Graphene has really caught my eye in the last several months, but unfortunately I couldn't find a good deal for Pixel phones (>128GB storage), used or new. That's the biggest bottleneck for adoption it seems. I just finally switched from an S10E to a S25Ultra (black friday deal brought down to $820), but not being able to use Graphene in the future hurts a bit for sure.
Readit Newsy-c-o-m-b commented on GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches grapheneos.social/@Graphe... · Posted by u/akyuu
y-c-o-m-b commented on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality jamanetwork.com/journals/... · Posted by u/bpierre
I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer. But I do have doubt in vaccines especially mRNA vaccines nowadays, and I wish these studies do more than just this.
I have 4 kids, and 3 of them got vaccinated for the covid (1 is a baby 2 years old) for the very first time with Delta. They struggle for weeks to recover, they get tired, they seem to have heart related symptoms. Eventually, those went away after months. The baby has never had covid (no vaccine). I then have never covid vaccinated them, and they have never been sick with covid even though my wife and I caught covid after our 3rd vaccine shots. We didn't do any isolation, we share things and direct contacts with them. They might have had Covid but very mild, the quick tests never showed positive.
My wife got blood clot issue that I saw blood coming out from her skin.
I struggled many months with the vaccines with weird fatigues (I'm normally very healthy in my late 30s). My gut biome seemed to change and I became quite sensitive to some food (milk proteins mostly, not just lactose intolerance)
My mom who lived in a different country got 3 shots and she struggled with heart condition for more than a year, Drs couldn't find the reason why. It was difficult for her to do anything with strength. She finally recovered after 1+ year.
There're many real and true stories like mine, I really have no idea what these studies saying anymore.
I'm having a hard time following your second paragraph, but I don't see where you're questioning the cause of these issues to be covid itself instead of the vaccines?
That's my biggest problem with the "I now have X problem after the vaccine" crowd; quick to blame the vaccine, but they never question whether it was the virus itself that caused it.
My dad is one of these people and it infuriates me to no end that he defaults to "vaccine bad" and not his irresponsible behavior during the height of the pandemic which caused him to get very sick from the virus itself. Nor the fact that he had a very visible lyme disease rash 20 years ago and refused to get treatment because "MDs bad". He's quick to blame his neurological disease on the covid vaccine though, so frustrating.
y-c-o-m-b commented on Unreal Tournament 2004 is back old.reddit.com/r/unrealto... · Posted by u/keithoffer
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.
The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.
I found somebody on Youtube a few years back that remade Nyleve Falls in 3DS Max and all I could think was how cool it would be to reboot Unreal 1 with modern graphics.
y-c-o-m-b commented on Unreal Tournament 2004 is back old.reddit.com/r/unrealto... · Posted by u/keithoffer
I found the CD earlier this year while I was packing for a move. Couldn't help myself and played a few DM-Morpheus bot matches. The graphics look dated but the fun was all still there. Few games ever since managed to hook me like this one did.
Is that the low-gravity one? Such a fun map.
I remember modding the homing missile gun (forgot its name) to be more agile around corners and building obstacles courses in Unreal Editor for DM-Morpheus to shoot the missiles through. Modding Unreal games was always a great time considering the technology back then.
y-c-o-m-b commented on Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse platformer.news/roblox-ce... · Posted by u/FiddlerClamp
> The fact that this still happened despite my many roadblocks and safe-guards I put in place really shocked me to the core. Not to mention the whole "am I terrible parent" question which naturally arises out of all this
I don't want to kick you when you're down, but you tried a technical solution on a human problem.
I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Can you elaborate on what a "human" solution would be in your mind? For us, it was a combination of technical, educational, and traditional parenting as well as some therapy for other behavioral issues exhibited in school. We had after-school classes and sports. We played board games as a family. From our perspective, we were doing things correctly in both the technical and human aspect of it to make sure it never got to that point, yet it still happened.
y-c-o-m-b commented on Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse platformer.news/roblox-ce... · Posted by u/FiddlerClamp
Out of curiosity how did they manage to sign up for Instagram? Browser? Asking for a friend
Ah great question, I wondered this myself as there was no phone involved here (in our household) and Instagram has been banned on my network for many years. It was from a friend's phone at school and that same friend later provided my child with an old galaxy tab to bring home, which was cleverly hidden under the carpet beneath the bed with wifi access to our neighbor's internet (provided by neighbor's kid as well). It's amazing the lengths they'll go through to circumvent rules.
