gattsuru
20hr ago
Oof. Do you have similar issues with other USB devices in the same physical ports? Keyboards, mice, usb thumb drives, especially anything with higher power draw or running in faster USB modes? Or is it just controllers, nothing else?
Do you know your motherboard? If not, grab CPU-z and check the mainboard tab, then check for BIOS updates from the manufacturer. Especially AMD motherboards have had sometimes-very-weird issues with specific USB modes in early BIOS releases.
The problem occurs regardless of whether I use a front USB port (belonging to the case, connected indirectly to the motherboard) or a rear USB port (belonging directly to the motherboard).
It's a bit of a hail-mary, but try unplugging the connection from the motherboard to the front side panel (they're keyed, so it's pretty easy to reinsert the right direction when you're done testing). In humid environments, I have seen bad connections there cause problems all across a hub. PCI(E) expansion cards are cheap as another try if you've got the available slots, but unfortunately most physical stores that stock them will charge an obnoxious premium.
Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI,
There's a really morbid joke here, because on one hand, yes, we have very specific test cases on this very specific hypothetical, and back in 2013 I had some sympathy for the state's concern even if some of the actual actions were clearly overkill response to hyperbole. From Zorba's position, that's clearly the correct calculus...
For conservatives.
When an actual assassin got within inches of doing a Gallager to the then-Presidential Candidate and now-President, and someone started talking about aiming better next time, the fascist brownshirts didn't break down her door at midnight and the FBI or Secret Service weren't knocking on every message board she'd been to; she got fired from Home Depot and every progressive in the country started taking cancel culture seriously for three seconds before promptly finding an asshole they wanted to fire again. When a major political activist got shot in the throat, with audience members dancing in glee while he bled out on livestream, I gave you, specifically, a long list of people who weren't going to suffer after it, and not only did I manage to guess right in almost every case, it was only going to surprise you if they all turned out to be true. It's actually kinda impressive how direct and explicit the threats have to be before this FBI -- this administration's FBI -- is going after anyone.
And, of course, there's no FBI investigation after WhiningCoil's very specific example of Jay Jones saying worse than Corcoran said, when Jones sent his texts directly to one of his political enemies. Like, duh, obviously, that's not something that's even worse considering as possible.
That's not the joke. The real fun is that convention isn't limited to calls to assassinate political rivals. Indeed, there's a lot of other reads to WhiningCoil's position that aren't assassinating political rivals.
But we know that this rule applies to a wide variety of other matters -- whether it be advocacy of lethal force for the specific case of defending yourself from a man trying to beat your head in, or saying mean things about teacher's unions or school boards. There's a very specific post about a number of recents -- and about countless other prominent events -- that I will pointedly not make, here, because as you're very clearly saying, it's not allowed. Doesn't matter that isn't specific, hell, doesn't matter that it's advocacy of something that's legal.
What's the penalty for being late?
gattsuru
1d ago
Weird. Are you seeing anything change in Device Manager when you plug in or unplug the controllers? If there's no sound or tree reloading behavior, that points to an issue with the USB hardware on the motherboard. If there are changes, set up an event manager filter to track down what they are; unknown device IDs can also point to hardware issues (usually a past short-from-D+-to-5V). If it's a desktop, switching to different USB ports or to a PCI(E) motherboard might be a cheap way to get back up and running.
Trivially, there are pretty significant costs to flight.
More seriously, there's very little guarantee it would work. I'll point, again, to KendricTonn getting a Kirk Smirk in Ohio meatspace, or to my own experiences over half-a-decade ago. Crusading AGs from Blue States have brought the long arm of the law against people who did try to escape, or (as people trying to publish CAD files from Texas have found out) even if they were never in New Jersey to begin with. WhiningCoil cares a lot more about trans stuff than I do, but Wyoming specifically isn't exactly matching with his goals there despite a legislative and regulatory environment that specifically ordered or legislated it.
And then you get the federal government decides that they're going to have a new interpretation of a law and want a nice high-profile grab, you get your skull ventilated at 6AM, the cops doing that put more effort into documenting your soon-to-be-widow's morning piss than the pre-dawn raid, and no one in office in Arkansas cares. The supposed libertarians otherwise traumatized by the presence of masks for law enforcement they don't like will suddenly find crickets, the people who would burn down buildings over government overreach will suddenly decide to roleplay owls with a 'who, who'.
gattsuru
1d ago
As I understand it, though, because the case can be appealed, the state gets another shot at proving it.
