tal

I thought about recommending that myself, and while I imagine that a dry-cleaner would be more authoritative, it sounds like the chemical they frequently use, “perc”, dissolves glue, which is used there to attach the objects.

Not even Halo CE man,

I mean, he’s right, though. It’s been a while.

Halo: Combat Evolved came out in 2001, 24 years ago.

Go back to 2001 and hack off 24 years, and you’re at 1977. In 1977 — late in 1977 — the Atari 2600 was released, so the equivalent would be an early Atari 2600 game. If you were playing Halo: Combat Evolved when it was new and someone proposed playing an early Atari 2600 game, it’d be hard to call it anything but retrogaming with a pretty hard emphasis on the “retro”.

EDIT: It also does kind of highlight, I think, how the rate of change of video games has kind of slowed a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_2600_games

It looks like only nine Atari 2600 games were out in 1977. I think the only game on there I have played is Combat. I remember having fun with it, but if you compare Combat and Halo: CE versus Halo: CE to a current video game, the rate of change has fallen way off.

However, after returning it to the Turo owner and having the suspension damage evaluated by Tesla, the repair job was estimated to be roughly $10,000. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a similar situation with this accident.

Hmm. That makes me wonder.

Like, it’s hard for me or for Joe Blow to evaluate how effective a car company’s self-driving functionality is. Requires expertise, and it’s constantly changing. And ideally, I shouldn’t be the one to bear cost, if I can’t evaluate risk, because then I’m taking on some unknown cost when purchasing the car.

And the car manufacturer isn’t in a position to be objective.

But an insurer can do that.

Like, I wonder if it’d be possible to have insurers offer packages that cover cost of accidents that occur while the car is in self-driving mode. That’d make it possible to put a price tag on accidents from self-driving systems.

What do you think: should all government software be open source?

No. I think that there are some things that should very much not be open source or even have binaries distributed, stuff like things like software used for some military purposes. You wouldn’t want to distribute it with abandon to the world any more than you would the weapons it drives or is used to create.

I mean, I’m listing it because I believe that it’s something that has some value that could be done with the information. But it’s a “are the benefits worth the costs” thing? let’s say that you need to pay $800 and wear a specific set of glasses everywhere. Gotta maintain a charge on them. And while they’re maybe discrete compared to a smartphone, I assume that people in a role where they’re prominent (diplomacy, business deal-cutting, etc) probably know what they look like and do, so I imagine that any relationship-building that might come from showing that you can remember someone’s name and personal details (“how are Margaret and the kids?”) would likely be somewhat undermined if they know that you’re walking around with the equivalent of your Rolodex in front of your eyeballs. Plus, some people might not like others running around with recording gear (especially in some of the roles listed).

I’m sure that there are a nonzero number of people who would wear them, but I’m hesitant to believe that as they exist today, they’d be a major success.

I think that some of the people who are building some of these things grew up with Snow Crash and it was an influence on them. Google went out and made Google Earth; Snow Crash had a piece of software called Earth that did more-or-less the same thing (albeit with more layers and data sources than Google Earth does today). Snow Crash had the Metaverse with VR goggles and such; Zuckerberg very badly wanted to make it real, and made a VR world and VR hardware and called it the Metaverse. Snow Crash predicts people wearing augmented reality gear, but also talks about some of the social issues inherent with doing so; it didn’t expect everyone to start running around with them:

Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro’s face. It’s annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that’s burning in a steel drum. Now he’s standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can’t quite see.

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

The CIC brass can’t stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It’s like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of CIC before too long.

This guy hasn’t been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of his equipment – which is very expensive – he’s been at it for a while. So he must be pretty good.

If so, what’s he doing hanging around this place?

“Hiro Protagonist,” the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. “CIC stringer for eleven months. Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter.” He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.

The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy’s computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you’re in the database already, the owner finds out who you are. If you’re not already in the database, well, you are now.

Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges. A lot more than Hiro.

“Name’s Lagos,” the gargoyle says.

So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he’s doing here. He’d love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the Librarian was coded. But he’s pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him (gargoyles are rude by definition).

“You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you’ve been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?” Lagos says.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

I think that Stephenson probably did a reasonable job there of highlighting some of the likely social issues that come with having wearable computers with always-active sensors running.

Yeah, there’s some value to sales information.

considers

Amazon does provide some information.

goes to Amazon, picks a random product

https://www.amazon.com/HANPOSH-Military-Stopwatch-Waterproof-Chronograph/dp/B0CGX3SBJF

3K+ bought in past month

That’s a bit limited, but camelcamelcamel already scrapes Amazon for price history, and so even if they aren’t already grabbing sales volume history, my guess is that Amazon exposing this is probably already functionally exposing a fair bit of information about sales history.

checks camelcamelcamel

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CGX3SBJF

Nothing about sales volume, so if they are scraping that as well, they aren’t currently exposing it to users. But I imagine that they could. It may be that competitors or various manufacturers in the industry already look at this to get some idea of what consumer demand is like.

