I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.

Why would you need psexec to run services.msc? You can just open the services by running it directly or even from the start menu.

I’ve bought a lot of stuff from AliExpress in the past 10 years. Including some $10.000+ purchases. There have been problems, but overal I’m happy enough with the whole thing.

I feel everyone is trying their best to make it all work, but in the end it’s pretty complex to get something from the other side of the world to your home. Plus the language barrier can be a thing, where nobody in the chain really speaks any English. Usually the people at AliExpress, the seller and the actual people shipping the goods are pretty far apart from each other (China is a big country) and don’t always communicate the best.

Now there are of course a lot of scammers, just like on sites like Ebay and Amazon. AliExpress really does do their best to ban the scammers and prevent them from coming back, but it’s like fighting a flood with a broom and doesn’t do much. Recognizing the scammers can be pretty hard sometimes. The trick I’ve used is to either rely on small communities of people interested in the same thing recommending a shop or simply talking to the seller. If the seller is happy to talk to you and willing to do just about anything you ask, it’s probably a scam. If they are kind of grumpy and say this is what we do take it or leave it, you’ve got a proper seller on your hands. Especially with large equipment as I’ve bought, the seller wants to talk shop about the machines all day, but if you have any special requests regarding shipping or customs, it’s a no go. They will also happily provide you a quote for a fully custom machine if you ask, with actual good prices for what it is, but still very expensive.

If something does go wrong with your order, don’t count on AliExpress doing anything. They are just the platform provider and don’t know you or your order. They aren’t involved in any way and handle millions of orders a day. Just use the tools they provide to talk to the seller, they will often happily help you and every time my shipment got lost, they refunded or sent another. If a part broke in shipment, they shipped me a replacement. And just because the product wasn’t what you thought it was or the shipment got lost in transit or there was something else wrong, doesn’t mean the seller is a scammer. Don’t report them as one, as for small shops this can cause problems and for the larger established shops AliExpress simply ignores the reports. Usually the seller does their best to get you your stuff, but when sending something from one side of the globe to the other, shit happens. International tracking has gotten so much better the past couple of years, so it’s easier to see where it went wrong.

AliExpress has also gotten very good with customs, they present you a price which is based on what you are going to pay. No hidden fees that get applied later in the process. They discount the product in the shopping cart with an indication of what you have to pay for customs handling and import fees. In the past this used to be a problem, where the price was too good to be true, only to turn out to be exactly that. But these days they are very good.

So if you have patience, do your homework and be careful out there, AliExpress can be a great source for products. If you want to be a Karen and shout at someone for not delivering the crap you don’t need within 24 hours, please just go to Amazon.

One thing to note: There is an environmental impact to buying directly from China and there’s no guarantee the products weren’t made by slaves in poor working conditions without mind for safety or the environment. So don’t go buying small crap you can get anywhere from there. Buy locally where possible and if you do order make it something big or buy a larger shipment. But this isn’t really an AliExpress thing, this applies to sites like Ebay as well as other big Chinese shops.

I feel like many of these got at least a spiritual successor if not an actual successor. That counts as a second chance right and means they aren’t forgotten?

Like Gauntlet has like 9 sequels and the last one released just 10 years ago. There’s also many games that are heavily inspired by Gauntlet. Same for The Settlers, which had a new game just last year.

The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.

I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.

You are totally correct. This is one of the first mainstream publications I’ve seen really explain to people what “AI” is and what it isn’t. Good to see this kind of content.

I’m going to stop engaging with you. You don’t listen to anything other people say and instead of looking into stuff you just answer with bad faith arguments.

Goodbye.

The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.

A Hyperloop would just be an inverted extension of this

That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This is the real world we are talking about, you can’t just take another concept, invert it and “just” scale it up a few orders of magnitude. That’s not how any of this works.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you are just a young person who is dreaming about cool sci-fi stuff. And not the other case where you are simply dumb, a huge troll or a combination of both.

Please think about this stuff for real and then comment. Don’t parrot what idiots like Musk say. And if people tell you there’s huge physics issues, think about that instead of waving it away and say “it’s just engineering”.

I don’t think AR/VR will play a big role, I was talking about the acceptance and incorporation of digital systems in our every day lives. Corporations more willing to see digital meetings (even if it’s just chat or voice) as a viable alternative to physical meetings. The integration of e-mail in business processes and corporate communication. AR/VR isn’t needed at all, that’s just a gimmick to sell shit. But the techniques employed today have already reduced the need for people to be on a given location fast for work to such a low level, there really isn’t a need for any higher speed transport.

A comment on Lemmy really isn’t the best place to start a discussion about all the advances needed to make something like a Hyperloop possible. Plus there’s already plenty of resources online that go into great detail about all the things that are totally impossible. I’d also like to point out the burden of proof is on the people claiming a Hyperloop can actually exist. If you think it can exist, please tell us how to build one, without going all hand-waivy and saying that’s just engineering. Because it really isn’t, as soon as you even start to contemplate this you run into huge issues.

If you’d like to envision a fictional world where we have free energy in the form of nuclear fusion and are mining resources on the Moon and have working Hyperloops. Great! Go for it, write a book about it. I love reading sci-fi. But keep in mind it’s totally fictional.

