I thought the issue was that the admin in charge of the domain name registration just disappeared for like a year and the other admin didn’t have access to renew it. Where did you get the idea it had to do with funding?

I get you, but the fediverse is small enough that you can get by with just blocking accounts that do stuff like this. Complaining about it is just pissing into the wind, unless you want to start another resistance movement spamming corn. Probably overdue for it again.

Do your part! Reduce, reuse, recycle!

They’ll refill it forever too, even if it was supposed to just be a recovery aid. Seen more than one elder become addicted.

What he said was that training humans takes a lot of water too, in defense of AI. This is a shitpost take on that.

Surprised that no one has suggested the .hack (dot Hack) game series. They were PS2 era single player RPG games, set in a virtual reality MMO. So it really tries to simulate the MMO experience of that era. There’s even an entire fake computer OS you can explore with news articles, forum posts, email, etc that all contributes to the world building and sometimes unlocks stuff in the “MMO” as you learn stuff ourside of it.

The plot is… ok. Kind of a tired one now and quite trope-y. Mostly because it came first and a ton of anime since “copied its homework”. The series is one of the first instances of the now semi-common plot of “players get stuck in VR MMO”.

The first group of games in the series is pretty easily emulatable, and carrying your save across the games lets you keep your progress and unlocks some extra stuff in subsequent games of the first batch.

The second batch of games in the series (widely believed to be considerably better in gameplay) got an official PC remaster with additional QoL and what amounts to a free story DLC. Probably better to start there, just know there’s some weird plot stuff with a semi-prequel anime. It was the style of the time to make these multimedia projects to try and cross market shit.

They just announced that the series is going to get a reboot/continuation too.

It’s also worth noting that there are some “pay once” MMOs like Guild Wars out there which have been running for a decade or more.

I would start with making scripts to reproduce your current customizations on a fresh install, personally.

You mean HUNK-ules

Not that it sounds like you or your friends would, but plenty of non-profits still manage to funnel absurd amounts of money to their owners. So you may want to lean less on saying it’s not possible because of non-profit, but instead not possible due to how you’d run it.

Notably, OpenAI was originally non-profit.

No way this lasts or holds up to basic scrutiny. End to end encryption is a de-facto standard for so fucking much technology.

Like fucking HTTPS.

The switch supports usb ethernet adapters. Look up the supported list. They plug into usb ports on the dock.

It’s pretty much mandatory for any online gaming on it.

If only. Halfway through the movie something the toys are doing goes horrendously wrong and their owner dies. Camera angle doesn’t change for the rest of the runtime as everything else goes on, like the ambulance arriving, the parents grieving but eventually packing up the toys and moving on, most of it muffled from off screen outside the old kid’s room.

Just another trillion dollars guys! Just another year and a half! I swear!

Isn’t Mint still effectively Ubuntu with no Canonical, and less worried about open soirce purity? Could be wrong, been a long while.

I’ve fooled around with Processing a lot, and have used it and later (iirc) a C++ or C# library many years ago to do “programmatic” edits to images and photos I had taken.

Stuff like:

• What if I treat the pixels in an image as one long strip and instead of placing them in left to right strips top to bottom, I lay them down in a spiral? Or in vertical strips despite the original image not being square?
• What if I interleaved a copy of the image upside down every other row of pixels?
• Let’s just apply random fucking math to the different color values!
• Let’s select random rectangular sections of the image and paste them over the original at a random location, rinse and repeat 100 times.
• What if I broke the image down into a grid of equally sized rectangles and shuffled their location?
• What if I averaged the color of each rectangle and added that to the existing color value of those pixels?
• etc etc.

I’d come up with different ways to select portions of the image, different ways to place that back in, and different ways to combine the “pasted” section with original. I tossed together something like 30 different “formulas”, then would do like 10 runs of each one that had random elements, spit out the results into a folder of what ultimately was something like 300 “result” images, and then decide the five or so I liked the best.

Add in the fact that I really don’t have any clue how color math works so I wasn’t basing my ideas off anything but whimsy, and some occasional pre and post processing with both paint.net plugins and audacity (you can sometimes open images as raw binary, avoid the file header, apply audio effects, and save it as raw binary to still have an image but it often just makes a corrupt file).

