Yeah true, and I think that makes him more authentic tbh. When I worked with domestic violence situations the perpetrators often hit the same vibe, super charismatic and many people around would second guess claims against them. but underneath they had serious anger issues that made them increasingly assholes and eventually straight up dangerous during periods of high stress. The charisma is a cloak that takes a lot of effort. That’s what people ignore with the character and irl too, they rationalize it away to try and make sense of caring about a person who is objectively shitty

God I love the sopranos, I wish I had time to rewatch that glorified crew

In a similar vein Walter from breaking bad, though that makes less sense. Tony soprano was at least a charismatic sociopath, Walt was just an asshole

Also the classic nerd version, Rick from Rick and Morty. Bojack horseman too, which is extra funny because the show eventually called this out (in a way that almost certainly went over the head of some of the people who idealized him)

This was many years ago and for the record not only has he never apologized, when asked to do so (in the aftermath of Arbery and during his senate run) he doubled down and refused to apologize

I bet money this works for them. Almost to the level that people will think flock was a psyop to direct hate before most counties switch to whatever nondescript alpr they can get their hands on. Americans have the collective memory of a goldfish and the outage will move on to some dumb bullshit trump pulls in a week

Or they just start directly integrating them into fixtures like traffic and street lights.

Definitely and the processor makes sure the floor is covered; my processor has 2.7%+ 15 cents per transaction to ensure they make a minimum amount per transaction, but there is no ceiling with any processor that I’m aware of

What’s also interesting is that with most processors the fee varies for in person and online with online being notably higher (1.5 vs 2.7% with mine). I suppose because online transactions are more likely to be fraudulent or something but ultimately the processing of the payment shouldn’t change between the settings

I eat the fee fwiw

And then the 3% surcharge is tacked on

Essentially a bunch of retailers decided they don’t want to absorb “the costs of doing business” anymore so they now charge $1-5 fees to cover when they have to replace a package that is damaged or lost in shipping. They sell it as “package insurance” but it’s once again consumers getting shafted to offset what was typically seen as a potential liability in running a business based around shipping. As a bonus if you don’t pay their extortion and your package is lost or damaged they will tell you to go fuck yourself

See also: merchants charging a ~3% fee if you use a credit card because similarly covering the cost of a payment processor is increasingly becoming a cost that is not absorbed. Even with medical practices!

Basically every time America gives huge telecom conglomerates money to expand rural services they literally just steal it and face no consequence whatsoever. It’s such a scam, politicians look good because they vote to spend 400 million dollars to expand rural access, comcast and Verizon take with the promise that in 5-10 years things will be better, then they do nothing hoping people will forget. Even when an expose article is written on the issue American cynicism kicks in and the politicians get away with letting them steal literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

It’s basically money laundering. It’s also a reason rural areas (which already tend to skew republican) have more support for musk, because for a lot of them starlink is the only real option for passable internet, but that’s expensive for internet that is pretty shitty compared to a basic broadband connection. And thus ~20% of rural Americans and almost 30% of Americans on tribal lands have no access to broadband in 2026

You can run Linux and steam on ps5 but jailbreaks are as of now limited to older firmwares. The ps5 is aggressive about making updates mandatory so you either need a console someone purposely did not update in anticipation of a jailbreak break years later or one that’s been sitting around not being used for a somewhat long time

Whenever I see one that’s obviously fishing I have an urge to reply in a contrarian way but I don’t bc that’s mean

Like “oh does anyone think my ass looks good?” No

The bigger thing is the thirst posts in replies though. Lemmy doesn’t have the traffic that Reddit has so nsfw doesn’t get nearly the engagement but it does still happen. And the goobers that reply, especially with weird parasocial bullshit, remind me that I do have an inner bully that just wants to say mean stuff to dorks

Those things are not mutually exclusive?

