Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.

Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.

The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.

And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.

… That might be so despicably evil that I mostly just fixate on how many cops around the world must feel out gamed.

Anyone know if this is a legit source? Because Clarence isn’t particularly surprising but is big and new?

Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.

Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft

I don’t know what to say. Plenty of folk, myself included, have had no issues with the majority or games. And stuff like geforce now is quite successful

And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.

Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.

Trying to get into the mind of a deranged fascist is a futile effort at the best of times.

But my speculation? He understands that trump is a real shit asset. Way too impulsive and he is rapidly reaching the point where even video of him sucking off bill clinton won’t make a difference (and, thus, won’t be a threat). And putin is competing with all the other people pulling trump’s strings who don’t need to get on a plane to intimidate him.

So either way works. The point is to negate the US as a threat (either by turning us into an ally or letting us murder each other) and, as a result, negate NATO as a threat. Because most of NATO aren’t fucking lunatics who put a massive percentage of one of the largest GPDs in the world into a standing military. WE were the army of NATO. And… yeah.

The US attacking allied territory of the EU is basically the death of NATO, one way or another. WW3 is a hop and a skip from that.

I’ve not been following super closely for mental health reasons, but if it is just Denmark? We are looking at another Ukraine. Everyone is going to hem and haw and say “just give it to the pricks” to “avoid World War 3”. Whereas, if we start seeing other EU/NATO nations deploying troops to protect Greenland… there is a chance that SOMETHING remains and we don’t just have russia running over everyone else one by one.

Oh noes. So horrible that there are no other ways this can be disseminated and I am SURE the organizers aren’t looking into those at all.

I guess the more interesting question is… is this putin or is it just a black hat for hire working out of russia?

And… I don’t give a fuck about a corporation’s best interests (at least, not one I don’t own significant stock in).

But also: Epic have the financial backing of god, hollywood, and fortnite behind them. Valve make more revenue off their cut of everyone else’s games than many small nations have in annual GDP.

GoG is a recently spun off loss leader for a large regional publisher. And you don’t add these kinds of capabilities without a LOT of corporate investment… or management who decides “AI Can Do It”

Ehhhhh.

I actually think the current model is what more stores should be doing. Have a solid web store/client with the ability to just download games without anything else. Provide hooks so that third parties (e.g. Heroic) can manage games for people.

Rather than assuming every single store needs to dedicate resources towards building out library management tools. Especially since EGS has shown that people will then just want social media on top of that.

Yes and no.

At its very core? “Agentic AI” is about the idea of having a bunch of different “agents” communicate with one another in a network with defined(-ish) communication pathways. This is an “agent network”. And if that sounds like microservices/task graphs/how every fucking app works then… you win the No-Prize!!

And, in that regard, it isn’t any difficult. This service has access to that database. It always has. Hell, this service might still have zero “AI” in it but count as an “agent” for marketing purposes. If the credentials are checked and passed in an appropriate and authorized way, it is as safe as it ever has been. Which… is a different depressing discussion.

The issue comes into play when you are looking at people rapidly rewriting existing infrastructure just to say they did. And doing so with generative AI that they fundamentally can’t vet (even if they wanted to). THAT is how you break things and THAT is how you introduce new CVEs.

The issue isn’t that you have this data stored in a SQL table that is accessed by that service which was pre-seeded with credentials in a secure way. The issue is that you have no rewritten both that service and the SQL server in a way that “optimized” things by removing that costly security check.

Yes and no.

Yes, there is a lot of value to staying in The System and trying to break it from within.

But when your day to day duties are to abduct and murder people? Yeah, I am sure John Smith is gonna LOVE that you were a rascal and actually put him in the system as “Johm Snith” so that his lawyers have good cause to declare the arrest void. Except… he has no lawyers because John got executed last week. And now nobody will ever find out which ditch his corpse might be in.

And that is the problem when you get to these paramilitary orgs. Mad props to the whistleblower for acting now. How many people did they hurt along the way? And how effective will this even be when the christofacists still rule this country?

To be clear. If there is absolutely nothing else you can do, then yeah, resist through weaponized incompetence and all that. But… just understand that you might be rightfully tried as a collaborator regardless of how slow you were at changing those tires.

The vast majority of cops will refuse to provide any identifying information. As long as the arresting officer complies, it holds up in court. Everyone else does whatever they want and waits to see if a lawyer cares enough to subpoena the department for all the bodycam footage they already conveniently destroyed.

ice isn’t special in that regard. They just understand they have no intent of giving anyone they abduct a trial (because “they aren’t citizens and have no rights”).

Same with the constant escalation to pretend that everything is a riot or a swat raid where cops need to wear protective gear so that they don’t teargas themselves and have to assume everyone is going to hunt them down after work and shoot them (and, for legal purposes, that would be a very illegal thing and thus bad).

