Yeah back in the day my friend group was on Skype as well as jumping onto whatever vc server was setup for whatever Minecraft server we were on. Skype was too bloated and bogged the system down especially if trying to do a voice call while playing a game on my old single core Pentium circa 2010ish

Is preventing teens’ access to pornography worth sacrificing the ability for every adult to have privacy online?

This is a society level value judgement that has to be made, I’m not necessarily looking for hard answers

TeamSpeak is basically what Discord replaced in many gaming communities/servers/groups. Before discord, most gaming groups would have a TeamSpeak, Ventrillo or Mumble server. These were self hosted (or hosted in a VPS) and generally worked better than Skype. TeamSpeak was the most polished, Ventrillo was kinda dated looking but worked well and Mumble was the free software that was getting started and is now pretty good

I mean, mumble has gotten super good at audio, but I don’t know about other features

I mean one side has literal Nazis, is building detention facilities while sending a poorly militia into cities to arrest and attempt to disappear people without any charges, the other side just wants a half-assed European social democracy (because you know the Democratic party is currently captured and unwilling to make any meaningful change that isn’t incremental and trivial to reverse)

Oh yeah I’m sure if I struggled through I’d eventually find the value to toggle, it’s just a royal pain and I don’t wanna!

Any kind of required age verification has significant privacy and security implications. Honestly I think the best approach is the pinky promise we’ve generally had until now, where by default the platform will not display explicit content until the user actively consents and asserts that they are of legal age.

Why exactly do we need to be verifying age? Any kind of legal/government documents and agreements are already covered by purjory laws, physical deliveries and purchases are already handled by photo ID checks, and porn is of course harmful to teens/preteens but they’ve always been finding ways to access porn even before the home computer era (and honestly this would be better handled through education by schools and parents than forceful legislation)

But, the publishing company can sue them for damages related to lost income based on TPB’s distribution of content.

Wasn’t the argument supposed to be that because they only link to torrents but don’t host the content that the torrents link to themselves they’re not a disributor just a link aggregator?

I’ve had some difficulty with the parental controls preventing my kid from joining my server on the same network. Microsoft’s parental controls are so overly granular yet incredibly unclear in the specifics, there isn’t feature parity between the mobile app and the web interface forcing one to download their shitty app to toggle certain settings, and it seems like even their documentation authors and support are unclear on how to set it up exactly

Especially when the maintainer gets upset about answering the same questions repeatedly in Discord but doesn’t offer a non-discord support stream

That’s also about what I saw at an MSP I briefly worked at, about 2000 managed PCs, and about 200 new managed PCs per year being prepared and deployed

On this subject, the freaking Windows Mail to Outlook (new) transition that Microsoft foisted upon users sent me deep into the “troubleshooting windows store problems” rabbit hole way too many times. Usually because something broke horrendously with the email account authentication and it would be stuck in an authentication loop without prompting for credentials

grab the 50 grand, and flee the country with it

Usually sign on bonuses are broken out over a period of time, you’d receive say 25% in your first paycheck, 25% after 3 months, 25% after 6 months and the last 25% after 12 months. Or in my wife’s case when she took a CNA role in 2021 she got $1k in the first paycheck, $1k after 3 months and the last $1k after 6 months for her $3k sign on bonus

I mean defining “active users” is an inherently political choice in any metric. You’re ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories.

I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets sliced

I keep a separate savings account for things like that. I just call it “upgrade” in my banking app. Its money specifically earmarked for any kind of entirely-optional big purchases, like computer upgrades, server upgrades, home theatre upgrades, etc. I also have one earmarked for replacing my current cars and one for vacations, plus of course my emergency fund

The only problem with this approach is I tend to hoard my money and want to see my savings account go up, so I really don’t end up spending as much as I could on myself. Like I have an entire computer’s worth in the “upgrade” account right now

That certainly changes the calculation quite a bit, but how many people can be anticipated to claim a given free game is definitely going to be a point of negotiation on how much to pay the publisher to giveaway a given game, so in a roundabout way it does ultimately cost Epic more money if you do claim the games without downloading them

I really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there’s both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.

I’m really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them…I write on social media at midnight instead of going to bed on time…

except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”

Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot

Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they’re the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they’d be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school

Honestly interest rates dropping might be ultimately be a good thing. The job market is so tight and most recession indicators have already been blazing. I doubt they’ll do the same hard drop they did in Q2 of 2020, but I do think more aggressive rate cuts might alleviate a lot of the burden consumers (especially young adults and anyone unfortunate enough to have been/be jobless over the last couple of years) have been feeling. A big chunk of the inflation consumers were seeing on goods in 2024 was just companies making opportunistic price increases, as evidenced by the heavily advertised price drops afterwards.

Additionally there is the statistic that nearly 50% of all retail spending in the United States is made by the top 10% of earners which is a heck of a dangerous tightrope for the economy. I do think that’s the other shoe waiting to drop right this second. If the wealthier Americans get spooked and start to pull back their spending this economy is going to tumble