What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.

Their detection script is probably trying so hard that it hits false positives.

Ironically, with an up-to-date uBlock Origin, you wouldn't see this popup.

That's so stupid, also because they have fixes for Zen and Zen 2 based Epyc CPUs available.

Intel vs. AMD isn't "bad guys" vs. "good guys". Either company will take every opportunity to screw their customers over. Sure, "don't buy Intel" holds true for 13th and 14th gen Core CPUs specifically, but other than that it's more of a pick your poison.

archive.org is cool and all, but a centralized service will never be a reliable way to truly archive something.

USB-C and Thunderbolt docks/hubs are a huge mess.

Around a year ago I was searching for a solid single-cable solution for my M1 Max MacBook Pro to hook up to an external monitor, ethernet and peripherals - and best case a decent audio jack.

The MacBook supports Thunderbolt 4 so I thought I might as well go for a Thunderbolt 4 dock (as opposed to a "normal" USB-C dock), but oh boy.

First, there was the problem of display outputs. I thought I'd just get a dock with two DisplayPort ports. But there are a lot of differences. Some are DisplayPort 1.4, some only 1.2. And some use MST (multi stream transport) to support both ports; which macOS does not support. Thunderbolt 4 does support two distinct streams of DisplayPort though, so in theory docks could exist with two DisplayPort ports, each with their own dedicated stream/signal.

Long story short, there were basically no docks with these specifications. So it became clear to me early in the selection process that would need to act as a hub that has multiple Thunderbolt outputs, so I can simply use USB-C to DisplayPort cables. This seems to be the best solution anyways, as the dock doesn't limit you in DisplayPort version or feature set this way.

So I looked for a Dock with 2-3 Thunderbolt outputs, Power Delivery, USB-A, gigabit ethernet and an audio jack.

There's the Razer Thunderbolt 4 dock for example. Has all required ports, provides 90 watts of power to the computer and (at least in color "Mercury"), looks the part. Bought it, plugged it in, connected a display via USB-C to DisplayPort cable. So far, so good. USB-A seems to be working.

So, what are the problems? Well. Firstly, the ethernet controller is connected to the internal USB controller. This also means it shares bandwidth and when hammering the USB controller, doesn't only mean bandwidth is throttled, but also that latency can be affected and spike seemingly randomly (like you're on wifi). There are also reportedly some issues with USB ethernet when waking up from sleep, but this might be related to macOS. Anyways, use f* PCIe based ethernet in your 300,-€ dock!

Next problem was something I couldn't believe got through QA. When audio starts playing via the audio jack, the right channel starts playing immediately, but the left channel starts after I'd say around a 200-300ms delay. This is VERY irritating, especially with headphones. As I said I couldn't believe it so I tried other devices including Windows 10 and 11 notebooks, and they all showed the exact same issue with this dock.

I found out that the problem goes away or is at least reduced when you set audio output to 24-bit in Windows. That's not how it works in macOS though (I know you can set something in some MIDI audio setting app, but that didn't help). So you're basically stuck. It's so insane to me that this glaring and obvious issue went through QA.

Then I thought okay, it's just Razer being Razer and ordered alternative docks. Turns out THEY ARE ALL THE SAME CRAP INSIDE. Sonnet Echo 11, i-tec whatever, Kensington. If it has a similar port layout to the Razer dock, it's likely that it's the exact same crap with the only difference being the odd USB-A port more or less and slightly different PD wattage.

There's a highly praised 400,-€ dock from CalDigit, but availability was bad at the time.

I ended up getting an Anker dock for around 170,-€, which simply has 3 Thunderbolt 4 outputs and a single USB-A output. I connected a simple USB-A hub so I can connect keyboard, mouse and USB DAC and mic for audio. I use the Thunderbolt outputs for DisplayPort via USB-C and the Apple Thunderbolt (1) Gigabit Ethernet adapter plugged into an Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter, and that's plugged into the dock. You wouldn't believe that this abomination of adapter chaos works a million times better than this USB ethernet crap.

