Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

Are you installing needed libraries?

For example, the installer runs because it doesn’t need any, but then your app needs say VCRedist 2010, and so won’t until run until you add the vcrun2010 extra library with Winetricks or the menu in Bottles.

It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Regarding 2, it feels to me as time wears on there are fewer and fewer online spaces in general. I fear it won’t be long before the internet is just a handful of “competing” social media companies and that one outlier group running the “Fediverse” that the propaganda says is the “Dark Web”.

Everything ends someday. It might be something we thought we’d move past with the digital age but, even digital requires resource input to keep going and that means it can and will end.

This does not surprise me at all. What were they supposed to do? Flash is dead, which broke most of the games on a site like this anyway. And kids, even young ones, go straight to Fortnite level video gaming these days, not flash sites.

It’s sad for those of us who grew up on this kind of thing, but like many other relics of the past the world moves on to something new. The Internet Archive and Flashpoint Archive will museum whatever functions without a server connection and the rest is lost to history, revered in our memories.

It’s just the nature of things. Like how a mere handful of social media websites today replace an internet once flooded with personal websites and small communities. I’m sure the next Cartoon Network sponsored game will just be a Fortnite event or Metaverse room.

Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.

I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…

And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!

There’s a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.

Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.

Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that’s the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.

And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.

And then there’s also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what’s available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.

To quote the article,

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.

And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.

I wonder if it can be detected by the streaming apps. Some of them are really anal about ensuring you can’t record or whatever, and don’t work if it doesn’t get all the HDMI security stuff just right. I’ve had issues with bad cables and my portable projector(Anker) has to side load an alt version of Netflix because they couldn’t/wouldn’t get the device to pass Netflix “certification”.

I’m guessing this means new partnerships and money changing hands, or nobody on a Roku can watch Netflix anymore, or they put these ads at a higher level that bypasses whatever security/DRM Netflix uses. Probably the last one, but if Netflix thinks they will lost money to this they’ll probably just pull their certification anyway.

I use Minio https://github.com/minio/minio, though there are others. As someone who never worked with s3 before but wanted to try it and use it with some apps that supported s3 as a storage target, it’s been working fine for me though I’m certainly not using it to its potential. Has web access and all.

Others might be:

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

I’ll take a compromise where “3.1” is etched in each head end, and I can trust that “3.1” means something, and start with that.

The real crux of the issue is that there is no way to identify the ability of a port or cable without trying it, and even if labeled there is/was too much freedom to simply deviate and escape spec.

I grabbed a cable from my box to use with my docking station. Short length, hefty girth, firm head ends, certainly felt like a featured video/data/Dock cable…it did not work. I did work with my numpad/USB-A port bus thing though, so it had some data ability(did not test if it was 2.0 or 3.0). The cable that DID work with my docking station was actually a much thinner, weaker feeling one from a portable monitor I also had. So you can’t even judge by wiring density.

And now we have companies using the port to deviate from spec completely, like the Raspberry Pi 5 technically using USB-C, but at a power level unsupported by spec. Or my video glasses that use USB-C connections all over, with a proprietary design that ensures only their products work together.

Universal appearance, non-universal function, universal confusion.

I hate it. At least with HDMI, RCA, 3.5mm, Micro-USB…I could readily identify what a port and plug was good for, and 99/100 the unknown origin random wires I had in a box worked just fine.

Actually, that leads me to another point:

One upon a time, the concept behind a universal USB-C connector was so we could do exactly that.

Laptop? Phone? Camera? America? Germany? Japan? Power? Connect the to TV? Internet?

Wouldn’t matter anymore. USB-C to cover it all. Voltage high for the laptop, low for the camera, all available just the same in every country, universal. So yes, fill the airports and hotels with them. Use them for power and to play videos on the TV. Because we weren’t supposed to have to question the voltage or abilities of the ports and cables in use.

Did/will that future materialize?

I feel the only place for a €1 cable is met by those USB-A to C cables that you get with things for 5V charging. That’s it. And it’s very obvious what the limits on those are by the A plug end.

Anything that wants to be USB-C on both ends should be fully compatible with a marked spec, not indistinguishable from a 5V junk wire or freely cherry picking what they feel like paying for.

Simply marking on the cable itself what generation it’s good for would be a nice start, but the real issue is the cherry picking. The generation numbers don’t cover a wire that does maximum everything except video. Or a proprietary setup that does power transfer in excess of spec(Dell, Raspberry Pi 5). But they all have the same ends and lack of demarcation, leading to the confusion.

The worst part is, I could accept that as a generational flaw. The newer ones get better, the olds ones lying around do less. OK, that’s the beast of progress.

But no. They still make cables today that do power only. They still do cables that do everything except video. Why? Save a couple cents. Make dollars off multiple product lines, etc. Money.

What could have been the cable to end all cables…just continued to make USB a laughing stock of confusion.

Don’t even get me started on the device side implementations…

That or they do prescription inserts, or just sell you the computer and you get other glasses that do, like Viture https://www.viture.com/

As someone with video glasses like those included here, it might be a step forward but it has a lot of room for improvement before it will survive mass market.

For starters, unlike a screen, these glasses must be tailored to your eyesight. If you wear prescription, you will need to fit double glasses or have some ability for the video ones to be prescription. And a huge problem in the market right now is pupil distance, or eye spacing/head size. Mass market wants one-size-fits all, but that means those outside the designed size will have difficulty using them if they can at all.

These are problems currently experienced with the current market like Rokid, XReal, and Viture.

And then of course there’s power, if we keep to 1080p we’ll need more computing power and battery than a Steam Deck screen, which some handhelds might be able to accommodate, maybe more so depending on the weight and shape trades of the new style. But so far it might be disappointing, especially if it has the appearance of a huge screen and still needs to low-res upscale/FSR to meet performance.

Just my thoughts. Still cool, but no confidence in it as a winner yet.

To be honest, I stopped being a “qualified player” a few years ago. Nowadays I load up a nice long Survival round, usually against Infested to chew on, with whatever Frame I’ve forgotten how to play, to enjoy the loop without stress. So I’m not in it to farm all the stuff either. Or, I’ll play the story quest if a new one is out, since they are pretty well scaled for solo play and/or give you what you need.

Other than that I just can’t compete. I tripped some time ago and didn’t keep up with the latest meta builds, so now I struggle to have the things “required” to effectively participate in public sessions or the latest missions. And don’t even get me started on Rivens, Shards, Liches or whatever.

If I join a Zariman round I’ll probably die. Not as much now that I have Titania, but I’m also not clearing rooms in a single volley like everyone else.

I’m a filthy casual and I still find a way to have fun, so there’s something there worth keeping.