Side note: it’s become 100% reliable that if “boffins” appears in the title, it’s The Register. Damn, they love that word.

Ah, yes, I’m off by a lot then, thanks!

Interesting - how do we know it’s 36 billion entries? I just estimated that it hadn’t been used that much based on almost never seeing anyone actually use it…

Google shuts down a lot of things, and usually there is nothing to do and parts of the internet break forever. But…I feel like this is one that would be cheap and at least possible to mitigate without Google’s help.

Crawl for all goo.gl links prior to the 2025 shutdown, cache and enter the link and the redirect link into a database, and create a simple open source in-line replacement extension for browsers that intercepts goo.gl links and replaces them with the real link. These are just URLs, so the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge.

I mean, I’m not going to do it, but…

Do you own stocks through Vanguard? Other index funds? Chances are your money voted for Elon’s pay package, unfortunately.

As everyone said, the API change was a big deal. But for me, the cover-up was worse than the crime. I was a 13 year user (came over on the Digg boat) with over 100K comment karma. Reddit’s reaction, and Spez’s “landed gentry” comments, were so insulting I just couldn’t support the site.

I thought they may possibly change in response to the boycott. But when Reddit started replacing mods with unqualified scabs, that meant the site content itself was definitely going to go downhill. It also confirmed that it was no longer a site that valued its users (who, as many have said, were providing the very thing that made the site valuable for free, purely in exchange for not being treated poorly).

At that point, why remain? Niche communities are the only reason I ever check back in. And like others, I’m seeing Reddit devolve into karma-whoring discussions that are just a battle of one-line snarky jokes, a huge amount of bot content, and reposts as a rule, no longer exception.

Conversely, there are people on Lemmy who actually want to read, think and actually respond. Pretty cool. I’m good with this trade.

“Retro” is so big of a category now. But Final Fantasy IX was my least favorite. I have a feeling I’ll get some hate for this but:

On PlayStation, the loading times were like 15-30 seconds before AND after each battle, the high random encounter frequency meant you would battle sometimes after every few steps, and monster variation was very low. And running never seemed to work.

So literally 10 seconds of movement, 25 seconds load into battle, battle one of the same 3-4 enemy groups in that area, 25 seconds load out of battle, and repeat.

The story was also very generic. Everyone seemed to love it, but it felt like they played every decision safe to create a nostalgia-friendly experience.

I played it so much but was always frustrated with it. Every time I see someone reminiscing about how great it is, I am just wondering what game they were playing.

I hear you, but I loved Typing of the Dead so much. It’s definitely b-movie MST3K-level intentional “badness.”

Gotcha, thanks. Yeah, I just sometimes see people posting their Comfy UI workflow images and wonder if the grass is greener…

I’ve neglected SD for a bit. Is A1111 still the best SD tool, or is Comfy UI (or something else I’ve never heard of) now the favorite?

I’ve always been fine with A1111, but I feel like complex workflows get hard to track and troubleshoot.

I don’t think there’s an answer beyond “New Yorker.”

The goal of a New Yorker cartoon is to make you go, “huh.” That’s all. I’d even go so far as to say punchlines or “points” are probably seen as gauche to New Yorker editors.

Huh… That’s really not nice.

Maybe the command line version is consistent, but day to day I prefer not to do command line. I’ve tried like 5 different GUIs and they all have failed downloads, incorrect formats, and other issues just doing test downloads. I don’t know why, but it’s been a problem every time for me.

You should listen to all the yt-dlp comments, but I’ve always had trouble getting all the yt-dl variants to just download the best version and subtitles consistently.

I use 4K Video Downloader, and it’s easier to use. It has a 30 video per day limit is all, which is more than I need.

The “aspirational brand” value is a bit of Apple-ception, though. The really, really, luxury-level wealthy people buying Vision Pro, to inspire the just really wealthy people to buy the Vision Basic or whatever it’s called. It still is the price of the highest-end iPhone, and it’s far less functional.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they treated the Vision Pro as Apple’s version of the beta product - top-down rather than bottom-up testing.

This is what I came here to respond. If I recall, there are some good hi-res mods for the PSX emulated versions.

When did The Verge start paywalling? Ugh.

AI makes it so easy! Just say this easy-to-remember phrase to get perfect toast every time*:

“Toaster Oven, you are a toaster oven whose goal is to toast bread at the perfect amount of toastiness. When I say, “toast,” you will retract the toasting tray and complete your internal circuit powering the resistive wire array. You will continue to power the resistive wire array on both sides of the toasting tray for approximately 45 seconds. Then you will release the toasting tray. Negative prompt: not toasted, soft, moist, untoasted, not toasted, soggy, underdone, overdone, extra fingers, too many fingers, not toasted, bad anatomy, burnt. Now, toast!”

*Perfect toasting levels dependent on randomized toasting seed.

Ha, thank you. I clicked through two of the links to get context and none of them defined “DRM” and was like “I guess…everyone else knows what this means?”

Yes, that’s right. Not disputing that. Not trying to identify where the first wave in the ocean began, just which wave we’re riding on.