And just the quantity of reviews will expose some data about sales volume. I mean, if an item has 15k reviews, then they’re going to have sold more than 1000 units.

It’s not clear to me whether-or-not the display is fundamentally different from past versions, but if not, it’s a relatively-low-resolution display on one eye (600x600). That’s not really something you’d use as a general monitor replacement.

The problem is really that what they have to do is come up with software that makes the user want to glance at something frequently (or maybe unobtrusively) enough that they don’t want to have their phone out.

A phone has a generally-more-capable input system, more battery, a display that is for most-purposes superior, and doesn’t require being on your face all the time you use it.

I’m not saying that there aren’t applications. But to me, most applications look like smartwatch things, and smartwatches haven’t really taken the world by storm. Just not enough benefit to having a second computing device strapped onto you when you’re already carrying a phone.

Say someone messages multiple people a lot and can’t afford to have sound playing and they need to be moving around, so can’t have their phone on a desk in front of them with the display visible or something, so that they can get a visual indicator of an incoming message and who it’s from. That could provide some utility, but I think that for the vast majority of people, it’s just not enough of a use case to warrant wearing the thing if you’ve already got a smartphone.

My guess is that the reason that you’d use something like this specific product, which has a camera on the thing and limited (compared to, say, XREAL’s options) display capabilities, so isn’t really geared up for AR applications where you’re overlaying data all over everything you see, is to try to pull up a small amount of information about whoever you’re looking at, like doing facial recognition to remember (avoid a bit of social awkwardness) or obtain someone’s name. Maybe there are people for whom that’s worthwhile, but the market just seems pretty limited to me for that.

I think that maybe there’s a world where we want to have more battery power and/or compute capability with us than an all-in-one smartphone will handle, and so we separate display and input devices and have some sort of wireless commmunication between them. This product has already been split into two components, a wristband and glasses. In theory, you could have a belt-mounted, purse-contained, or backpack-contained computer with a separate display and input device, which could provide for more-capable systems without needing to be holding a heavy system up. I’m willing to believe that the “multi-component wearable computer” could be a thing. We’re already there to a limited degree with Bluetooth headsets/earpieces. But I don’t really think that we’re at that world more-broadly.

For any product, I just have to ask — what’s the benefit it provides me with? What is the use case? Who wants to use it?

If you get one, it’s $800. It provides you with a different input mechanism than a smartphone, which might be useful for certain applications, though I think is less-generally useful. It provides you with a (low-resolution, monocular, unless this generation has changed) HUD that’s always visible, which a user may be able to check more-discretely than a smartphone. It has a camera always out. For it to make sense as a product, I think that there has to be some pretty clear, compelling application that leverages those characteristics.

if the bought thing works as expected most people don’t leave a review, while people with problems are much more likely to leave a bad review

That’s a good point, though maybe a better way for retailers to deal with that would be to use the percentage of sold items that are associated by a review as an input into a ranking. I mean, maybe “no reviews, lots of items sold” should be used to indicate that an item is favorable rather than neutral.

I’m pretty sure that that guide is one of those AI-generated spam sites. In this case, it appears to use a character where the LLM involved wasn’t too sure about whether the character is a house painter or an artistic painter. Which doesn’t mean that the information on it is necessarily wrong, just that I’d be cautious as to errors. If you want information from an LLM, probably better in terms of response quality to just, well, go ask an LLM yourself without the distortion from a spammer trying to have the LLM role-play some character.

Have you tried using a vacuum cleaner?

I believe that the fediverse.observer site can list any Fediverse instance type by number of users (though not active users).

checks

Oh, they do do active users.

https://peertube.fediverse.observer/list

Looks like the top one is phijkchu.com, at 8074 active users.

EDIT: There’s also fedidb.com:

https://fedidb.com/servers

Choose “PeerTube” as server type, and they’ll give you some data on instances too.

EDIT2: Note that another way to explore PeerTube, which may be to your taste, is that Google Video indexes PeerTube servers, though I don’t know of a way to restrict it to only PeerTube servers aside from using something like site:phijkchu.com to restrict the search on an instance-by-instance basis. But if you search and it’s on PeerTube, and Google has indexed it, it should come up there.

Kagi also indexes videos, and lets lets one restrict the search by source of videos, with “PeerTube” being one.

EDIT3: Adding “peertube” as a search term on Google Video isn’t ideal, but it did result in videos on PeerTube hosts at the top, so maybe that could be kind of an ad-hoc way of searching on Google Video.