Steam is gross, popularized the “own nothing” model (along with loot boxes), and just has a bunch of (very passionate) fanboys because it’s the least gross option (barring gog, which they often conveniently ignore), but this is more a problem of publishers consolidating and buying studios, giving some games obscene marketing budgets. The overwhelming majority of games are released by people whose marketing amounts to making (not promoted) social media posts on an account no one follows. Meanwhile Ubisoft, Microsoft, take two, etc have the capital and connections to dominate the press, social media, YouTube, etc

Best game ever won’t make a dime if no one knows about it. Even if you can get some pull it’s hard to compete with the game that everyone is talking about. That game is also probably more expensive, which theoretically gives you an edge, but in practice much of the time probably means your game isn’t getting purchased if the consumer is also hyped about gta6 or whatever

One measure they could take is to significantly lower or even eliminate their cut for niche games. They currently do the opposite, the largest cut (30%) comes in until your game makes 10 million, then progressively gets lower (25% 10-50m, 20% 50+m). A lower bracket that says like, 0 to 10% if your game makes under 300k or whatever. Based on this article they clearly make the majority of their revenue from heavy hitters so this would barely impact them

Plus we then perpetuate the idea that the internet is actually only 4 websites in a trenchcoat. Google and co love this because eventually more and more people will just stop visiting all of those pesky “other” websites that aren’t in their web of control and advertising. Here’s an AI overview that will tell you more without needing to visit Wikipedia or whatever

Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp

For some cameras in stores hiding IR LEDs on your person aimed out (eg sewn into a collar or hat facing forward) will disrupt the facial scanning but many have gotten wise to this and added ir filters. Even if they are susceptible it’ll make you a big white blob which easily makes you stand out so they can manually review footage and look for any moment the led failed, you didn’t wear it, you getting into a car with a license plate that’s read by an alpr, they just come grab you if seeing it live, etc

Nothing beats the combo of hat/mask/sunglasses though. Though some sunglasses are transparent to certain cameras, and others like vaydr claim to have an extra layer beyond ir blocking (but don’t explain how it works, really, bc “proprietary”)

FWIW from what I’ve read the formbot kit seems to be pretty serviceable, almost 50% less and is still pretty good, though by most accounts I’ve seen the LDO kit is objectively better (for a significant premium)

mine the older 2.1 design and scratch built. Hard to say because a lot of parts were grabbed from other projects

If I were starting today I’d just get a kit. The LDO kit is the standard and high quality but pricier.~1500 for 350mm. There’s the formbot kit as well, much cheaper (~800 for 350mm) but not as nice quality wise. Never used one of these kits but that’s the general sentiment on the forums now. West3d also has a kit builder, this is def the most expensive option but if you plan to install a bunch of mods this can save you some money buy bundling them at the beginning (but honestly if you’ve never built one before I’d start with the vanilla build)

Time wise it’s not too bad, sort of. I would say if you’re a tinkerer type person you could build it in a weekend, especially with a kit. However, you may spend quite a bit more time calibrating everything. Like the time from a box of shit to actually printing isn’t terrible, but the time to getting a beautiful dimensionally accurate print is potentially a bit more involved, especially before you get it printing fast (if you pursue such a thing)

That’s honestly the primary reason Bambu is destroying in terms of sales right now (plus aggressive marketing). They are shit bc they are consumer hostile, but they do make good equipment. You can get a solid print right from the first startup. You can with voron too tbf but it’s like comparing an iphone to desktop Linux: the former is easier to setup and has a lot of slick features for use, the latter can replicate almost all of them but takes a bit more time to get going (and because it’s open design can be taken much further once you get the hang of it, vorons can get amazing quality at incredibly fast speeds though tbf some of those mods to get truly fast can be pricy)

Alternatively look on their discord or somewhere like Craigslist/facebook marketplace. I see people sell LDO builds for like 6-900 a lot. Resale is tough because once built it’s a nightmare to ship so they drop value like crazy and then you can (hopefully) get one that’s at least printing decently

This is the thing imo. Come in under “ban ghost guns” but 10 years from now you try to print a new battery door for your remote and get blocked because the design is the property of Samsung.

Fuck Bambu and co, I’ll keep my voron around as long as humanly possible

This is free advice from a medium expensive counselor who mostly works on insurance reimbursement:

Most modern pop psychology is finding a way to repackage “try not to think about it” into more palatable terms because a great deal of “mental illness” is directly attributable to systemic issues that have no end in sight

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america