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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

    Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
    Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

    X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

    Half-Life 1 and 2.

    Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
    DCS is the best jet combat sim.

    Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).






  • Pretty much any Batman movie. It’s subtle, because it’s not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d’entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.

    I’d argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.

    Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that’s standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.

    Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it’s so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.



  • Saying that AptX is lossless since 2016 is blatantly false. And yes, just like with HDMI and USB, AptX standard naming and Qualcomm feature naming schemes are a misleading mess.

    There are 4 flavours of AptX (linked article states this as well), and only the latest supports lossless, but is available only on very few chipsets and devices so I even forget that it exists, because for all practical purposes it doesn’t.

    Denon Perl Pro, Bose earbuds and Cambridge Audio M100 are the only non-chinese earphones that I know of that support AptX lossless and the latter are not even listed by my local importer. Plus, you need a very specific (expensive) phone to use them because AptX Lossless is not available for all chipsets. Basically, Asus ROG 8 or Xiaomi Redmi K70 Pro for ones available to buy for me, and then it’s not available at every retailer, either, and the b2b wholesalers I have access to through work only list ROG Phone 8 (~1200€ retail).

    In conclusion, to make use of lossless AptX you have to jump through many hoops and spend a lot of money—700+€ phone and the 200+€ earphones. The standard is far from being, well, a standard; common and widespread. 99,9% of devices on sale and in use by people only support older AptX standards, mostly AptX HD (which is not lossless!).








  • Most likely the module, if it is a separate module and not part of the SoC of the infotainment system or whatever, works over CAN bus and the car will throw errors when it doesn’t detect its presence, or doesn’t detect the SIM card. Might even refuse to start if that module is missing. Might be possible to remove the antenna so the car thinks it’s just outside of the service area, but if it’s built into the PCB and the PCB is cast into resin/silicone for waterproofing, even this might be extremely difficult. Probably the module is also serialized* so replacing it with a “dummy” module or a module from a junkyard won’t spoof the system, either.

    *Manufacturers have been serializing even airbags for years, making replacing a faulty one with one from a junkyard impossible.



  • 140 dB under water is not the same as 140 dB in air. For underwater noise reference level is 1 uPa, in air noise level reference is 20 uPa. 140 dB under water would translate to 114 dB in air. Still impressive, a trained opera singer or a typical home hifi system can achieve somewhere around 105…110 dB, but far from a gunshot.

    EDIT: in another article it was mentioned that the actual sound level is 108 dB at 1 m which would translate to 82 dB at 1 m in air. 1 m distance is the standard distance to measure the SPL level of an object, eg a loudspeaker. Far less impressive and very, very far from an actual gunshot that is ~140 dB at 1 m distance. Science reporting at its “best”.


  • Privacy and anonymity are two very different things. Meta et al very much tie your real world ID to your online persona plus track, analyse, store and sell everything you do on their platforms (and possibly what other sites and apps you use).

    Your posts on Facebook can be set to “private” (only Meta and you/your friends see them), but they’re never anonymous. Eg if you start saying unwanted stuff if you live under an oppressive government, you will have IRL trouble.

    Your post on Fediverse can be public (everyone can see them), but anonymous (no-one can tie your IRL identity to your online persona). Eg you can make an account here and say things about your oppressive government and if you use basic anonymity tools (VPN-s, e-mail aliases etc) you cannot easily be tracked down.

    You can also be private and anonymous, eg tipping off journalists about stuff going on under your oppressive government by using anonymous, E2E encrypted message service like Briar. That way no-one can eavesdrop on your comms and only you know your real identity.