While this is one of the few times a state can appeal an acquittal, appeals primarily review mistakes of law. The state does not get a do-over unless they can successfully persuade the appeals court about that first. I think Rov_Scam is being far too deferential to the judge, here -- there's a lot of judicial 'I could imagine alternative explanations' in that order -- but the standard to retry is so high I would be very surprised if they get a second go.
gattsuru
1d ago
But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground.
For that very specific example, the Biden FCC did in fact cut a major SpaceX (StarLink) contract/grant program on clearly spurious grounds (see FCC v. Starlink here for further details), the Biden EEOC brought questionable claims of anti-immigrant discrimination against SpaceX directly. And those are just the ones with Biden admin people directly signing the paper.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm not a high-caliber dev, but I've used and will recommend gitkraken, especially for very large teams or very distributed projects; it's one of the few that handles heavily forked projects and related PRs well. That said, I don't know that that it does much to solve these specific issues.
gattsuru
5d ago
I've got a major love for its genres*, so grain of salt, but I like it enough that my biggest complaint's that it's too short. Story's pretty strong if sometimes a little jank, the animation's great, and the voice-acting works a lot better than I feared given how heavily they leaned on youtubers. There's definitely room for improvement -- the central minigame is a little too easily broken, and The Last-Second Redemption feels like it's more earned by a player than by a character -- but it's well worth the entry fee.
* both VNs with some strategy or reaction gameplay dropped in like Uplink, and serious-but-not-grimdark superheroics like the Astro City and Common Grounds comics.
gattsuru
6d ago
The downside to building a good memory is that you end up with a good memory, though in that case it's because of MorlockP's treatment of "I can save her" as particularly verbotten that it stuck better (and was more searchable).
It’s not unusual a claim, even for straights.
((Though not universal; there’s no shortage of people in that thread not noticing until much later, and I myself was a very late bloomer in both the sexual arousal and romantic attraction senses. Those I was curious about what other guy’s dicks looked like well before I wanted to do anything and that I’d assume straight guys didn’t, so maybe I was just really clueless.))
There’s an uncertain question of whether it’s post hoc hindsight, and a bigger question whether it distinguishes sexual orientation from romantic orientation. But the split attraction model is itself a controversial mess, and enough of its ‘clearest’ cases are just as clearly closeted that I’m skeptical of self-reports.
gattsuru
7d ago
... there's a fun story from the criminal justice sphere, and by fun I mean incredibly depressing.
It's an old Freakanomics bit that drug dealers don't actually make that much money, but despite being in Freakonomics, it's actually true. The distribution agents and runners make peanuts, even mid-level dealers that handle a lot of cash end up spending a lot of that to replace stock, and you have to get real close to the top of the chain to break into high five figures or low six. Now, admittedly, that's tax-free and you don't have to deal with McDonald's customers, but there's a whole new level of problem when 'can't leave work at work' goes from late-night on-call to slightly more energetic concerns, whether from police or from other criminals.
Why would people accept a risk of 45 calibre wakeup calls for less than they could make sllepping fries ends up one of the big driving questions for criminology, and unfortunately there's a ton of different partially-right answers : lack of access to conventional employment, cycles of poverty, casual users making a little bit of money on the side, yada yada.
If you ask the actual people, though, a very common answer (especially once you get away from the casual users) is that they don't plan to stay at the entry-level. After all, it's not like the people at the top now have been there very long, and turnover for the mid-levels is often ridiculous. They're always hiring!
It seems stupid, from the outside view. They're jumping to get into the shoes of imprisoned (or dead) men, with at most vague motions about how they won't step into whatever trap got the immediate previous owner and not the thirty other previous owners. Maybe it is stupid.
They're still always hiring.
gattsuru
8d ago
In a mainstream story, not a ton, and most of the cases I can think of it's at least arguable that the writer believed the character to be a hero or 'conflicted', all evidence to the contrary aside. For a male example, Aizen from Bleach (not recommended) or Jacen Solo from __ or Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men for a more entertaining version; for female ones, Kreia from KOTOR2 is probably the best-known among readers here, most others usually fall around into genres (romantasy and college drama stuff).
Actual Mary Sue turns evil stories are rarer. Kreia and Jacen fit, but only marginally.
Stories where a powerful Chosen One ends up turning to the Dark Side -- without being flat characters that wrap the story around themselves -- are a little more common, but usually different, not least of all that they typically have the actual protagonist take the center of the narrative away from them. Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda, Dylan from Control. Arguably Wanda from the DCAU kinda straddles these two positions, but she's a pretty unusual case.
