I have a Binatone one in a crate here with essentially the same selection of games on it. It was a really common thing to clone, there was one chip that played them all.

No, Radofin was a UK-only brand.

You could definitely kill a villain with my laptop, if you fired it with sufficient force from a cannon.

I’d be amazed if this works, since these sorts of tricks have been around since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and most bots will use pretty modern zip libraries which will just return “nope” or throw an exception, which will be treated exactly the same way any corrupt file is - for example a site saying it’s serving a zip file but the contents are a generic 404 html file, which is not uncommon.

Also, be careful because you could destroy your own device? What the hell? No. Unless you’re using dd backwards and as root, you can’t do anything bad, and even then it’s the drive contents you overwrite, not the device you “destroy”.

most firmware releases will be to fix something with the online service anyway. If it displays stuff coming down a wire from your PC when you buy it, it probably never needs an update.

If we ban people from “earning” over a certain amount, they’ll get round it through “gifts” or exchange in-kind or something, right? Same with ads. If we ban them, then product placement with plausible deniability will be rife, paid through essentially money-laundering methods, worse than it is now.

it’s not talking about tracking emotions from looking at the viewer, it’s tracking the emotions in the script of the thing they’re watching, so it knows what they like.

It’s just the addition of “AI”. We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. I used to work for an advertising data company over a decade ago, and they filtered all the ads for one of the big channels’ streaming services in exactly the same way just with regular algorithms rather than AI. It’s what would make ads for men’s razors appear in the middle of a soap opera at 11PM because it knew the user was a man getting home from the pub.

This is one of those things where if I was to say, “no, but I know celery”, people would think I was being silly.

That’s incorrect.

BlueSky relies on JavaScript to run (try turning it off and loading their site, it won’t even render). Click-through traffic is almost exclusively measured by JavaScript (e.g. Google ad “events”). This is the same as measuring other stats, like whether you lingered on a post before scrolling past it, or whether you opened another tab, or whatever.

Proxy links are absolutely a method of measuring traffic, and they’re a method that works even when the site has JavaScript disabled - but since that’s not how Bsky works, it’s not relevant.

For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being “join mastodon.social”, with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to “bluesky social”.

It’s a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it’s difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.

• No “starter kits” which are just positive-feedback loops for popular accounts
• No “algorithm” which promotes popularity or engagement over quality or relevance