As a little aside: I’m not sure where the whole nuclear fusion = cheap (almost free) and clean energy thing comes from. A nuclear fusion energy facility wouldn’t be that different from a nuclear fission facility. They would be huge, very expensive to build and maintain, with plenty of safety concerns. They still need fuel, they still produce nuclear waste. You’d still need to jump through all the hoops and get all the permissions that make nuclear fission facilities so expensive. You still need a whole bunch of water and have to deal with the same pollution / environmental impact issues a fission plant has. It would be cleaner and better than what we can do with nuclear fission in principle, but in practice we’ve had 50 years of experience with nuclear fission and the first fusion plant that produces energy in a usable way is still decades out. So in reality the difference might not be that big in the short term. A big advantage may be the unwarranted fear people have towards nuclear fission, which prevents a lot of them being built over the past 40 years and even has some perfectly fine facilities shutdown (looking at you Germany). If nuclear fusion can brand itself in a different way, maybe the publics fears would subside enough to let those facilities actually be built. But at the end of the day, the power wouldn’t be that much cleaner than we can get out of nuclear fission plants and would certainly be more expensive than current nuclear power (which is pretty cheap, but not free by a long shot). There is a big advantage in the fact nuclear fusion plants wouldn’t have the proliferation issues nuclear fission has. But on the other hand we know only the richest of rich countries in the world would have access to nuclear fusion and they already have nuclear weapons. So in that regards it’s kind of a non issue.

Again this points to me a blurring of lines between sci-fi and real life. I know in sci-fi small nuclear fusion plants are used as a literary device to explain to the reader why impossible things are possible and even practical, without needing to actually solve the problem or go into a big explanation that detracts from the main story. But let’s keep in mind sci-fi is fiction and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the real world.

This is very wrong. Hyperloops aren’t practically possible.

It’s not true that if something is theoretically possible, it is somehow also practically possible given enough engineering effort.

I know it’s easy for futurism fans and tech bros to say bruh it’s just engineering, but in reality we would have no real idea of how to build such a thing. You’d need advancements on so many levels and so many different fields, it’s not even in the ballpark of being possible right now. Engineering is putting existing techniques into practice, creating an optimized design and plans on how to build something. But engineers aren’t in the business of developing new techniques or materials. That’s up to the researchers and scientists to first figure out the basics, then develop it into something that could be useful, then create prototypes and then hand it over to the engineers to put it into practice.

And even if they were possible to build, the amount of energy, effort and resources far out way any problem they aim to solve. Not only can’t you ever make money on them, the timelines are too long for any government to keep such a project going if by some weird miracle it would be started at all.

Long story short: Hyperloops are a pie in the sky futurism sci fi concept which don’t even work in fictional scenarios. They can’t exist in the real world and even if they could, they shouldn’t.

I’ve also never heard anybody explain what problem Hyperloops intend to solve. It’s a solution looking for a problem. We can move people around the world plenty fast enough. And except for recreational use, the need for people to physically be at some location fast has gone way down over the years due to the internet and increasing digitalization of our society. And I for one hope we can get rid of the recreational part in the future, the amount of pollution caused by the use of jets and cruise ships doesn’t way against the benefits of going a long way from home for a holiday imho. But seeing the pollution has increased in these sectors let’s me know I’m the minority there. And anybody who says freight knows nothing about logistics and should perhaps look into that before speaking any further.

Bullshit, it could decode them just fine it would just take a while. It would only need a source of storage like a tape or floppy drive.

Back then and now we have our computers often do tasks which process more data than we have ram available. It’s not a hard problem to solve and we even solved it back then.

3** status codes: 4000%

Oops

Agreed, removed

Good advice, just to add to this:

• Comments should be part of code review, having at least two pairs of eyes on comments is crucial. Something that’s obvious to one person maybe isn’t so obvious to another. Writing good comments is as hard or harder than writing good code, so having it checked for mistakes and quality is a must
• Comments aren’t the actual documentation and aren’t a reason not to write documentation to go along with your code. Often I see larger projects where each class and function is documented in comments, but the big picture and the how and why of the overall structure is completely missing. Remember that in the real world you often have a lot of folk that need to understand how the code works, who aren’t programmers themselves. They can’t read the code or don’t have access to the code. Writing documentation is still important.
• Please for the love of god when you change code, check if the comments need to be updated as well. Not just around the immediate area, but also the entire file/class and related files. I’ve worked on large codebases before with a high wtf factor and having the code do something different to or even opposite the comments is a nightmare. I’d rather have no comments than wrong comments.

A 1000 ways to suck, a practical guide for how not to live your life.

Please note that every day thousands of people try to start with streaming/YouTube/TikTok etc. and almost all of them fail. It’s not impossible to make money, but it super hard and most people never make anything. I would never recommend anybody do it with the intent or expectation to make any money. Just do it for the fun of it and if you happen to make some money, great!

Fun fact: in Dutch the word pagina is pronounced exactly the same as vagina

Nope, you were totally right, only the single DisplayPort port connected to the onboard graphics.

Ah that’s too bad. Usually there is at least a HDMI or something extra. If you want you can post a pic for a second opinion, but I trust you if you’ve checked.