No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.

I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?

Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?

I can’t speak to monero specifically

But:

• Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
• Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?

Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.

Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.

While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.

If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.

Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).

No. Its a tablet. Marketed toward Professionals because of its focus on handwritten notes and sketches and the kind of thing where even the people who swear by it acknowledge it is insanely expensive and not something people should really buy.

Recurring theme on Remap but it very much highlights what category the ps5 pro is in. Same with comparing it to an apple vision pro.

Welcome to Walled Gardens. This is why so many of us swallowed our bile and rooted for Epic in their lawsuit against Apple.

No disc drive and no fucking vertical stand/mount.

And yeah. Sony actually tried to “kill” physical games years ago with the PSP Go (?). But that was still when Gamestop and Best Buy were power houses and there was a lot of threats of “okay. We will give all the good shelf space to MS and Nintendo” and that went away fast.

But now brick and mortar are basically dead and everyone is periodically pissed at Amazon because they did an unsanctioned 2 dollar discount on a new game. So we are seeing the return.

In theory it annoys me because the playstations have always been okay-good media players and I have one of the gundam breakers on a physical disc because that was the cheapest way to get all the DLC. But for higher end digital media we are missing the codecs (because money) and physical digital media as a whole is going away. So… probably the right decision to wean people off it.

That said: Charging extra for the fucking vertical stand is just insane since a lot of us had tv stands that cannot fit the PS5 horizontally. But also, considering this looke like it is a bit taller/longer, it also can’t fit it vertically so… Even more reason to build a new HTPC over the next few years.

Remap, but also Rob Zacny (so you can never tell how much is actually a bit), did a REALLY good bit where they immediately priced out the new Remarkable with all the expensive attachments and… it is still (probably) cheaper than a PS5 Pro with a disc drive and a stand.

The bag isn’t THAT wet (just enough chemicals to keep it from going purple AND to make getting good hashbrowns nigh impossible without more effort than it took to shred it in the first place) but yeah. Check your refrigerated lunch meats and cheese displays at your local supermarket.

I personally love them for “breakfast for dinner” or a week night (blasphemous) burrito. They are shit because they take so long to properly crisp up, but you can get them into perfect burrito texture in like 10-15 minutes on the stove.

And yeah. Unshredded chunks are incredibly common. First time I saw like half a potato though.

Again, cats aren’t singing. They understand it is just a different (much less efficient and much more danger prone) method of communication.

Animals are generally good at understanding that not everyone is them.

A great example is the best animal: The House Cat. Cats are pretty famous for catering their sounds to different targets. Mom not paying attention? Squeaky cry. Something needs to be taught who the big err… cat is? Growl. Content and happy? Purr.

Need something from a human? Meow. Because they understand that humans don’t understand purrs and body language to the same degree.

I noped out of Destiny during 1, but it isn’t dissimilar from most live games.

Some people want that endless content drip. They are the ones who tend to bounce between live games and so forth.

But for a lot of us? It is about the journey, not the destination. We played Elite Dangerous because we like flying and scooping and not because we want to buy every single ship. We play Warframe because we enjoy the movement and gameplay and not because we need to make our MR even higher. And so forth.

And for them? Hopefully there is new content at some point if only for Bungie’s sake. But even if there isn’t? They are still playing a game they enjoy.

Because back in the before time? I probably logged 30 hours on CTF-Face alone back in UT. I played and beat Freespace 2 at least a dozen times. Hell, I have basically an annual replay of DOOM 1 and 2 that I have been doing for longer than most of you have been alive. Sometimes you want something new to experience. And sometimes you just want to have fun playing a game you like.

That is wrong on many many levels.

Old school milsims actually were pushing the tech envelope. Novalogic were the kings of it and went all in on voxels for good or for bad (mostly bad). And it let them do VERY large worlds with a lot of entities being actively simulated at once with an art style that could run on hardware of the era.

And even the OFP/ArmA era were similarly beasts of games that mostly just took advantage of uniforms (that thing soldiers wore before cod and battlefield decided they wanted to sell skins) to reduce the textures that needed to be in memory.

The reason newer Ghost Recons don’t actually play like Ghost Recons is that they aren’t actually milsims anymore. They are movie sims. They want you to feel like you are Jim from The Office getting froggy with all the terries. You can see the same with the Rainbow Six games where they went from tactical room clearing to fighting off hundreds of terries in a single small house in Vegas (good game) to outright not even having pve anymore in Siege.

Which is the same reason Battlefield keeps trying to make people think it isn’t a Battlefield game whereas cod increasingly tries to become one. Major studios make games that sell well by remaking games that sold well.

Which is why publishers like MicroProse (modern and historic) are awesome. They make games that others aren’t making or that others aren’t doing a good job of. Sometimes that is a ridiculously complex mech game that nobody understands and other times you get something like High Fleet that is almost universally praised for its accessibility and style while also being streamer candy for the ones who try it.

But, at the end of the day: Just because a game isn’t made for you doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made.

Yup.

OpenMW is awesome, no arguments there. But it is really “just” an incredibly patched and modernized version of the Morrowind era gamebryo. One could argue it is comparable to if Bethesda ported Morrowind to Skyrim (they would be very much exaggerating but…).

But issues regarding level geometry, animations, world/cell space? All of that is still there.

Pickpockets have been a thing throughout all of human history. The key is to understand your surroundings and be aware of what you can do to minimize your risk.

But hey, continue to be a smug asshat who finds amusement in people being coerced by thieves.

It is genuinely more realistic and tactical because people don’t close one eye while looking through an optic (usually).

But yeah. Hard to convey and they haven’t pulled it off yet. But modern (and historic) Microprose knows how to rev my engine so still very interested.