Fanfiction, everywhere. Quirrelmort from HPMOR was pretty overtly intended as a send-up of the concept, and succeeded so aggressively that even after the story's conclusion a lot of people didn't get the joke, but original characters, Draco, Hermoine, or Harry made far more competent (or faced off against dumber authorities) taking out their frustrations on random characters or fictionalized versions of real-world targets happened a lot. MLP had Gilda, Trixie, and Princess Celestia as pretty common go-tos, Transformer fandom's got a lot of people who love the Decepticons, yada yada. They're not always Sues, but they tend to be less considered stories, so not a surprise that they're common.
gattsuru
8d ago
Jedi Knight had some at-the-time impressive FMV bits, but the story was not exactly the core of the series. Knights of the Old Republic is much more heavily on the RPG side with correspondingly deeper story, and a lot of KOTOR 2 and especially its end boss in particular is focused on questions about the Force and its Dark Side and what that means to individual people force-sensitive or not (along with a bit of theodicy and anti-theism).
Pretty good game, too, if you're into the genre.
gattsuru
8d ago
I'm... kinda confused by the window example. I can go down to the hardware store and buy pet-resistant screen door mesh that can protect against a hundred pound dog lunging and clawing for thirty-plus minutes, or chicken-wire grid that block less air intake and is designed to protect a chicken coop against invasive predators for weeks at a time; both will cost less than thirty bucks. Even if we presumed Safety Above All, there are simple solutions that would be as or more effective and allow much better airflow (and be compatible with boost fans).
- Truce at Bakura has the Resistance and Empire join together to fight off space dinosaurs that powered their machines with the tortured souls of harvested force-sensitive species, and really played into the Jedi as warrior-monks in the western-religious sense. Only mention of the Emperor is that he sold out the titular planet; Anakin Skywalker shows up as a ghost looking for forgiveness... and Leia tells him to fuck off. It was such a bold new direction that a lot of writers pretty carefully tiptoed around the whole thing for about a decade after.
- Crystal Star is so weird that the only other EU book to mention it is only did so to glass the main planet involved. Weird cult sacrifices people to summon an extra-dimensional entity. Pretty sure it started out as a Star Trek novel and got lost somewhere. Not good, but definitely nothing like any movie.
- I, Jedi focuses on an ex-cop-turned smuggler Force Sensitive working undercover to track down his disappeared wife and facing off against a pirate gang, while he Forrest Gumps his way through a bunch of post-Endor events. It's... actually a bit of a fix fic for the (tbf bad and very Empire Builds Another Superweapon) Jedi Academy Trilogy, so it's not the most accessible for people who haven't read others parts of the Expanded Universe, but it's a major point getting away from a lot of the trite Rebellion V Empire and Big Superweapons Go stuff.
- Rogue Squadron (and the imo even better Wraith Squadron) books are a bit of a The Expendables: the stories are military fiction with high body-counts and more focus on intrigue. They're set against the Empire in most books, but the commanders are drastically different, and the closest thing to a superweapon is a not-very-special biological weapon more notable for its political impact.
- New Jedi Order set a New Republic - which was mostly at peace with mostly-run-out-of-evil-people Empire since the end of The Hand of Thrawn series - against extragalactic invaders who were both religious fundamentalists and cut off completely from the force. About the only Original Series bit is the increasing use of planet-destroying superweapons, but that's a bit like complaining about oversized guns in Warhammer 40k given the topic focus.
- Legacy of the Force falls after that, with the son of Han and Leia facing a force vision of the future holding that the only way to protect the galaxy and his daughter was to turn to the Dark Side and become a Sith Lord. Controversial, but there were some interesting bits: Jacen's a byronic hero/villain who genuinely struggles against the easy routes of power and hate and pride, and it's not a battle he can ever win... and then there's an Evil Bigger Badder Plain Evil Guy.
These aren't always good (I really dislike both NJO and LOTF for pretty dumb canned heat), and the ones that are good aren't always original (The Thrawn Trilogy's a send-up of the very 'Empire Reborn' stuff that you're criticizing and has to invoke it to deconstruct it, Wraith Squadron has a few comedic bits that are basically Down Periscope In Space). Sometimes they're even just plain weird: I'm not recommending Darksaber when I say it's the best Kevin James Anderson work, but it actually does pretty a good breakdown of why the Empire's whole philosophy is so fucked up even if it's so deep in Bathos that there are Austin Powers jokes.
gattsuru
10d ago
In addition to WhiningCoil's complaints, I'd point out how badly what they've done as updates and upgrades has gone, where they have done any work.
