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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.

    Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?

    You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.

    But… that hum? The buzz?

    Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.

    Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.


  • Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.

    I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.

    Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).

    … Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.

    There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.


  • Hehe sounds about right.

    Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

    And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

    I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

    But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

    We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

    This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

    Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

    It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

    It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

    But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.





  • So, its now around a day or two later.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/09/dramatic-sell-off-of-us-government-bonds-as-tariff-war-panic-deepens

    I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

    Again, Varoufakis idea is:

    Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?

    and

    Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

    Summarized, he thinks that:

    US Bond prices will go up

    and/or

    US Bond yields will go down

    and

    The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.

    What is actually happening is:

    US Bond prices are going down.

    US Bond yields are going up.

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M

    USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.

    The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.

    So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.

    Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.


  • … Yeah. That makes sense.

    So far, my hope is that someone develops at first just a stable de-googled ROM for a Nothing CMF phone, and then that can grow into being supported by a more security focused android ROM/distro.

    You sound like you know more about the technicals about this than I do… afaik there are a few actually secure either android forks or just linux distros that run on android hardware… but they basically only support stupid expensive phones.

    Would really be great if a decent quality, actually affordable, reasonably secure phone existed.


  • Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

    Exactly.

    In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

    You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

    Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

    … Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

    -.-


  • … But there are a multitude of security focused or at least de-googled android roms/oses.

    I mean, i am not trying to be an ass, I do genuinely aporeciate your answer, and I totally get it.

    But at the same time, you said you already have experience with custom ROMs…

    And though yes, it is very annoying imo that many of the more well known ones seem to mostly focus on supoorting Google Pixels, but there are other supported phone mnfctrs and models you can combo with other custom ROMs.


  • I mean, that is a pretty reasonable way to do a mirror, or a very glossy reflective floor (just throw a transparency/alpha layer over it and render it on top of the floor texture) back before… shaders as we know them today really got invented, and model poly count/texture res is not very high… and you specifically only do this kind of mirroring in enclosed, indoor areas that don’t have huge vistas.

    Like, I don’t think Deus Ex is on ‘the build engine’, but it certainly ultimately derives from it, and it does this.

    Then you get to HL2, and while, to my knowledge, HL2 doesn’t literally have ‘mirrors’ in it, you can basically do that by making a render target camera, the kind that displays in the game as a TV screen of some kind… well you could just point that camera right out of where the mirror is, and have the render quality/resolution be lower than the quality/resolution of the rest of the world.

    (ofc this wouldn’t work in hl2 just per se, because gordon isn’t actually rendered as a player model, but you could futz around in gmod not long after hl2 and do this, i know this because i did it)

    I am reasonably confident most modern games with mirrors … basically do that, just with an actual game settings slider to determine fidelity instead of all those settings that used to be baked into the map as it was with custom hl2/gmod/sourcemod maps.

    Water, window and world space reflections can/could also be set to just… render the whole world again in a lower quality… but prior to that, it was more common to bake a static ‘reflect map’ into your compiled map, as realtime duplicating the whole world can often be waaay too demanding.

    And of course now we have shifted over to the Real Time Ray Tracing paradigm, that is absurdly high fidelity but absurdly highly demanding, and that has neccessitated the development of frame upcaling and frame gen tech to balance out the performance losses from this absurdly inefficient lighting paradigm.


  • I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.

    Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.

    The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.

    Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.


  • I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.

    Got gaslit about it by my family as well.

    You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.

    You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.

    Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.


  • One third of Americans, about 100 million people, are in fact this stupid.

    This is (one of) the real horror(s) of fascism:

    It forms a cult of personality.

    As in, a literal cult, a ‘Dear Leader can do no wrong’, honest to god, utterly delusional cult.

    Just go check all the polls of people who still specifically support Trump’s tariff policy.

    Combine that with the fact that 20% of the US is functionally illiterate (reading/writing skills of a 2nd grader or worse), and the average literacy level is between a 5th and 6th grader, meaning that next 30% of people are… just barely out of elementary school when it comes to literacy.

    Those numbers are for US adults 18 or older btw.

    As other commenters have mentioned, I too have multiple family members I have had to go no contact with in the last few years because they are in the MAGA cult, are incredibly aggressive, delusional, manipulativr, etc.

    In my case specifically, my Dad fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the last time I was with him in person, he was showing me how he manufactures ghost guns (no serial numbers) in his garage with some vintage machining tools.

    In a sane world he would be on a red flag list as a potential domestic terrorist.

    In the actual world he is just a retiree with a hobby.