Now, this setup works but it's super ugly and messy on the desk.

Nowadays I'm using some HP monitor with USB-C which has built-in ethernet and USB-A ports. It's honestly not a great solution (and functionally worse than my solution above), but it's simple and doesn't clutter your desk with 3-4 different boxes and 10 cables.

Unbelievable.

No way I'll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I'd consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn't turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.

I also don't see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it's too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.

Let's see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it's too much of a hassle, I'll just stop using YouTube. I don't miss Twitter, I don't miss Reddit, and I won't miss YouTube.

I actually get Prime TV series from the high seas even though I'm subscribed to Prime. It's simply better UX this way.

The lawsuit isn't really about the 5 GB free tier, but about being able to use system services like device backups with other cloud providers.

Poorly written headline.

I always find it interesting how many people are welcoming kernel-level anti-cheat software. I dislike cheaters as well, but granting a part of a game essentially full access to my system isn't worth it at all in my opinion.

Also, I didn't even realize that people commonly play this game on a public server. I thought this was more like a co-op experience on a private server/invite basis, or solo.

So they're banning what's likely the "end all, be all" meat replacement in the (hopefully not so distant) future just so that being a "livestock farmer" remains viable?

What a sensationalized headline (and not the first one I read on the topic).

Apple didn't send lawyers to prevent his company repairing devices, but because the company uses Apple trademarks in their marketing material which then could confuse customers into believing this is an official Apple service partner.

It's pretty standard brand/trademark protection going on, and as far as I know you actually have to protect your trademarks to a certain extent.

This stuff is happening a lot, and this time news outlets chose to make it seem like Tim Cook himself wants this man in prison.

• ASUS' and MSI's motherboards, not AMD's.

I don't even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it's probably not great that there are three competing formats for "applications with dependencies included". It was supposed to be "package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use", now it's a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

I expected something more shocking when I read "working with Russia".

Kagi uses multiple search backends, and of course it needs to forward search terms to these backends. These backends probably can't trace the searches back to the individual Kagi user though, but Yandex could still analyze search trends for example.

What's worse is that - unless they use Yandex' API for free - customers indirectly (and likely unknowingly) support a Russian company with their paid Kagi subscription.

Kagi should at the very least release a statement about this claim.

I like all the FOSS and community development of different Lemmy clients that's going on, it's really awesome and great to see.

But if Apollo was released for Lemmy, I'd subscribe to Ultra (or buy lifetime) in a heartbeat and only look at alternatives out of interest, not because I'd want to use them as my main Lemmy client. Apollo was just that good.

Views like this one feel pretty toxic and elitist to me. Let people use Sync if they like it. Let people use their Android phone unrooted if they are fine with it. Heck, let people use Windows if they like it.

Yeah, let's make sure all exploits are patched before the device inevitably becomes obsolete in a couple of years, so we can throw it away and buy the next version instead of not being wasteful.

I'll go against what most comments said and recommend DirectX 11. Yes, DXVK will translate it to Vulkan anyway, but Larian's own Vulkan implementation is definitely less stable compared to DX11.

I've experienced multiple crashes during simple things like opening the character sheets using the tab key, or crafting alchemy potions. I never had a single crash using DX11. I used Fedora 39/40 and openSUSE Tumbleweed, so the kernels were fairly recent. Radeon 7800 XT GPU.

I had the same experience under Windows 10 (before I switched to Linux), Vulkan has smoother frametimes but DX11 is more stable.

YMMV, this is just my experience from almost 400 hours played so far.

Pretty calm here for a "panic".

The article links an article from March '24 talking about the introduction of these devices that contains this part:

The scanner that Adams and police officials introduced during Thursday’s news conference in a lower Manhattan station came from Evolv, a publicly traded company that has been accused of doctoring the results of software testing to make its scanners appear more effective than they are.

So they could never be trusted but were still allowed to proceed.

Even if all of that worked, why would I want it?