If you have access to a Win11 machine, compare the old network configuration interface with the new one. There's an absolute ton of space for improvements and better usability, here! And they've skipped almost all of it; even ignoring uncommon (but not exactly rare!) things like handling multiple IP addresses on a given physical interface: why does it only accept IPv4 subnet masks in (bastardized) CIDR notation (without a combobox wtf?). Worse, if you used dotted decimal notation, why does it just give "Can't save IP settings. Check one or more settings and try again." without explaining what error or even highlighting the 'wrong' entry?
gattsuru
10d ago
Yeah, his discussion around 1I/‘Oumuamua was one of my examples for crank-on-organization wars, and while that doesn't mean he's wrong (of other examples, Hirsch ended up winning his fight pretty clearly), it doesn't give a ton of strength on its own.
gattsuru
10d ago
This is a nitpick, and you're definitely right for the start menu; the real problem is probably something to do with network latency and poor caching and software design.
((Though there are some things separate from typical performance that can be Bad: Electron is just 'heavy' as an environment, so even were it perfectly performant, you just have to deal with it loading from disk and RAM, and that can be expensive. C# has similar problems at a smaller scale but made worse by repeating them per thread, hence the kinda goofy task not-threadpool thing. And the Start Menu in 11 is React Native, which is unlikely to have these particular problems but probably has its own instead.))
I'll caveat that memory-managed environments can have some foundational performance problems in some specific use cases: (esp nested) array access is extremely expensive in managed environments, and I've gotten three or four-fold improvements by merely changing to pointer access, and I'm sure someone who cares (and is smart enough to care) about cache locality could have gotten close to an order of magnitude out of it.
You can work around this by either having that language allow programmers to pin memory and use pointer-like features, have ways to pass data to unmanaged-memory languages, or have prebuilt tools that do these under the hood, and a lot of higher-level languages do (eg, python is three C++ wrappers in a trenchcoat at times). But if you have to actually touch a bunch of individual bytes, the difference can be a big deal.
gattsuru
10d ago
Before doing anything else, make sure you have backed up your phone and any vital information (esp things like 2FA keys).
I've done it pretty regularly, both for my own phones and for others at my workplace. That said, it is difficult and sometimes even dangerous: I've lit off one battery on an older iPhone removing it, and while that's mostly a result of that particular aftermarket battery being crap and badly swollen, it's definitely not a surprise most people want to deal with. iPhones are definitely worse than most Android phones I've worked on, but none of them are fun.
((Screen damage can fall into a similar boat; replacement (Non-OLED) screen modules are typically under 30 USD for a plausibly-legal model and replacement gasket, and it's step 1 of getting to the battery for most phones. But iPhones can be a particular pain in the ass, with the TouchID modules on iPhones gen5-9 being extremely fragile and impossible to replace and extremely unpleasant to repair if damaged.))
The iOpener is nice, but it's just a glorified non-condensing heat/ice pack (buckwheat with a mixed additive, maybe?), and in a pinch you can just use a hot air rework gun or hot air gun. Would not recommend a hairdryer. You definitely need something like it; most phone faces are hard enough to remove with heat, and impossible with it. The AntiClamp is more a convenience thing; it's mostly just giving you more space to hold the phone while . Almost all of the other tools will come with any Amazon-grade vendor's battery (even the crappy ones), and if you do phone repairs a lot you'll end up collecting a ton of these stupid weirdo screwdrivers.
While not listed on the iFixit guide, I would recommend a silicone work mat; you can buy repair-specific ones (personal recommendation, but discount stores like Five Below or Dollar General will often end up with cooking or art-intended ones that work and can be cheaper. The screws here are tiny and often not magnetic, so having a clean, uniform workspace is a must Grab something with individual cups or marked areas, or grab some small disposable shotglass-sized cups, because a lot of the screws look identical but have slight differences that keep them from being interchangeable (tbf, less a problem on Pixels than on iPhones).
I've mostly been happy with it. Screen and especially battery quality can vary heavily, especially if you're going to Amazon and sorting by price, but even the worst I've gotten have still keep the phone running for a couple years more, it's more a matter of whether if it lasts three before battery life falls off a cliff or if the screen's backlight has a hotspot. Tablet screens can be prone to getting dust specs or hair in them, so there's been one or two times I thought I was done and had to start over again. Do expect worse water intrusion resistance unless you're absolutely neurotic about gasket placement.