Had a decent “glitch art” hobby going to keep me occupied in my free time.

I desperately need to find that old code again. I miss tinkering with it.

Unfortunately, the existing results are tied to a flikr account with connections to my real name, so I’d have to find the code and make more to share.

I don’t know where the consoles my parents bought me were from, because they were always surprise gifts. But I sure as hell remember where the ones I bought with my own money were from, where a I bought a few particularly important to me games, and where I used to browse with my parents. Not address off the top of my head but I could pretty easily look most up now, or even years ago with the internet.

Kirby’s Dreamland 3 was from a discount bin at the Walmart where my family lived until I was 8. Death and Return of Superman for the SNES was from the video rental store we used to frequent after we moved, when they started selling off their old SNES games. Lots of games from one particular Gamestop in between the grocery store and the movie theater. Midnight release of Smash Bros Brawl there. Got a used N64 and some games for it there during the early 360 era too. PSP and some games for it was my first “real” purchase completely with my own money (no birthday or christmas gift money towards it) and was done at a Gamestop in the corner of a local mall. Moved 8 hours away with a GF and picked up Aladin, Starfox, and Super Metroid for the SNES for prices that would now be robbery from a local retro games store before the collectors started getting into retro games (still haven’t checked if they’re legit or repros, and I should because that store sold a few romhacks on physical cartridge from a different display area in the store). Moved back with my folks after a rough break up. Bubsy 3d from a new store that sells all sorts of used stuff out of what used to be an old Border’s book store where I had previously been to for a midnight Harry Potter release (cut me some slack I was like 10 for the Potter and it was long before any of the drama). Switch from a Gamestop in the town where my wife grew up.

Yes, I wish I remembered more important stuff, but I think people have forgotten what buying video games was like in the “old days”. You had word of mouth, experience with previous games in the series, cart and box art, and maybe a review from a gaming magazine to go off of. So it was an experience. Unless you were one of those kids that was going out to buy a brand new game, you used to actually browse and decide. It was a big deal because you’d get maybe one new game for 6 months at a time. I used to strecth things by trying to get a few used games instead of just one new one. Sometimes you got a flop, like when I bought Croc and Croc 2 because they looked fun and I liked the humor on the back of the box. Not bad games, but I already had experienced Crash Bandicoot 2 and Spyro 3. Early 3D platformer controls like Croc just weren’t my thing by that point.

In some ways I miss it. On the other hand, I have a lot less “meh” games hanging around now.

“Fun” fact I just remembered. Shortly after I graduated high school, a former classmate of mine became the manager of the Gamestop I used to go to the most. While I was out failing out of university, 4chan’s /v/ideogames board started the “meme” of prank calling Gamestops and finding increasingly roundabout ways to ask if they had Battletoads. This former classmate of mine had a total crashout when his store got hit and ended up rage dumping on Facebook, where he had his employment listed publicly. Eventually he started posting the numbers they were getting the calls from trying to get people to spam call back. Cost him his job.

I actually enjoy the ones with unintentional double meanings. Corporate redid my building at work a few years back.

• We have a picture mural of the local city skyline featuring a big billboard that they couldn’t be bothered to get marketing to photoshop into one of ours. It’s an ad for a local real estate company and apartment group with known ties to organized crime. It’s named for the owner’s last name and I shudder to think how much money these people burned on SEO shifting results to not immediately return all the sordid details of the court case that landed one of the brothers in jail for some serious shit including connections to homicides (those didn’t stick, but the financial crimes did). Makes me giggle because in one of the wall sized photo murals this billboard is like 4ft wide. Who the fuck approved that?

• We also have “inspirational quotes” up on the walls. Big custom ordered vinyl sticker shit. One from Winnie the Pooh effectively works out to “Don’t waste time thinking shit through, just work! Fuckin’ YOLO!”. My coworkers now say we’ll blame Winnie the Pooh if one of our projects blows up.

Most that hit Lemmy are pretty damn obvious and get banned quickly by mods and instance admins.

So far the slightly more complex reddit style ones haven’t been turned on us yet. Probably don’t think the smaller userbase is worth the effort.

While technically true, you have to be kidding me if you think there aren’t relevant laws for a situation like this.

Some people would pay good money for that!