So my question is, do we want ISPs to be liable? If they are, they will be more likely to cut alleged pirates off. If they aren’t, then a legal door is open for the rights holders to go after individuals directly.

“Agrees” and “forced under duress” are not the same thing. An agreement before both, I think.

They were sued. Nintendo won. The people don’t have a chance against corporations.

Interesting video, and I watched the whole thing. And even as accurate as the Nintendo Switch NES emulator is, there’s still lag. Mario still runs like he’s on ice. On actual hardware, you have pretty tight control, but on the Switch, there’s a lag that makes the game unplayable to me. Still talking about SMB1, but the lag is in all the games. I find it unplayable.

The Super NES Classic, which I have (and I have modded to run other games, but it still runs the same emulator — it’s not running RetroArch, which I believe it is capable of doing) is good enough for Zelda 3 (as is NSO), but for Mario… it’s not quite there. I was so good at it when I had an NES. Not world record good, but good enough to beat the game without warps and without dying. Did that a few times for friends.

That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.

I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.

But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. “The Ecosystem” isn’t as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I’ll pay for an app if I like it but I won’t pay monthly unless it’s a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they’re both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you’re under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower… on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you’re not going to see a big enough difference to say “I’m selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right,” whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it’s amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can’t see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I’d love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

I think what I’m gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that’s a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone… probably with a base model, because honestly I don’t play top end games and even the top iPhone can’t get something as basic as typing.

Kinda, sorta, not really.

So on Reddit, the people who run the iPhone subs have iPhone 17, iPhone 18, iPhone 19, and so on registered and they’re squatting on them until they become useful. Or Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 5, Fallout 6… Now what some people have done is add a word. Like you have the “Cyberpunk” sub and “Low Sodium Cyberpunk.” That works. Or like you have Atheism, and you have RealAtheism. So you can put a word on it, or something like that. But you’ll never be able to be the “original” because a small group of people control those.

Now with Lemmy, those same people will just make those communities on the biggest Lemmy instance, but they won’t do it on all of them. I use Divisions by Zero, which leans a little further left than some of the others, it’s more of a fringe instance I guess? They’re probably not gonna target that. So if someone made a community and tried to divert views to their videos for profit like I said in my example, I could make a community with the exact same name on this instance. The other community probably wouldn’t let me advertise it there. I could do it once and get banned and maybe get a couple people to join both, at least, but I could promote it on neutral ground, and people could decide who they want to support. Because of federation, even if you aren’t on db0, you can still subscribe to a community hosted on it. Like this community is on lemmy.world and I’m subscribed to it and freely commenting on it (at least until/if lemmy.world decides to defederate the instance I’m on — they have that right and ability. But I could make an account on their instance or one that is federated with them. And that’s kosher as far as I know, as long as I myself am following the rules of the instances I post on.

Because they want to stop people from using ad blockers.

IIRC Crunchyroll used to be a pirate site so that may be where you heard that? But they’ve been legit for years.

I would say just look for x265 (HEVC) webrips of your favorite content and throw it on a Plex (or Jellyfin if you don’t have any Apple stuff) server. On the flip, if you have all Apple tech, Infuse is a good option, but IIRC it doesn’t stream outside your network like the other two do.

I wouldn’t. I like the idea of repurposing old electronics, but the issue is, it’s meant to be a low powered device meant to run off a battery.

You can run Plex off a RPi and those are like $20. A bit more if you want the case and heatsinks and such. They are also (similar to the Android) low powered ARM64 computers, but the hardware and software is more open.

I also have an old 128GB Android phone. I use it as a cosplay prop and I treat it like an iPod Touch. I’m primarily an iPhone guy, so of course it has Apple Music on it, but I also know Android and know where Android excels, so it also has Firefox with uBlock Origin, and Nova Launcher Prime. It’s way better to type on because the iOS keyboard has always been dogshit.

Also, you’re in the Piracy community. Not to be pedantic, but this is where you’d go to ask how to get the files to populate your music streaming server with. That’s my weakness there — I mostly self-host stuff I’ve bought and ripped myself. There are good tools and you’ll find good advice here, but something something old dogs, something something new tricks (me being the old dog, not you, unless you are, in which case, good on you for trying to break the mould). Right. So, what you want is the Self-Hosted community. Don’t ask them about where to get the music (that’s this community), but they can help on hardware and software. Me, I just use Plex, and I host it off a Mac mini. My desktop computer. You don’t need to spend nearly that much on a server. My Mac is a couple generations out now, but it’s still overkill for a music server.

