I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.

But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.

Really depends on your current tool so RTFM on that.

But when you are activating it in your account? There is a QR code you are supposed to scan. And there is almost always a button like “Having trouble?” or “Show TOTP Key” or whatever. Click that and you get a long alphanumeric string instead. Paste that into the TOTP field for Bitwarden (or Keepass or whatever) and it will generate codes for you.

Once or twice I have had to actually use my phone camera to decode the QR code so that I can manually type in the TOTP code/seed, but I think the last time I did that was in like 2020?

There is.

2FA. No, not the fucking “we’ll send you an SMS” bullshit that is increasingly used to just highlight an active phone number for spam purposes. Proper TOTP with the code backed up to a proper service (bare minimum, Bitwarden)

Someone can steal your password and even your email account (unless you TOTP that too…). They still can’t get into your account unless you are an idiot who gets tricked into providing the 2FA key.

In a perfect world? Have your TOTP credentials in one encrypted database/Bitwarden account and your passwords in another. In reality? Just use a trusted service. I used to be a big fan of Keepass but protecting that with a yubikey (or similar) is a huge mess.

The recent push for passkeys (?) is a nice-ish middle ground. People don’t need to understand how to paste a TOTP code into Bitwarden but they still need to approve a login. That said, I hate it since so much of it is dependent on a single device that can generally be opened by just applying REDACTED to the screen and doing REDACTED to narrow down the lock code significantly.

I mean… It would be nice if they put a nicer message there. But I mostly agree with that.

Look up how people social engineer their way into apple accounts and so forth. The more you put the burden on a (perpetually) underpaid CSR the easier it is to steal an account, Spin a sob story and then harass the CSR until they just reset your password so you will go away. Except there is no guarantee that is YOUR password and now we have yet another stolen account.

The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.

But some highlights:

1. Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
2. Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
3. Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
4. Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
5. Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
6. Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense

They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.

I mean… plenty of youtubers and channels are doing exactly that. Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and the “educational” gun youtubers have History of Weapons and War. A bunch of creators did Nebula. Corridor Digital have their channel. That comedy channel that came from college humor have their own site? Same with those two channels that pissed everyone off in the past few weeks? And Linus Media Group have been trying to add “we run a shitty version of youtube” to their grift for years now. And Rooster Teeth and Giant Bomb had their own video site for basically the entirety of their runs.

Let alone stuff like Utreon and the other one. And then there are the various successors to liveleak that are basically about spamming yu with an insane amount of spyware and ads in exchange for letting you upload faces of death.

And while I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea that mostly just does the legwork for those sites to run the software: Peertube is a thing and there are plenty of instances that exist.

So I am REALLY curious what evil organization you think is waiting to kill anything that is not made by Youtube. If you comply with DMCA requests and don’t host CSAM then it is just a function of whether you can afford it.

Which… is the real issue. There is just a ridiculous volume of storage and bandwidth required for even a “small” youtube. Which is why almost all of the successful “alternatives” only really host a very small subset of videos.

So… to punish them for “harvesting” your data you are going to… continue to give them your data.

“Time theft” is very questionable and more a topic for society as a whole but…

Okay? Then don’t watch youtube. Rather than allow them to engage in “time theft” but calling yourself smart because you don’t watch ads.

Also: As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the scale of Youtube (and Twitch) is massive and truly hard to comprehend. The only companies that even have a snowball’s chance of running that are Google, Amazon, and MS because they ALSO have giant “cloud” services. And… it is pretty clear none of them really know how to run a site like that (hence why MS just gave up entirely).

In this case, they are a monopoly because they are the only company that even wants to try and make something as massive as youtube work.

But, regardless: It is fine to not “feel bad” about running an adblocker. Just don’t “feel bad” when youtube runs a you-blocker as a result.

Sort of.

The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.

The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).

And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.

And the fact that Microsoft noped out says it all.

Basically, the only orgs that have a snowball’s chance of hosting a twitch/youtube are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on account of them also being three of the largest “cloud” providers and having the resources at cost. Amazon/Twitch are scrambling to find a way to deal with the increasing shift to sponsored streams, Google/Youtube are cracking down on adblockers, and Microsoft just gave up.

People refuse to even let an ad play but sure, they’ll participate in the pledge drives

Always worth pointing out:

People were skeptical of toilet water but after Not Sure et al demonstrated that it was effective, they embraced it.

We have people who were skeptical of… modern medicine. And when vaccinations were demonstrated to be effective they… shoved horse medicine up their asses and attacked medical workers.

We are so far past Idiocracy.

Mentioned it before but:

LLMs program at the level of a junior engineer or an intern. You already need code review and more senior engineers to fix that shit for them.

What they do is migrate that. Now that junior engineer has an intern they are trying to work with. Or… companies realize they don’t benefit from training up those newbie (or stupid) engineers when they are likely to leave in a year or two anyway.

Yeah… anyone who believes that meme has never interacted with a customer.

People who get angry about an emulator not having the right capitalization on a menu twelve layers deep is shitty. So are people who have a single site license but insist you need to add twelve features or they will take their business elsewhere. And they usually interact with Sales who give less than a single fecal particle and just make tickets and start blaming you for all the problems in their life.

While “AAA” has lost all meaning: even in that space we have some real bangers already

Yakuza/Like a Dragon 8 is already in the running as one of the all time great JRPGs (and probably a top 50 GOAT in terms of games period). FF7R2 is going to have to REALLY screw up for fans to not feel strongly about it. And Dragon’s Dogma 2 is, somehow, showing all signs of actually being faithful to the incredibly weird original. We also might be seeing Elden Ring DLC sooner than later. Tekken 8 seems to be incredibly well received… accessibility aside. That gets us to the end of March (ER has a mysterious youtube entry but it has for weeks so who knows)? Even if nothing else happens this year, that already is a stacked as hell line-up.

Two months in and, gaming wise, 2024 is shaping up really well. Like most years, people see what they want to see. If you want to say things are a flop, there are flops. If you want to say things are awesome, there are some truly amazing games.

I just use a pretty generic z-wave plug and home assistant. In the past I did more complex setups that actually determine what process is spiking and so forth. But eventually realized that “this is doing a lot of compute…” is a catch all for a LOT of potential issues.

And I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “shouldn’t be wireless”. It is inherently going to be wireless because you will be on your phone on the other side of the planet. If you genuinely suspect you will be vulnerable to attacks of this scale then you… probably have other things to worry about.

But as a safety blanket?

With my firewall disabled a lot of my internal network (including home assistant) will fall over sooner than later.

But that is also a recipe for mass stress. Because I know “something happened”. And now I know “in six hours, I need to check in and make sure that ‘something’ is still not happening”. Which is extra shitty if I got the notification late evening local time.

I have friends/neighbors that I trust to swing by and push a button in the event I need to bring it back up before I get home. But if I have reached the point of “it is possible my wireguard credentials were compromised?” then I really don’t need to be able to download the next episode of ATLA NOW.

Never used it “in anger” but:

I have my firewall plugged into a metered outlet (plugged into a UPS). I have it set up to send me alerts if power draw increases beyond a certain threshold. I’ve tested it and wireguard is measurable (yay) but so are DDOS attacks. If I get that alert, I can choose to turn off that plug and take my whole network offline until I get home and can sort that out.

Gotten a few false positives over the years but mostly that is just texting my partner to ask what they are doing.

Oooooooh.

Thanks. Will take a look to try and figure out their terminology for this.