Never underestimate how actively worthless “eyewitness” testimony is.

I was not aware of this detail. But if it were just bystanders telling stuff to cops before they got a hold of the footage, they are going to go with it. Especially since it is already pretty worthless to begin with (so many jackets are easily reversed).

The nose I can go either way on. It looks “different” to me but wearing a mask and not grinning makes a huge difference there (it is why you are told to not smile for ID photos). The eyebrows are more a function of angle and resolution as you can see some darkness on the left (and he is obviously scowling and not flirting with a cute desk girl).

As for the jacket and backpack? Too lazy to look up the backpack models (people figured it out) but the one on the left looks small enough to fit in the one on the right. So he has his backpack for travel and then a smaller one full of gun and snacks and whatever else for the stakeout.

I guess the happy hostel guy would have come forward and been like “WTF?” and “I have an alibi” if it wasn’t him?

Never talk to the cops without a lawyer and NEVER voluntarily talk to them.

Also? The cops are going to find SOMEONE in the next week or so. And you can be damned sure they are going to take advantage of all of the news and social media about how this is a skilled hitman fighting for the loss of a loved one who WILL NOT BE TAKEN ALIVE. They’ll corner whoever they can pin it on, shoot them a few times, and then plant a gun and call it a day.

They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.

And yet?

Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.

I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.

So… Windows?

I vaguely recall an extra worry a few min because. But my expert is that windows inevitably clobbers the boot loader eventually. So unless it is a laptop (where you are better off with a VM or wsl anyway) just give each os their own disc and use the BIOS for boot order.

I have nothing against the wolders but the admins of that instance raise more than a few eyebrows. Particularly when they rolled back specific anti hate speech policies in favor of vague common sense ones to stay ahead of the anti-woke crowd.

Kind of feels like they have been trying to take over Lemmy. Which… Could be a lot worse but still rubs me the wrong way.

Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

And… while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.

My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven’t looked super closely.

I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that… mostly I don’t care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don’t mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.

Doesn’t even really let you do that.

A “DRM Free” kindle ebook still basically requires a physical kindle (or shenanigans with apps) to even access the raw file of. If you just go to your content library to try and download it to transfer via USB you get told to pound sand and buy a kindle. That might change if you have a physical kindle registered to your account (I currently read exclusively via my phone and my onyx boox) but… yeah.

And yeah, as long as it is in The Cloud, amazon can do whatever they want. I am not aware of having any books removed from my account but I do recall having the option to “upgrade” an ebook to a newer version in the case of publisher screw ups.

Of course you don’t. Did anyone think otherwise?

Kindles have always slotted in as somewhere between the mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks. Cheap books you read once or twice and then likely never again. If you do get in the mood to read it again? mobi files hold up a lot better than pulp designed to decay in order months but MMPBs always had a tendency to be lost forever just like amazon has a tendency to fuck with your library.

If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.

If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.

If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.

Yeah. Keychrons are kind of a clusterfuck because they release like five limited runs every month. But… basically all of those are the same feature sets but might have slightly different internals based on whatever they bought in bulk the previous month. It DOES make figuring out what to buy kind of annoying but… logitech and razer have been doing that for years anyway.

Keyboard wise? At this point, prices have dropped enough that there is no real reason to go to one of the major manufacturers for anything that isn’t disposable. And basically “all” of the smaller batch mechanical keyboards are dependent on QMK or VIA to some degree which means you can customize them on any machine that can run chrome.

For the logitech price point/build quality? Unless you know why you don’t want one, you can’t go wrong with a Keychron (https://www.keychron.com/). The price and build quality isn’t “the best” but it is very much on par with the logitechs and razers of the world and they are perfect for someone who just wants “a keyboard that works” or someone who wants to learn what they ACTUALLY want out of a keyboard.

Mouse wise? There are an increasing number of “third parties” but… they basically all suck unless you are going to go crazy and mod them. And while I think the firmware matters less in these cases, there are an increasing number of qmk/via mice but… they mostly feel “cheap” or like they are just proving the viability. I have a friend with a ploopy but even he doesn’t really recommend it. So… you are still more or less suck with logitech and razer and the like for that. But hopefully as those companies lock their hardware down more it will lead to something in between “here is a cheap no name ergonomic mouse” and “here is a five hundred dollar mouse”.

Are there any good resources for qmk/via mice? Mostly can only find a few that feel like they are, at best, proof of concepts and more likely just outright predatory scams to cash in on people who want to spend money.