Again, damage or destruction is possible, but a manageable risk and you have to be doing something kinda stupid for it to happen. Don't pry on batteries with screwdrivers, be careful with ribbon cables, essentially.
For shops, Google does have an authorized repair program and that puts an effective cap (as does the iStore 'repair' system), albeit a pretty high one. Sticker prices usually start around 100-150 USD, depending on exact model; some smaller (non-authorized-by-google) mall stores will squeak under that a bit, but I'd be surprised by anyone going under 80 USD these days. I've heard they're pretty reliable and fast from people who do use them, although they tend to be normies only using recent phones.
I'm generally a fan of keeping older equipment running, but do be aware it comes with costs. The Pixel 8 is supposed to keep getting security and software updates until 2030, so you're good for probably two battery replacements... and some other software might not keep up with that. That's gonna depend a lot more heavily on what you use your phone for, but I've seen a few pilots who were forced to update not because of hardware but because of Foreflight, as one example.
gattsuru
13d ago
There was a short period in 2005-2012ish where FPGA programming languages like VHDL and Verilog had to work on so badly constrained environments that octal bases were worth the obnoxious overhead, but either none of them retained support or no one uses that support for normal code this decade.
gattsuru
15d ago
When I receive these emails, I open up my computer and phone, load the PDF on my computer, scan the QR with my phone, load the site, copy the URL, email the URL to myself, then open it on my computer. Am I missing something essential about how this is supposed to work?
There are a tiny number of use cases where it makes some sense. If you're expecting students to receive e-mail through school accounts only accessible from (public) school computers, you don't want them putting private or especially financial information (b/c PCI DSS almost universally prohibits that) on those computers no matter how sure you've keylogger-proofed them, and you can't trust students to transfer even prettified URLs from one computer to another by mark I eyeball. Then your workflow, stupid as it seems, makes sense; the only trusted computer most people bring with them is the phone, and scanning a QR code in is the only viable way to pull the URL in.
In rarer cases, the school (or vendor) might be required to pretend that's the use case, either by regulation or internal norm, even if nobody does it.
Of course, if you were building such a system and not hilariously incompetent, PDFs support links, and you can just offer both. In many cases, the IT administration, or their leadership, is just incompetent. It's a funny joke, but it's not a joke.
But instead of using Square or something that charges 3% or so, they use a payment processor I've never heard of before that charges $1 per transaction, mostly for transactions of $5 - $10. Is it providing a real service of protecting the schools from liability somehow?
Most vendors have a minimum flat fee; the difference for a 10 USD transaction would be closer to 0.4 USD at current fees. Sometimes this can have better processing, or review standards on chargebacks, or have given them a good enough deal on payment processing systems or security reviews that it's worth the slightly higher fee, especially if the school uses the same system for large transactions for non-physical goods or for some (overtly) credit-like system, which can get messy from the lowest-overhead-common-denominator. PoS systems in particular can be very expensive (>1k USD/unit, usually need to be replaced every 2-5 years depending on use levels), which can be a massive hassle and expense for an organization that has to authorize individual purchases in a slow method but can get a contract with service requirements through at the same rate. This can even pop up if you aren't seeing those point of sale units: I've seen a volunteer org that only used a physical payment processing system once a month for sports game consumable sales have to do some very complex math to figure out what made economic sense.
But if they're charging you for the fees, it's as likely or more likely that they like the system because it lets them pass the charge onto purchasers explicitly, which ranges from disfavored to banned by terms of service to potentially illegal depending on payment processor and state (and even type of card). Officially, this can get into somewhat gray areas really quickly, but it's very rare for the rules to be enforced and a lot of actual accountants don't know the rules.
gattsuru
15d ago
Alternatively, distribute the stories as 'by' a collective name.
Within 24 hours of this post, two National Guard members were shot
and killedin Washington DC, by a shooter that alleged targeted and ambushed them.I'm willing to give another 24 hours from now before speculating on the motives of that shooter. The shooter has been capture and is expected to survive. I'll note, however, that nationally syndicated television did not wait to see whether the man was a gangbanger or schizophrenic before giving justifications for the shooters actions.
It's possible that Dilanian is fired in a week. Would you like to make a wager?
Because I'd wager that your lefty college buds can get all the justifications and friendly tongue-washing from broadly published news media that everyone treats with far more respect than it deserves; the wig-wong waggling here doesn't really matter.
Edit: I shouldn’t trust politicians. “conflicting reports”
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