EDIT: and if you're wondering where the initial exposure to Roblox came from, it was from an Android tablet I had at the time which was setup strictly for kids games (hence the FamilyLink with time limits and stuff)
y-c-o-m-b commented on Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse platformer.news/roblox-ce... · Posted by u/FiddlerClamp
I didn't grow up with Roblox.
I did grow up gambling pogs and MTG cards. I did grow up getting verbally sexually harassed at a Chuck-e-cheese. I did grow up finding my uncle's porno mag collection.
I also did grow up playing Ultima Online with a group of people who knew I was a kid and helped and guided me through some really hard times with compassion.
It's easy to focus on the amplification these platforms have on all the negative parts of our society. And it's a valid criticism . But it also should equally amplify the positive outcomes that occur from finding a community when you live in a bad situation or one with limited positive outcomes.
As usual education is key here and unfortunately our education system (and parents) will never be able to keep up with the pace of advancement. There is no room for nuance or gray areas in our society, everything is too polarized and personal responsibility is non existent.
Education will not be enough. They actually teach about this stuff in school and give plenty of warnings believe it or not.
I also gave lectures and installed FamilyLink and put restrictions on my router to prevent my child from accessing devices in a way I didn't approve of or when I couldn't adequately supervise it. The sneaky little shit still found ways to circumvent all this both here at home and at school. My child completely ignored all the warnings and eventually got roped into talking to a very sick predatory individual over Roblox.
The Roblox creep convinced my child to sign up for Instagram where they were able to get on video calls often. They then made my child watch them do very disturbing things, including attempting to hang themselves, cutting themselves open, and other very sick shit that I would have never imagined. They then threatened my child that if it was reported, they would kill our entire family. This went on for a couple of years apparently and we're still dealing with the trauma and fallout of it years later. Authorities were unable to determine the identity of the individual due to the many layers of obfuscation (fake names, VPN usage, etc).
I'm a software engineer of nearly 20 years and very knowledgeable of tech. The fact that this still happened despite my many roadblocks and safe-guards I put in place really shocked me to the core. Not to mention the whole "am I terrible parent" question which naturally arises out of all this. I've been reassured that I did everything I could reasonably do to prevent it, but that question always weighs on my mind regardless.
I warn every parent I can to keep their kids off Roblox and other "community driven" games that are like this.
This is mostly why I stopped going on Reddit. At least on X I have more control over what I see and mostly just follow trustworthy accounts. I just assume most of the commentary on mainstream American subreddits like politics is infiltrated by foreign actors and bots.
I left because I couldn't stand the echo-chamber and hivemind attitudes. There's also way too many people arguing just for the sake of arguing, even though they agree with your overall comments. It was slightly more manageable when you just stuck to very niche sub-reddits like gardening, landscaping, cozyplaces, sub for tv-shows etc. Now it's nothing but bots and AI garbage. The platform is beyond saving.
y-c-o-m-b commented on I just want working RCS messaging wt.gd/i-just-want-my-rcs-... · Posted by u/joecool1029
> Iran is Telegram
I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still popular. I remember reading an article on here about a whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60 million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of the country.
Can confirm, my family back in Iran doesn't use Telegram and haven't for quite some time. They're all on WhatsApp. Telegram seemed to be popular in Iran during the Whatsapp ban and it switched back to Whatsapp being dominant it seems. Which is very annoying to me because I loathe Meta and don't use any of their products.
Also I once asked an employee for help locating an item and they told me to pull up the app. I was like "you pull up the app", and we sat there for 5 minutes waiting for things to load until he decided he'll just help me locate the item lol