Prophet Zarquon @ FordPrefect @startrek.website

Sorry I'm a bit late

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.

Hmmm, that reminds me; I need to separate out all the old ones that say "10BaseT"

802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we've become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.

After the usual "Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals" reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.

Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?

Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they're about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.

Them: "The WiFi is down."
Me: '... No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.'
Them: "I can't connect to Flipboard."
Me: 'Ohhh, the internet is down. It's probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.'
Them: "Yep, now the WiFi is back."

I'm just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.

Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that's why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.

Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people's routers nearby.

Weird: I just noticed that I have seekbar preview on my desktop install of VLC, but not mobile. Now I want to compare to the Win version as well, because I'm noticing some menus look different than I remember.

Honestly, I install VLC just to snag the file-associations away from the WMP / Windows Video apps, because they remain insecure by default.

No. I'm open to suggestions.

If I had to install right now, it would be Debian, just out of familiarity.

Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, even Kali are fundamentally changed from when I last tried them.

Linux window managers change more often than I need to reinstall; I get really tired of picking a distro based largely on its choice of window manager, just to end up with Gnome installed anyway after a few packages fetch their dependencies.

The other nice thing about running vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu) is that at least some of the documentation for some apps, will be applicable!?

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I'm just glad when I see media with a plot that I don't immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

I feel like you replied to someone else's comment?
Gimp feels just like Photoshop before Creative Suite editions...
Everything that's not MS Paint, feels like a huge upgrade to me. On Windows, I open Paint.NET as often as any other image editor, just because I don't need more than that for most copy\paste\crop\color tasks.

I haven't done any illustration or background\logo art in about 20 years. I'm not even sure what features are considered most defining, for a good image editor these days?

That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC... I haven't really had any reason to install MPC in... wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.

What shit did I start? I agree 100% with the sentiment of this post's OP: Teachers moving to corporate marketing jobs just to get a survivable wage, is a tragedy of first order. The people who do our societies most vital work are not rewarded anywhere near commensurate with the importance of their work; hence my reading of this post.

I was joking about needing 18650 cells as a point of reference for pricing... mostly. I really don't have any sense of the prices of those other commodities you mentioned. Regardless, based on what you said, it seems like Australian teachers are better off than here, but still grossly undervalued?

And no, I hated the musical episode of Strange New Worlds because it wasn't up to my expectations based on their invoking of Buffy The Musical, but I loved most of Discovery & Stamets is freaking gold. I didn't really think they could top the engineering hijinks until Tig Notaro as Jet Reno was introduced. She's a treasure.

I have had good luck finding what should be basic essential goods from overseas brands, when the major US brands stop making them. I was unironically, seriously, asking if you or anyone here could suggest a brand of jeans that still comes in loose fit black, as that's literally all I can wear to work & need them for life as well. Sorry to derail the topic; I was leery of that, but Australia has good stuff sometimes so I figured I'd risk it!

It did lead to one, but he didn't last forever, & again, I think it's pretty hard to argue they were better off before than after.

Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.

They're intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don't really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.

That said, TPB's continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run "internet" we have today.

It's a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.

It's planned to have communication features beyond file-transfer, but otherwise I'm not sure what similarity you're seeing, to what the OP suggested...

Which describes torrent apps 15 years ago. I'm really not sure what people think is missing?

Search engine functionality goes in the sharing\communication app.

DHTs in the '90s already had search & tagging & even some rudimentary social networking, built in.

Networks like Tribler's don't really need a lot more features, so much as just raw usage; most people torrenting are still using the mainline DHT, which doesn't have a search layer.

That's largely on those users. Advanced DHT search with rich social features, already exists for those who decide to use it.

+1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:

• Social features
• Discovery\follow
• Patronage\ratios
• Sync (via following \ autodownload)
• Curation\filtering\tags

Doesn't really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for "privacy", use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).

(I know this sounds insane, but I don't use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend's computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK...? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I'm not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I've never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)

+1 to those who said DHT.

There's no tagging support, but I'm not sure why I'd need tagging.
DHT crawling reveals pretty much every active public torrent, & finding what I want is just a matter of including it in the search terms.

"s04e10 2160p x265" brings up every torrent containing a file with s04e10, 2160p, & x265 in its filename.

I could foresee plenty of situations where tagging for quality, & for metadata beyond filenames & sizes, would be useful; I just haven't actually had it come up.

Everything I need shows up on DHT search.

Well, except .STL files, but that seems to be because they're given away for free so often there's no impetus to make torrents of them?

DHT crawlers find pretty much all the active torrents. No shortage of 4K content; as @burgersc12@sh.itjust.works said, just add 2160p to the search terms.

No trackers needed. (Omit the tracker URLs when loading magnet links too; they're not at all necessary.)