People bring it up because they are smart enough to understand “we investigated ourselves and found no signs of wrongdoing” is not a defense.

Already explained it elsewhere but, the super short version is: Law firms are nor mandatory reporters outside of the most extreme cases. They are not investigating wrongdoing. They are investigating liability. They are looking for what was done in writing and what can be explained in the event of a lawsuit (and discovery).

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/15t1mzn/mandatory_meeting_the_after_madisons_departure/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 is james sexually harassing people during the seminar

Here is the verbose “We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” post https://x.com/LinusTech/status/1793428629378208057 with a real nice bit threatening anyone who ever dares to be a whistleblower again

At this time, we feel our case for a defamation suit would be very strong; however, our deepest wish is to simply put all of this behind us. We hope that will be the case, given the investigator’s clear findings that the allegations made online were misrepresentations of what actually occurred. We will continue to assess if there is persistent reputational damage or further defamation.

And here is Linus playing the “what about the white man” card https://x.com/linusgsebastian/status/1778165221414347053

Like almost all situations: Demonstrate growth. No, not “subscribers go up” but actually show that you are better.

• I’ll skip the anti-consumer stuff regarding merch because that has always been the brand and they at least learned to not tell people to argue against their own rights.
• Antagonistic behavior toward competitors: They are still doing the “we are the best because we are the best” bullshit in their marketing. They’ve at least started collaborating with Wendell from Level1Techs again which is nice. But just reaching out to the other channels would go a long way. Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed are basically the kings of technical reviewing and would actually benefit Lab for a collab. And GN and HUB are very open about having group discords where all the tech youtubers talk to corroborate strange behavior or let people know that AMD fucked everyone over and they need to re-do all their work for the past week.
• Gross incompetence in their own tech reviews: They apparently have made it a subscriber benefit for Floatplane that people can pay to error check videos which… okay. And they’ve taken down a few videos where they REALLY cocked up basic facts and conclusions. But it is still the same mess they have always been.
• Fucking over small businesses: They eventually gave the cooler company money which I guess was nice? But it looks like they still do a “Linus is made and hates this horrible product” every few months when they want a viewership bonus and it isn’t like they are going to do that to the companies that sponsor the LMG convention…

As for the really big ones? Sexual harassment and assault allegations?

A BIG first step would have been to get rid of james streib. Fucknuts was caught, on (audio part of a ) camera engaging in sexual harassment to the entire company during the fucking sexual harassment seminar the day after his report left the company because of sexual harassment from him and others. Whine about “people out for blood” all you want but that is the kind of cock up where you lose your job. Period. And the fact that people thought to record that meeting AND that linus and yvonne didn’t do a “What the fuck is wrong with you?” to him for that says a lot about what kind of a culture the company has. And putting him front and ecenter on thumbnails shows how little LMG cares.

But also? Their response to multiple allegations of harassment and assault has been to attack and discredit the victim, sometimes through blatant threats toward other employees? Fuck 'em. The brand is tainted and this is the point where you pivot to right wing grifting.

Speaking of which. I forgot to mention the time D-Brand made really racist jokes about a customer’s name and Linus Sebastient went to bat REAL hard with lots of “this wouldn’t be a problem if he were a white man” level responses. So… I guess they already got the memo.

Yes. Everyone and their mother posted that thinking they were clever.

It is also very telling that the concerns over warranties came up when:

1. The previous owner of the company who everyone knew and trusted died
2. There was active concern over the future of the company
3. The person trying to sell them that is a deranged lunatic with a sex pest best friend
4. The company is actively under threat of a hostile takeover spearheaded by people who might have killed the previous owner.

Are warranties foolproof? no. But they give you something so that you are only deciding if a lawyer is worth it when circumstances change significantly. Rather than by default any time anything goes wrong.

I think it was mostly that Naomi dropped it after excessive amounts of harassment. And Linus’s excuse was that she misunderstood him and it is her problem for thinking that a guy saying he would only give her a business opportunity if she came to his bedroom at 3 am was sketchy. And his wife was totally CC’d to some of those emails anyway.

I recall there was a different (not going to speculate on who the timeline would line up with…) case where Linus was accused of sexual assault (possibly outright rape?) where his defense was that he was a virgin until he met his wife which… okay.

As it stands, it is basically proven that the company has severe cultural issues regarding sexual harassment and bad workplace dynamics. The sexual assault accusations are still very much in the “where there is smoke…” range. And it is why I point out that Madison’s harassment claims were corroborated by former employees but her assault claims were not.

Rossman is a different mess, but I think it is undeniable that he has been a net positive on r2r over the years. And I think he will continue to be as long as he is someone that outlets like GN and even LMG collaborate with or reference but minimally platform.

But yeah. I think Rossman is genuinely a free speech absolutist with strong libertarian tendencies. Stuff like his “I don’t care if that amazon delivery driver was racist or not, this is unacceptable” just undermines his efforts. Same with his never ending hatred of NYC because he ran a business into the ground. Also his tendency to push immediately from “ads bad” to “STEAL THAT SHIT”.

Like, I immediately think of THAT Dril quote, but I do have to give it up to LMG from like three or four years ago. The idea that people SHOULD be aware of how to run adblockers and even dns level adblockers. But to also understand that they are pirating content (whether that is bad is up to the individual) and that some sites are going to block them or not work. Because that is honest and “real”. And it provides a conversation that can be had between companies and consumers.

Whereas Rossman has increasingly been “If they aren’t going to let you block ads, fuck 'em. Pay a different company to let you access their content without ads or giving them money” which just paints everyone who cares about privacy as a childish pirate with no respect for the work of others.