Pretty sure it’s against the TOS to do that. So if found, the account is simply terminated and it ceases being valuable. That means that even if it’s sold - it’s value isn’t in the games, but your friend network - as a sort of trojan spam/burner account. Which also means that it’s not worth more than a few dollars at MOST unless you’re some big-time twitch streamer with a vast network of steam friends.

So yeah, just be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s not likely some guy who wants an instant steam library - it’s someone who wants to exploit your friends, family, and acquaintances for money via scams. Don’t be that guy.

I liked it just fine!

I know there are a lot of Asimov diehards that found it disappointing. I don’t know why. The iRobot book wasn’t even really a book, it was a collection of short stories. Not exactly an easy thing to adapt to a movie.

Well, in the cases that I saw documented it happened in one of two ways.

1. Spotify assumes a record label submits good faith information. Many of these impersonation attempts come from “brand new” lables like “Gupta Music” and such. Since they are in the system as a label, it’s more permissive and Spotify generally assumes that it’s not their place to ask why a Band using one label is suddenly using another. These are the worst offenders and actually impersonate real artists.

2. Another approach that’s been reported is to not actually impersonate the artist, but to confuse the user that this is the artist visually. Take for example, The Weeknd - AI artists might upload a band named “Weeknd” or “The Weekend” or some other similar permutation - banking on genre similarity to get the algorithm to present you the song and hoping that you don’t notice the misspelling. These are still bad, but a bit less so since I can usually find the real band page for the “right” info.

As for new artists that get recommended, a quick search should be able to make it clear if an artist is a real person / group no? With tour dates or pictures and stuff?

I echo xuxxun’s feedback here, the newest bands often lack any sort of presence - especially with their first single or EP. A notable one back when they first released was Apocalypse Orchestra - basically ZERO info on the artist except for a newly created facebook page with no images or anything. Obviously that changed in just a few short months. It’s definitely not a method that would reliably sort AI from Human - but I do agree that it’s more likely to catch the AI stuff.

I read a bit of it. And while I understand the desire to get away from folks on the internet being harassing. That is the problem of the internet right now. I’d be remiss to say that if I had a thin skin, Tucson.social would be a lot harder to run. I’m not excusing the meanness of the internet when I say this, after all, it’s one of tucson.social’s goal to deal with that. It’s just a pragmatic fact.

There’s also the fact that the Creator has no desire to hand this off. I understand that is work. And that I am not entitled to their work. However, it seems to perform a defeatist narrative. Which just doesn’t feel constructive.

I’m in no way trying to be mean.

It’s just that this Creator is coming across as “taking his/her/their ball and leaving.” It kind of makes it harder for the community to pick up where they left off. No platform, no code base. And I think it’s fair to criticize that. It comes across as “returning the meanness they received and redirecting it at people with good intentions”.

I’m the type of person who is well resourced enough to pick this up and continue. Had I known about this project earlier, I might have been pitching in this entire time. But reading these posts now make me feel pretty unwelcome at least in that capacity.

I too am optimistic about community picking up where they left off. It’s just that it’s a lot harder to do when there’s not even ashes to rebuild from.

I’m sure the Creator is a good person. And I have no ill will against them. But I am a little bit upset that what they built will be lost in entirety.

I think, going forward, open source will be a requirement for any sort of platform like this for me. I just don’t want to be forced to lose something good because the Creator has made that decision for me.

But to your point, I probably shouldn’t have called them an ass.

As an aside, I think you shouldn’t be recommending this site. If it’s going to shut down, then what is the point of learning about this? There certainly isn’t any ability to swoop in and try to keep it going. I hope the existing user base enjoys the sunset celebration! But as a new user it just doesn’t make sense.

Looks like this is about to go away. 😢

EDIT: Looking at the persons thread as to why they are shutting down is… odd? Like, okay dude, you aint handing this over to anyone and nuking it - being an ass about it doesn’t help. And I say that not as a random internet denizen, but someone who supports multiple websites including tucson.social. I know there will be a day to dim the lights or pass the torch, but I’d never play up being the victim quite like this creator has.

Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7digital

Yup, I do that where possible now. Usually only for albums though.

I also buy a lot of band merch these days and try to go when they play locally.

I only take to the high seas in the event I can’t find a particular hifi release or something equally niche and eBay is no help.

