pixelscript

Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.

I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account's name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.

I've also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I've done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.

MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.

The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.

When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can't select which stock they're buying. Gee, I wonder what you're gonna be getting...

Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.

The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).

I have a fair amount of crap, but not a lot of it is of much interest to most people.

Unless someone out there wants me to show up with a laundry basket full of Fumos and subject them to an unsolicited three hour lecture on Touhou lore...

Sounds like it'd be very finicky and fragile!

I didn't compare it to modded content. I just wished for more circuit channels. The fact that at least one mod exists that offers this is irrelevant.

There is very much a noticable feel difference when comparing native engine features and content that sometimes has to awkwardly wrestle around the limitations of the mod API. A first-class feature implementation baked directly into the engine with its own interface is almost always an equally good or strictly superior experience to modded offerings, provided that the features are identical. So, given the opportunity for a feature I desire that a mod provides to become a native feature, I will never not root for that opportunity.

At least unlike Space Exploration, the transmitter and receiver buildings are the same, and not specialized only for send/receive. It's also tied directly into a building you'll be making anyway.

It's a pure win on all accounts, just less of a win as I'd have liked.

Only two circuit channels on radars is rather restrictive. It definitely won't be usable as any kind of grand open bus as I'd like it to be. Perhaps they think that's too overpowered.

Eh. It's a welcome change, anyway.

My thoughts exactly when reading this.

I believe people when they claim to develop free software. Often because it's software the dev wants for themselves anyway and they've merely elected to share it rather than sell it. The only major cost is time to develop, which is "paid" for by the creation of the product itself.

You (OP) are proposing a service. Services have ongoing fees to run and maintain, and the value they create goes to your users, not you. These are by definition cost centers. You will need a stable source of funding to run this. That does not in any way mix with "free". Not unless you're some gajillionaire who pivoted to philanthropy after a life of robber baroning, or you're relying on a fickle stream of donations and grants.

You indicate in other comments you will not open the source of your backend because you don't want it scooped from you and stealing your future revenue. That's fine, but what revenue? I thought this was free? What's your business model?

It sounds like what you want to do here is have a free tier anyone can use, supported by a paid tier that offers extended features. That's fine, I guess. But if you want to "compete with DuckDuckGo", you are going to need to generate enough revenue to support the volume of freeloaders that DDG does. If your paid tier base doesn't cover the bill, you will need to start finding new and exciting ways to passively monetize those non-revenue-generating users. That usually means one or more of taking features away and putting them behind the paywall to drive more subscriptions, increasingly invasive ads on the platform, or data-harvesting dark patterns.

Essentially what I'm saying here is, as-proposed, the eventual failure and/or enshittification of your service seems inevitable. Which makes it no better than DDG long term.

It is, at any rate, a very intriguing project.

mean: <2 eyes

median: 2 eyes

mode: 2 eyes

Seeing "please" in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

I believe I pay USD $70/mo for 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up. American midwest.

Tends to actually measure around 10%-20% higher than advertised. Just ran some speed tests and got 120/40. Not complaining.

$5/mo or $10/mo of that I think is for renting the modem which I stupidly have not bought yet.

I've never seen transfer rates given in MBps in the wild. It's always Mbps.

Serial network connections give no care to byte alignment, they operate either bit by bit or symbol by symbol (which are rarely byte aligned).