The only time I use either of my phones as servers in any capacity is to like send a few files or something — and yes, I can do it just as capably with either. Honestly though both of them can easily host a file server another phone (either platform) can connect to and download from.

I hate to say it, but I don’t think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they’re correct.

I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump’s event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.

I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band’s unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they’re his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.

Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don’t think that has happened yet, but I’ve seen it happen on other sites.

To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don’t destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that’s not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.

Is it paywalled in some countries? I saw the article when it first went up and it was paywalled then — The Verge restricts new articles to paid subscribers. But after an hour or two it went free to read and the link is fine now. At least from my machine in my location — can’t speak for others and the Archive link is definitely welcome.

Right, the part I don’t get is, the video of you isn’t going to include what you’re looking at. And if it does you can say they faked it. They could put anything there. They don’t have a shot that includes both you and the screen. They can get sound though, so they can match sound, but that can be faked too. Strip out the audio. Separate the sounds of what you were really watching from the ambient sounds (and the grunts/moans from you) and then dub those sounds over the new audio and it should be passable.

Also, I just wouldn’t do anything embarrassing with a camera pointed at me. I’d cover the camera or point it away from me. Even sitting on the toilet browsing, back cameras point down at the floor, front camera points up, maybe gets the top of my face? Nothing private is seen by the camera by my best intentions. I just do this naturally. I guess others don’t?

Yes, Widget Locker! I used that too. Now there’s KWGT (I think that’s how it’s spelled) and also KLWP and KLCK. Kustom is the brand and their apps make widgets, live wallpapers, and lock screens, respectively. But Widget Locker came first IIRC.

It’s not even the 6th yet! …which tells me he’s in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.

iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it’s been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.

So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least… but… what’s everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It’s meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It’s fully functional — you open Nook Music and it’s Apple Music which I’m subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it’s just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)

Black Mirror had an episode about this.

Surprised it took someone this long to actually make it.

I forget the name of the episode. If you’re curious, it’s on Netflix, it’s in season 3, and it’s right before San Junipero. It was bleak AF, which is why the only happy (and arguably the best) Black Mirror episode came right after it.

Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.

I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don’t get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.

Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.

Do that many people in 2025 not know that while OpenOffice was first, LibreOffice is the more actively maintained fork and that OpenOffice has been somewhat problematic in the past and is kinda avoided?

I clicked your link, and I actually like how that office suite has the options on the left rather than the top. Like it was made for widescreen monitors.

The only other office suite I’ve seen do that is Apple’s. As a Mac user, I recognised the style immediately. So I use iWork stuff because it’s on my Mac already and it’s good enough for me. I like the way LibreOffice is looking but I don’t need another office suite. But I really like the way calligra looks. It might need some polish, but they have some good ideas.

You don’t believe it’s ever happened?

I don’t know why the CSS isn’t loading on this CNN link, other than maybe because the link is 16 years old. (Probably older than the waifu in question.) But here you go: https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/16/japan.virtual.wedding/index.html

Rest of the world: Yeah, we know. Except, it wasn’t just in Poland.

X is owned by a guy who supports fascist causes in Europe. He used to support one in the US until they had a falling out. He did the Nazi arm gesture (albeit with the wrong arm, IIRC). Then (or perhaps before) he got rid of a bunch of content moderators.

We know exactly where he stands and what he stands for.

That said, there are still good people on Twitter. My wife and a bunch of her artist friends. I keep telling her, it’s bad news up there, it’s supporting a bad dude… but this whole community is up there and they won’t move. I’m not sure what it will take at this point.

Honestly all social media is kinda trash these days.

Facebook has literally had people killed. Some anti-government rebels were using Facebook in some third world country (I forget the name), and Facebook gave their location data to the government. Volunteered it even. Guess who stopped using Facebook. Wonder what happened. Oh yeah, and you know what Mark Zuckerberg calls his users? “Dumb fucks.” Literally. Can’t make this shit up.

Reddit was built on CSAM, they even sent one of their early moderators a physical award for running a subreddit with upskirt shots of underage girls. (He was very publicly outed. Guess who didn’t even protect the guy who helped build their empire?) They also tried to falsely accuse a third-party app developer of blackmailing them, but the guy recorded the conversation. A bunch of people rebelled but they all came back around. I myself got banned for suggesting stiffer penalties for child abuse, and I lost the appeal (I figured maybe an AI tagged me but a human would overturn it, but no). So I figure they did me a favor.

I think it’s mostly the same people who use all these services, from Facebook to right here on Lemmy. And in any group of people, you have a few bad apples. But I think you have to look at the people leading it. What they stand for, how they see the world, the kind of world they want to make.