commander, commander@lemmy.world

I’d absolutely use crypto if it was more available in anything I’d want to pay for. So far it’s mostly just VPNs and donations

At the size of transactions they’d be doing, it’d probably be worth it to set a high fee so that it gets picked up and processed faster. Should still be peanuts compared to the value of cargo these tankers are carrying

I’m hoping by the time googles Android goes to shit, GrapheneOS is readily available on more phones or PostmarketOS. Same with Linux with KDE Plasma Bigscreen running on a minipc rather than using an android TV box

Like others, desktop I’m using Firefox with ublock origin. Android phone, Firefox with ublock origin. Android TV, SmartTube. Ad blockers have always outpaced Google in my experience though I use youtube maybe like twice a week and I don’t randomly browse reccomendations. Just there for specific stuff

They’re propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors

To me twitter started off as like how the facebook timeline used to be, people posted inane stuff about their day. The place for people to overshare. It was the evolution of early 2000s personal blogs now told in a daily stream of single sentence posts.

Then it became celebrity gossip and it continued to be that until celebrities got on and it became the text version of Instagram. As in it was a major advertising portal. Then the scammers/wellness/influencers came in (just like Instagram) and it became where people tried to get people on financial multi level marketing schemes and special pink salt that removes negative ions from your surroundings (that’s still advertising). Around that time Trump was a hot take artist on Twitter and managed to parlay that to the White House (he really worked the media well in 2015/2016 - Twitter was the ultimate guerilla advertising platform then). To that event, whatever good discourse was going on on Twitter was deep in obscurity by like 2012. It had been a culture warzone well before Musk bought it

Everything becoming a punchline, I associate that with twitter. Like no delays joking about sex trafficking and Diddy became a joke day one of his arrest. Joking like that became mainstream on twitter a long time ago

Still worse than it was before. There’s no win in that

New consoles and maybe new steam deck. Maybe raspberry pi and similar SBC hardware won’t be stupid expensive anymore

These idiotic lawsuits. First of all, this isn’t even Valves responsibility. Second, Steam/Valve are small frys compared to Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft. In gaming they may be smaller than Sony and Nintendo and those two have full on closed software platforms. Steam is one software store among many on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. All these groups want to enshittify PC gaming. They want to enshittify personal computing in general. Turn pre-iPhone smartphone operating systems into iOS

They’re hosting their own Forgejo. Forgejo is easy to self host. There’s even easier simpler stuff like Gitbucket. If you want something with a ton of features, Gitlab self host but that takes way more resources. Personally I have Gitbucket on my NAS for my basic stuff but am thinking about giving Forgejo self hosted a try. It looks better than gitbucket

Tech writers consistently suck. We’ve had 3rd party app stores for a long time. Googles trying to make them worse, not welcoming them

If someone doesn’t like Mozilla, use a Firefox fork rather than a chromium one. Brave and other chromium forks to get away from Google surveillance and dominance of web standards makes no sense to me

You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it

https://a.co/d/06KEUx7E

This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical

https://a.co/d/0cKQrMAZ

Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you’re not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5” woofers. You’ll appreciate them for music too

There’s a bunch of brands and you really can’t go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don’t require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, …

Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

In my group of friends I describe what I feel related to this as, obsession with youth/fear of aging, and consumerism/tourism rebranded as spirituality/wellness/experiences

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65”, they’re the best option.

Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65” model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65” with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

Go Valve go. Screw Facebook/Meta, Google, Apple. I want the future of VR to be standard desktop Linux centric. The iOS/Android state of mobile is annoyingly restrictive compared to even Windows let alone desktop/server Linux

Lol. Please everyone contribute to the change you want to see. If you’re not sharing spreadsheets and slide decks in a team, then for personal use you should be good with Collabora (LibreOffice based). It’s great. Write your novel and short stories in Collabora

https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-office/

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/