CD’s have a nostalgia appeal to it for me, and since I’m finally financially stable I’ve been wanting to get back into collecting physical media. It’s just hard because not many new bands bother with physical media at all anymore. At least outside of limited run releases.

As an aside, I don’t get the resurgence of tape players at all! Tape being lower fidelity coupled with the shorter lifespan was something I thought people disliked.

UPDATE:

RYM is awesome. Thank you!

feeds on Bandcamp.

I have a Bandcamp account, but weren’t they acquired and sorta lost their souls as well? I’ll go check it out again and see what’s there!

I wondered the same thing actually.

After some googling I saw two trends emerge so far that impacted me.

1. A general proliferation of lower-effort Electronic music (particularly Lo-Fi and *wave genres) that are harder to distinguish from their human-made counterparts.
2. A wave of metalcore impersonation with AI just a couple weeks ago.

The metalcore one hit me hard as I just got into the genre and don’t yet have enough familiarity to find the generated stuff uncanny.

Basically that’s why it’s music discovery that’s impacted - not listening to already established bands.

As an example of this, one of my favorite bands is VAST (Jon Crosby) but he’s pretty inactive and doesn’t report songs that have been mistakenly added to his artist profile. I know this artist so well that I can tell within seconds if it’s actually him or not. So this AI problem is much more manageable for bands I already know and love.

Discovering new music however, has become a terrible experience full of disappointment and confusion.

Even on Windows, Proton drive is hot garbage. It never syncs my files correctly. Has a tendency to leave half encrypted uploads just lying around. Eating up desk space.

Don’t even get me started on how long it takes to upload anything. Got a 1 GB file? Good luck!

And that’s before getting into the fact that it’s proton’s third product. It was announced in 2019. 5 years and they still don’t have proton drive as a working product.

Another gripe I have is that the Linux VPN client still doesn’t support wireguard. Sure, you can download wireguard configuration files. And they work just fine. But changing servers is a pain in the ass because of it.

It’s made me seriously consider dropping my visionary plan and moving to a more competent provider.

That being said, proton mail has been fantastic. And I have a ton of domains on it. So it would be a pain to move. I guess I’m just in a stalemate.

I’m really surprised no one mentioned Terra Invicta!

Basically if the Three Body Problem series was a Grand strategy game.

In terms of grand strategy it is quite grand. So massive and complex that even 100 hours in, I haven’t completed a game.

That being said, it’s so addicting. I haven’t really played any other Sci-Fi games where you can take over multiple countries on Earth, take over other bodies in the solar system, and field space Navy to defend the planet.

Well, seeing that Insurgency: Sandstorm was on a sale, I just picked it up for him (and myself). Seems to have a lot in the map making scene, and that’s a really important factor for him.

It also helps that the prior Insurgency game has the most hours on his profile, by far. Gave me a good hint that he should enjoy this one.

Thanks so much!

EDIT: My dad just got back to me, and loves the gift. Apparently that’s where most of his online buddies went and still are. Nailed it!

Well that’s pretty compelling!

Ever since the failure of Windows mixed reality, there hasn’t been many non-Meta HMD’s worth buying. At least with inside out tracking.

Maybe this will finally pressure Valve to lower the price on the venerable Index? Probably not. But one can hope!

I’m running a Steam OS like experience on my Lenovo Legion Go. Not quite a steam deck, but very similar.

You should be able to use the heroic launcher. And you should be able to install it as a flat pack or a snap. That will make your GOG games as easy to download and install as a steam game. If I recall correctly, it even automatically adds entries for steam.

I regularly play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk on this device using the GOG edition.

I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she’s done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the “clean slate” was far more impressionable. She’d search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see “popping” videos, even though she’s now searching for dinner recipes.

So yeah, I saw her experience and decided “no thanks”.

To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it’s not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.

YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.

I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I’ve been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn’t seem to help at all.

At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it’s recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn’t feel like I’m missing much.

It’s just my client. Boost for Reddit doesn’t appear to show it correctly. It’s the opposite though. It just shows the text. Spoiling it for me.

deleted by creator

I have personal experience with these “churches” after my time in Portland. They were far and away worse than the homeless. They will harass and abuse you on the street ESPECIALLY if you dare express cynicism towards their spiel.

They will follow you, and verbally abuse you unless you bee-line straight for a police station too.

Why these charlatans are able to masquerade as a religion I’ll never know…

yeah…

They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.

Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.

I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.