Sorry if this is a repeat but I was just about to go to bed.

I suspect I’ve saved this image to use as a joke to my family multiple times over the years and never remembered to use it or that it exists until the next time someone posts it here

Man. I know you are joking. But you are also saying the quiet part out loud that a lot of us are thinking.

Who would notice if a few compatible with Trump immigrants disappeared at the border? Would you believe their friends? Or would you just assume the cartels got to them?

That’s always my fear as a minority in the USA post 9/11. Due process seems somewhat gone now too. They could send me to Uganda and people around me (friends and neighbors) would probably assume I did something to deserve it or… not even notice.

This does not look real. I can’t put my finger as to why. It looks like good CGI but the lighting off the robot does not feel perfect.

Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.

I understand. But then how would others in the channel interact with my Soundboard and trigger it? Now I have to write a bot if I want others to interact with it. Have to write rules so people can submit their own sounds and manage the volume on each one of the sounds.

Also, discord soundboard does seem to somehow stream or play the soundboard item locally at a higher quality than what the voice channel provides (default for most discord voice channels is 64 kbps bit rate).

It seems you are pretty stuck on the soundboard as an individual feature instead of a sever feature that works regardless of me being around or participating on that server.

My argument was more around feature users now expect in a noIM platform. In my experience within my own life out of every 30 people or so, 1 or 2 will truly care about privacy and security. This is with having a career in IT, with some family members also in IT and most of my friends are IT or IT adjacent. Most people are looking for tools that provide with the richest set of features they can easily use while giving the users the semblance of privacy. So for a new platform to welcome them it has to be very feature complete with its competitors or offer something beyond the lost features the users truly value.

Yeah. Soon as I realized that at some point Discord either has to sell or IPO the platform was eventually going to deteriorate.

It’s already got some odd limitations. Character limits. Very tight file upload limit. And streaming limitations. But hey, Nitro/Boost fixes it.

Worse part? If most of the limitations were removed for the price of $1 or $2 a month it might be more acceptable (at least for me). $10 feels steep for nitro. When I see that price tag, it signals I might not be the target audience. Which is weird when I’m pretty sure I’m a subset of the target audience.

Yeah. I could simulate my own. But for the average pleb who already wary of trying unpopular applications, telling them they are “losing” features is usually a no go.

Discord has become this place where I hang with multiple different groups of people from work, personal life and random online acquaintances. We game, talk politics, plan family/kid events and often it’s the fastest way to get a hold of someone. The soundboard as silly as it is one of the many meming features and my friends are usually into meming on each other.

It’s to the point where when I propose to even my other Tech buddies that we spin up matrix or revolt server, one of them just offers to boost whatever server we’re on. People would rather pay than lose what they are used to using on Discord

I’ve not logged in on my Reddit account since that big group boycott and switching to Lemmy.

If Reddit didn’t hold some specific info for certain video games or just a much larger group participating in Tech/Selfhosted subreddits, I’d rarely have to visit the website.

Honestly, to me the Reddit demise was happening organically anyway. For a lot of weirdly specific topics, Discord has become a good alternative.

Now just don’t get me started on Discord and how it will eventually have to better monetize the platform and ruin that too. Wish Matrix had a soundboard for voice chat 😢

Not sure I’m with you on the China not spreading their influence. It’s been exactly what they have been doing in Africa and the Middle East. This has been going on for a long while (close to 10 years) and seems to be working.

https://odi.org/en/insights/why-china-is-seeking-greater-presence-in-africa-the-strategy-behind-its-financial-deals

https://ecfr.eu/publication/east-meets-middle-chinas-blossoming-relationship-with-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae/

This seems pretty typical. Feels like Leaders only have one lever to pull. Things are going badly? Let’s ReOrg, that’ll fix it.

Instead of doing the smart thing and identifying smart individuals within the company and putting them all in group letting them solution.

My guess is the outcome of this will be google having an unofficial marriage with gambling companies as they are the last customers to pay for Ads and see a big positive result

Yes, amazing extension in combination with what you said. I actually find myself watching a lot less videos on YouTube. This is because even knowing something is click bait, I still impulse click on it. Also, it has renewed my love for info YouTube channels because i realized that I prefer watching those, but usually they are not click baity and I used to skip them before DeArrow.

Also, highly recommend this extension combo if you have kids who consume YouTube

Firefox with Betterfox user script. Then from there is a bunch privacy focused/oriented extensions. I also harden my DNS with custom host files from StevenBlack. I also point all my devices to NextDNS as another catch and also to standardize things as I use NextDNS to manage my kids access to the world.

I do need to create a private VPN (of my own) still so my mobile devices can be setup behind StevenBlack host entries.

Kaladin would survive that nocap

But can’t that same argument be used for a Picasso or Van Gogh painting? Are those also regulated by the SEC for ownership? NFTs are trade-able when it comes to art. It’s just a contract in the form of a deed of ownership at a digital layer being transferred.

If regular art which is often considered an investment and hogged by the ultra rich is also regulated by the SEC then you’re right. If it’s not then I don’t get why we treat the “art” which is owned by a NFT contract differently based on the type of contract we’d like to consider binding.

Marketing has been rough lately. I stopped using reviews sites for the most part. A lot of the time I could not tell if there was any integrity in the reviews posted or if it was just a paid Ad. I rely a lot more on word of mouth and watching my favorite streamers play a game before even considering it. I get the devs struggle. How do you grab my attention when the market is full of these types of games and it’s hard to differentiate at a glance.

Also, this game from the article is the type of game I wait until a steam sale before buying.

I believe NFTs are actually a good idea on paper for this use case. Our implementation of the idea is weird though.

I don’t know why the SEC though. NFTs are not “money”. It’s a contract that shows ownership. It’s a legal issue in my opinion

Normally, I like privacy oriented apps. I use Signal when I can. Years ago, I heard telegram was good for android sharing of binaries that would unlock my bootloader, and used it for that. There were a few people in the group chat posting some suspicious links, but i ignored that. Then i explored it for pcb keycaps group, that was a smaller group. Tons of porn and suspicious links started to pop up in the chat. I felt I was one step removed from things I didn’t want to be a part of in any way.

I know this type of stuff probably happens on Signal and most other “privacy” oriented chat apps. I had this feeling on Telegram that it was part of the norm though. Like how cigarettes companies said they weren’t targeting young people but we all knew the messaging appealed to them. I never dug deep into this. I just bailed on Telegram and decided I didn’t want to participate. I’m sure lots of people use it for it’s intended use and I hope the owners/creators were not turning an obvious blind eye to evidence of evil foul play on their platform for the sake of the almighty dollar.

I hope you’re right. I feel like “most” of us in the USA already picked who we are voting for. For the undecided in key states who haven’t, I don’t know if the DNC or RNC matters or not. I hope it does. I don’t want it to come down to some random event late in September that they remember as they walk to the polls on Election Day.

Gaza can strangely have a huge impact if something memorable happens before Election Day. I’m not saying most of it has not been something all of us shouldn’t remember. I can just see the current admin mishandling another Bibi crazy move alienating Muslim voters.

I can’t even get my InfoSec team to let us use all the features we already pay for in our M365 E5 license because they can’t figure out how to secure and govern it. Unfortunately nowadays bringing up great ideas that are open source to replace mediocre big tech products mostly gets laughed out of the room 😢

Also, if you want to stream to multiple discord servers there is not an easy way to do that. I have multiple friend groups and they don’t really mix. This is easier and it lets me fully use OBS without weird webcam integration from OBS to Discord.