Would be pretty cool if we could build a crowdsourced network of these that do basically exactly what flock does, but just to keep a constantly updated public database of the location of all cop cars, hopefully with the ability to associate cars to specific officers with names, photos and badge numbers.
We could call them “drove cameras.” A drove is a term that refers to a group of pigs.
Gotcha. Thx for the explanation!
Sure, but backports are a thing, right? The new Wolverine game “requires” a console firmware version of like 13.40, but you can download a backported version of the game that runs on 4.0. I don’t have a ps5, and I don’t know how any of that translates to emulation, but I’ve got plenty of ps4 games that “require” a higher firmware version than what my console has, but I can play them because they’re backported. The current ps5 jailbreak works on firmwares as new as a few months ago. Backported ps4 games have been a thing for years, and from what I can tell about ps5, that doesn’t appear to have changed.
I was able to find it by following the mobile app instructions. Mine was pretty boring. It had stuff like “Likely lives in (city where I ship my orders)” and “Likely favors (brand of thing that I’ve bought multiple times)”. I guess the most invasive thing is that it guessed I live alone, or rather that I “likely has one adult.”
There’s a Walmart near me that I just never bother going to because like 80% of the non-grocery items are locked behind plexiglass. There are 4 self-checkouts and 2 employees assigned to just stand there watching people to make sure they don’t shoplift. They’ve made shopping so hostile that it barely makes sense for it to be a department store at all. Might as well just go back to the old model of telling the employee what you want and then they go get it for you.
The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.
I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.
The Skyrim modding anecdote I mentioned isn’t related to the story from this post. I see now my wording is a little unclear on that. This post just reminded me of the Skyrim thing.
Very close. It’s actually Mr. Krabs that the boots are driving nuts in that one.
Yup that’s the one. If you’ve got the stomach for it, by all means go ahead. For me, I kinda regretted watching it after because despite being a well-made video, I realized that all I was left with afterward was a lingering anger and and an unintentionally curated list of things that will probably remind me of that douchebag every time I play Skyrim from now on.
Had a gen z coworker once who was a little mind-blown when I pointed out that the squeaky boots episode of SpongeBob is just “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Usually any time I’ve tried to share that fun fact, anyone who’s already familiar with both stories has already connected the dots. It was pretty fun to witness the “holy shit it IS the same story” realization in real time.
I watched an extended breakdown on YouTube of this dude who’s been an absolute villain of the Skyrim modding scene for like over a decade. I honestly can’t recommend anyone watch it because it’ll just make you angry. I was happily playing modded Skyrim for years without knowing anything about him. After I learned of his existence, I realized that some of the issues I’d had with modding Skyrim over the years were actually deliberately caused by this guy when I’d assumed it was due to the general flakiness of modding.
This comment reminded me of a cherished Little Joel video.
It’s not perfect, but as a huge fan of the game, it’s definitely close enough for me. I’ve played all the way through it like 3 times already and I just discovered how fun it is to play randomizer mode so I can keep playing again and again and it still feels fresh.
I have a higher tolerance for VR jank, but I’d say it’s like 90% of the way to being a proper VR port. I’ll list the most broken things:
All that said, everything bad I described takes less than 1% of the time you’ll spend playing, and for me it’s a dream come true to finally be in Hyrule experiencing everything I remember so fondly through my own eyes. The first time I stood under the Deku Tree, I just stood there for a few moments taking it all in and appreciating the true scale of it. Every time I’m crossing Hyrule field and hearing the incredible music, I always find myself thinking “I can’t believe I’m playing this right now.” I didn’t realize until typing this out just now, but it’s probably already one of my favorite VR games just because it was already one of my favorite games.
I play VR pretty regularly. The meta quest 3 is objectively a very good piece of tech, regardless of how much Zuckerberg sucks. It’s also a lot more open of a platform than many people realize. You can sideload apps easily and there are at least 3 ways to use it for PCVR without having any meta software on your PC at all. They’ve never come down on Beat Saber modding despite it being very clearly against the TOS of the platform. Ports of classic games have been dropping like crazy because AI is allowing non-programmers to build VR mods for existing games. I kid you not, I’ve learned of more VR mods for classic games in the past 2 weeks than in the past 2 years. It’s really popping off. Some ports still require a PC to play the game and other ports run natively on the headset, such as half life 2 and portal 1.
Lately, I’ve been hooked on playing Ocarina of Time in VR. Also, the Simpsons Hit and Run just got a pretty impressive VR port. I’ve got like 5 other mods in mind for games I want to check out next.
The native quest games are mostly fine with some standout bangers like Resident Evil 4 and Batman Arkham Shadow. My favorite multiplayer games are probably mini golf or table tennis. I think anyone who’s played table tennis in real life would be pretty impressed with how well we can simulate it in VR. If you’re good at table tennis, you can pick up VR table tennis and your skill immediately translates.
I guess Zuck’s focus has mostly shifted to the perv glasses now because the company doesn’t talk much about VR much anymore. The metaverse (or at least Zuck’s version of it) was pretty clearly a failure, so I assume that’s why they don’t like talking about VR anymore. It’s definitely a quiet time for the medium, but with the way mods of classic games are coming down the pipeline now, I’m pretty excited for what’s next.
Meta is still working on their next headset and it will likely be one of the lightest and most comfortable yet. The compute is getting moved to a separate puck which you won’t have to wear on your head. I’m hopeful that now the metaverse phase is basically dead, the medium will become more focused on games.
I once had a roommate who preferred to keep the peanut butter in the fridge for some reason. I didn’t really get it, but it was easy to accommodate so I did. Turns out they were just doing the same thing for me because they assumed that it was my preference. I have no idea which one of us originally stuck the peanut butter in the fridge.
I was so confused when I realized that the restaurant thing is the same as the tire company. I’d assumed my whole life that it was just random that both happened to be associated with the same name. Honestly it still doesn’t make much sense to me.