Look… bill is a known sex pest and hilary is a politician with a LOT of skeletons in her closet (also way better at politics than bubba ever was but…).

Any testimonial is going to be tainted by the prosecution. Expect questions like “Is it true that you are a liar who framed our dear president donald j trump” and similar. And even if the objections are recognized (as they should be), it is out there. “Hilary Clinton doesn’t deny claims that she framed our dear rapist in chief!” and so forth.

Just because you have very strong feelings as to what should happen to people who rape children doesn’t mean you support them being put through a kangaroo court. Especially when it is in service to protecting a different rapist.

Yes. For true emergency/disaster relief, that is the baseline. I doubt most of the meshtastic repeaters will survive a real storm and you can bet people will be spamming/attacking longfast from the comfort of their homes a county or three over. And there is no good way to communicate proper regional channels ahead of time.

But not every internet outage is a disaster. I live in a region where it is not uncommon for construction crews to cut the fiber line and take out all traffic for the county… sometimes multiple times a month… And I can speak from experience that having a mesh network with locals is incredibly useful for “Yes, it is all of us. And Verizon/Tmobile/Spring is also out” as well as “If you go to the park on 5th and MLK you have line of sight to a working cell tower”. And even just “So… I got all of Frasier on my Plex if anyone wants to hang out for a few hours”.

If you whip out your emergency HAM radios (without a license) during that? You can bet ALL the narcs are gonna tattle on you because “you weren’t prepared”.

But even during the prelude to a disaster it can be an issue. We also have wildfires in the region and get a pretty big scare maybe once a decade. Last time we were in a state of “be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice” for the better part of a week. And just a bit of gossip that “today is going to be the day” was enough to trigger panic and clog up cell service faster than you can say “9-11”. We even got an emergency push telling us that there were no planned evacuation orders for the day and to go about normal activities.

If you are someone frantically trying to figure out where the school took your kids? Yeah, you have an emergency. If you are someone who doesn’t have a strong support network trying to figure out what is even going on? The narcs are gonna whinge at you. But, like I said, it is very useful to coordinate your evac with that support network. You can plan ahead of time to try to all get hotels/campsites in the town a few hours North. Then you drive through the hell of the evac until you get a few cell towers away, pull over, and use an app to book a hotel/campsite. But if all the people with families have to go South to pick up their kids from the school drop off site? You can only communicate when you are all an hour or three away from town and… ain’t nobody going back through that traffic snarl.

Hopefully it ends up being a false alarm and you come back a week or two later to some smoke damage (that everyone TOTALLY fixes…) and not much else. But it’s the difference between a week or two where you are able to hang out with your friends and have some degree of normalcy versus a week or two isolated and worried that you are going to lose everything.

And that is where mesh networks thrive. I am not talking about “I have a repeater in my garden” (which I should get on…). Stuff like the t-deck is what is actually useful. Plug it in, turn it on, and the pseudo-blackberries mesh with each other well enough for coordinating because enough people in town are doing the exact same thing.

One thing that people trying to make Meshtastic/Meshpro/whatever work might want to try:

odds are that your town/community have a social media system that is generally used to discuss events and the like (probably facebook, sometimes reddit). Make a post on there basically providing a link to a “getting started” guide and the credentials/key for the local mesh.

And, most importantly: Schedule an event (maybe every other month or once a quarter) where everyone with a device should turn theirs on and either be near a window or stand outside. That is a great way to rapidly detect all the temporary nodes that might only exist during a “not emergency” and for people to debug all the messes because meshtastic is a cluster.

Got it. Nobody should consider the need for a license because, in an emergency, you don’t need one. But also get a license so that you can use it in non-emergencies otherwise you’ll get a fine.

Good talk.

If you are in a situation where you need help, the odds of someone (even the person you have been talking to for weeks on the radio) doing a day or two journey to MAYBE be able to reach you is pretty slim. And such long distance communication has other implications for bad actors.

And in the event of “rebuilding” some kind of community, you aren’t going to be using a handheld device at all. You’ll raid… I don’t even know what at this point (I miss Radio Shack) to install a radio on the tallest building you can find. Oh, a HAM Radio Nerd’s house. That’ll work.

Whereas if you are trying to communicat4e with others and signal for rescue? Whatever you can get from walking up a hill/mountain or climbing the stairs to said tall building with your handheld is probably about what you can expect.

Same with in stuff like hurricanes and the like. If you are in a region that is at all hospitable then the relief teams know to send helicopters/people to that area. And if you are in the kind of situation where even a few hours might mean the difference between life and death… odds are nobody is coming.

Maybe you’d understand more things if you continued to read after the first opportunity you see to spew whatever you want to?

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

I’ll also add on that it is useful to be able to practice and get familiar with a tool without risking a fine.

I wish this energy was just put towards promoting ham, tbh.

I wish you put more energy towards reading the comments you are replying to