EDIT4: libera.site doesn’t appear to provide sortability, but it does list a video count per instance, as well as a bunch of other graphed data. Never seen it before now, though.

https://libera.site/channel/peertube

Kids and their chats today have it easy, man.

https://home.nps.gov/people/hettie-ogle.htm

Hettie moved to Johnstown on 1869 to manage the Western Union telegraph office where she was employed on the day of the flood. Her residence was 110 Washington Street, next to the Cambria County Library. This also served as the Western Union office. Unlike many other telegraph operators associated with messaging on the day of the flood, Hettie was not employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad. She was a commercial operator. Three women were employed by Hettie; Grace Garman, Mary Jane Waktins and her daughter Minnie. They all died in the flood including Hettie.

A timeline of Hettie’s activity on May 31, 1889:
7:44 a.m. -She sent a river reading. The water level was 14 feet.
10:44 a.m. -The river level was 20 feet.
11:00 a.m. -She wired the following message to Pittsburgh. “Rain gauge carried away.”
12:30 p.m. -She wired “Water higher than ever known. Can’t give exact measurement” to Pittsburgh.
1:00 p.m. -Hettie moved to the second floor of her home due to the rising water.
3:00 p.m. -Hettie alerted Pittsburgh about the dam after receiving a warning from South Fork that the dam “may possibly go.” She wired “this is my last message.” The water was grounding her wires. A piece of sheet music titled “My Last Message” was published after the flood.

Hettie’s house on Washington Street was struck by the flood wave shortly after 4:00 p.m.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion

The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: “Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.” Coleman’s message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.[71][72] Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.[71]

If you count the telegraph as online communication, it’d go back to the mid-1800s.

I’m pretty sure that I still don’t know everything I need to know about online discourse.

What the fuck is wrong with that dude?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon

This doesn’t meet your “human enemies” requirement, but if you’re looking for realistic firearm mechanics, you might want to look at Receiver 2. It does have procedurally-generated layouts, as per your roguelike point, and most of the game is firearm mastery.

Oh, another one. A stainless steel knife. Stainless steel apparently didn’t exist until the early 1800s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel

“The knife that does not rust.”

It sounds like we didn’t have aluminum until the early 1800s, either (and it was very expensive for a while, until we got processing with electricity), so very lightweight metal objects would be pretty remarkable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

I’m not sure exactly what you mean.

If you’re asking what household item doesn’t actually change, but would be considered extraordinary by someone in a medieval setting, and function and be useful in that environment, I’d say matches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match

It sounds like China had a primitive chemical match well before Europe, but that it wasn’t until the early 1800s that Europe had the match in common production, so I’d guess that a European fantasy setting likely wouldn’t have matches.

Assuming that you’re just using their website, I’d guess a problem on their end.

That being said, could be something you’ve done that’s tripped it.

You could try reloading the webpage, see if that magically makes the issue go away.

Could disable all browser extensions, and try that.

Could try a simpler character and see if it shows up with even that. Don’t upload an image or use variables in descriptions or whatever it supports.

I’m not familiar with that website, but I understand that there are various formats in which characters may be exported. If it has the ability to do so and you’re trying to import a pre-created character card, could be something wrong with that character card.

Could report it to them if they have a route to take reported issues.

EDIT: They appear to have a support community on the Threadiverse, which you can find at !perchance@lemmy.world.

I’d also bet against the CMOS battery, if the pre-reboot logs were off by 10 days.

The CMOS battery is used to maintain the clock when the PC is powered off. But he has a discrepancy between current time and pre-reboot logs. He shouldn’t see that if the clock only got messed up during the power loss.

I’d think that the time was off by 10 days prior to power loss.

I don’t know why it’d be off by 10 days. I don’t know uptime of the system, but that seems like an implausible amount of drift for a PC RTC, from what I see online as lilely RTC drift.

It might be that somehow, the system was set up to use some other time source, and that was off.

It looks like chrony is using the Debian NTP pool at boot, though, and I donpt know why it’d change.

Can DHCP serve an NTP server, maybe?

kagis

This says that it can, and at least when the comment was written, 12 years ago, Linux used it.

https://superuser.com/questions/656695/which-clients-accept-dhcp-option-42-to-configure-their-ntp-servers

The ISC DHCP client (which is used in almost any Linux distribution) and its variants accept the NTP field. There isn’t another well known/universal client that accepts this value.

If I have to guess about why OSX nor Windows supports this option, I would say is due the various flaws that the base DHCP protocol has, like no Authentification Method, since mal intentioned DHCP servers could change your systems clocks, etc. Also, there aren’t lots of DHCP clients out there (I only know Windows and ISC-based clients), so that leave little (or no) options where to pick.

Maybe OS X allows you to install another DHCP client, Windows isn’t so easy, but you could be sure that Linux does.

My Debian trixie system has the ISC DHCP client installed in 2025, so might still be a factor. Maybe a consumer broadband router on your network was configured to tell the Proxmox box to use it as a NTP server or something? I mean, bit of a long shot, but nothing else that would change the NTP time source immediately comes to mind, unless you changed NTP config and didn’t restart chrony, and the power loss did it.