empathy that I had hidden to fit in with the world around me.

I don't know what the answer is. On the one hand, I know how bad echo chambers can be, on the other hand, corporations and algorithms manipulate people all the time and shouldn't be trusted either. I do think RSS had potential to be better than what we have now (where social media sites like Twitter and Digg/Reddit/Lemmy essentially act as everyone's shared feed reader and end up putting people into new echo chambers), but I think having the chance of seeing content that challenges our worldviews has also been a good thing, that I'm not sure would happen as often if we all only read our personally-curated RSS feeds.

That said algorithms are getting more manipulative, and I may just be a lucky outlier that an algorithm happened to push in a positive direction.

MrMcGasion , 4 months ago

In reference to your title, there used to be RebeccaBlackOS, which was basically the first "live cd" Linux that used Wayland. It was great for peeking at Wayland development and hardware support without needing to install anything.

MrMcGasion , 4 months ago

With all the discounts they offer it is, but technically Incogni is 12.98/month. And with as many YouTube sponsor spots as they buy, I'd imagine they're just trying to get as many people signed up as they can, and will stop offering as many discounts once they've burned through their investor cash.

MrMcGasion , 4 months ago

8.99/month seems mostly competitive to Incogni which is a similar service that costs 12.98/month (they'll give you a 50% discount if you buy a full year at once, which works out to 6.49/month). Although with as many sponsor spots as I see Incogni buy from YouTube creators, they are probably flush with investor capital, and trying to get as many subscribers as they can, before slowly "raising" their prices by offering fewer discounts.

MrMcGasion , 5 months ago

Honestly, let's bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn't a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there's a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn't require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn't have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.

MrMcGasion , 5 months ago

They won't care, they have the consumerist crowd locked down. The crowd that buys dozens of Stanley Tumblers so they have one that matches any outfit. There might be more of us who care than there used to be, but the average iPhone buyer doesn't care and Apple knows it.

MrMcGasion , 5 months ago

The gist of it from what I remember is a woman's car burned, but her Stanley tumbler survived the fire, and maybe still had ice in it. Anyway she posted on tiktok about the whole incident, and Stanley's marketing department got the biggest lay-up ever, I think they bought her a new car, and launched a bunch of new colors of tumblers as limited edition things.