Hail Satan.

Kbin
Sharkey

Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin’s development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit’s abuse detection. Otherwise, they’ll automatically undo bulk changes like that.

    There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI

    This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It’ll be a while.


  • Gonna play Devil’s Advocate for a moment here.

    I assume that this isn’t actually for nefarious purposes, and is actually just a low-effort way of curbing spambots on their platform. It’s likely that the bots are using emulated devices to post from the official app, and this permission might lock up a lot of those bots. Obviously this wouldn’t be the best way to combat spambots, but I’m gonna go with Hanlon’s Razor on this one.

    I know the immediate first thought most people will have is that this is just so Meta can open up another avenue to spy on you. But let’s consider for a moment the logistics involved in that. Audio/video data is huge; capturing and parsing it it requires a non-insignificant amount of CPU/battery usage, and transmitting it will use a good bit of bandwidth, both of which would be noticeable by even novice users (since most modern devices these days will show an on-screen indicator whenever certain sensors are being activated, and will tell you what app is using it, so seeing Instagram trigger your mic/camera when you’re not using it would be immediately noticed by just about everybody). That would also make this one data stream exponentially more costly to gather and process for Meta than most of their other data streams combined.

    Also consider the fact that Meta already has over a million data points on just about every single person on the planet, anyway; what could they stand to gain by monitoring your IRL presence that they haven’t already inferred from the other, less-invasive data they’ve gathered on you? Half of the recordings they’d get would be farts and “oh my god, stop barking, nobody’s even at the door”, and Meta probably already knows that you have a dog and lactose intolerance.

    It’s more expensive to produce, it’s more likely to be detected, and there’s less of a guarantee that you even get any usable data from it at all since they already know just about everything about you already. I really don’t see spying as the end goal for this particular action, only because it doesn’t seem like a profitable venture.

    None of this is to suggest that Meta isn’t spying on you. They are. They 100% are spying on each and every one of you. I just don’t think the mic/camera are how they’re doing it.




  • For me, I was enamored with the simplicity of it. You click Start and the Start menu just appears, without having to spend 10 seconds connecting to the internet to refresh a bunch of tiles that I never wanted in the first place. There wasn’t any half-baked “assistant” trying to suggest new spyware for me to install. It didn’t try making me sign into a Microsoft account just to open the photo gallery. The only “bloatware” it came preinstalled with was Outlook Express. The whole experience just made the computer feel like a tool to use for a purpose again.

    It’s funny, because I remember thinking when Vista and subsequent versions of Windows came out, that it was amazing we ever survived with something as primitive as XP. But these days, all I want is to go back to that.





  • Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about some of the casting as I’m kinda tired of seeing Kevin Hart and Jack Black in everything lately (I’m surprised I didn’t see The Rock in the trailer somewhere, to be honest), but the overall feel of the trailer seems to match the energy that the games had. I’m not saying it’s 1:1 accurate by any means, but the trailer definitely manages to feel like Borderlands. I imagine the writers for the movie didn’t want anybody from the main group to feel like a “downer” character, so Roland’s probably being reworked a bit.

    I’m okay with it so far, at least. It’s generally pretty hard to make the “strong, quiet type” very interesting, especially for a movie format where you have limited screen time that has to be shared among a lot of characters. You can make that sort of character interesting, like in No Country For Old Men, but you have to dedicate a lot of time to it, and that’s not easily done with a story that has so many characters with their own stories to tell.

    I dunno, I’m just remaining optimistic. I want to like this movie.


  • Chozo@fedia.iotoGaming@lemmy.mlBorderlands is failing already.
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    1 month ago

    I forgot that they were making this. I just checked the trailer, and it surprisingly doesn’t look terrible. As far as video game adaptations go these days, this actually seems pretty true to the source material.

    I imagine it’ll be one of those movies that’s terrible for general audiences, but will probably be well-received among its niche. As a huge fan of the first two Borderlands games, it looks solid and I actually want to watch this.


  • I highly, highly recommend playing BL1 and BL2. They’re fantastic games, and wonderfully written. Not all of the humor has aged really well (nothing offensive, just mostly very 2010’s-specific humor), but the gameplay still holds up today, IMO. The DLCs for BL2 are particularly good, and among some of the best DLCs I’ve seen for any game.


  • McDonald’s has been on a really steep decline for the last few years, it seems. They used to be tolerable; they weren’t the best fast food around, but they also weren’t the worst, and were generally a pretty good deal for your money. The last few times I’ve gone, the prices have been higher than the time before, and the quality lower than before.

    The last time I went was nearly a year ago; my food was cold and my shake was melted, and it was nearly $20 for just one person. There’s just no reason to go back.