a alien

No problem, let me just say that I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve watched a lot of videos of other people trying it and the worst results that I’ve seen have been the ones using a gel that they paint onto the plastic and then cover in plastic wrap. This tends to leave a streaky effect because the substance is not equally thick in every area and so it has more whitening effect where it’s thicker.

The best results that I’ve seen have been the ones that have completely submerged the plastic in a liquid peroxide solution, or have suspended the plastic above the solution to immerse it in the vapors that evaporate off from the peroxide (pure oxygen). These methods give completely uniform coverage so they whiten the plastic equally in every place.

It seems that you also need strong UV, and people that live nearer the equator have better success using the sun. But in the absence of good UV lighting, heat also seems to have some effect.

Good luck!

But god forbid you unplug a controller while the console is switched on. Better know how to replace that fuse on the controller board!

(If you just bridge it with a wire, I won’t tell anyone).

Let me be the one to introduce you to the rabbit hole that is retr0bright. There are numerous videos on youtube of various different methods of retro-brighting.

The most scientifically thorough treatment of the phenomenon that I’ve seen is this paper: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Retrobright-Mystery.pdf

Thank you for making Hallowe’en content!

You need a visa just to pass through Singapore on a connecting flight?

The army of corporate boot lickers in the mobile phone context is largely composed of people who think banking on a smartphone is wise

This is extremely reductive and oblivious to the actual realities of banking in various countries. If you think it’s easy to be “unbanked” then I would suggest that you try it yourself first.

Because some banks now require you to authenticate every payment (eg. online payments using your debit card) and every new recipient for bank transfers, using their phone app. The apps rely on the chain of trust that Google and Apple provide with their TPM or “secure enclave” chips to cryptographically authenticate that it is indeed the same device that the bank previously authorized.

Online banking via the website of these banks will still require at least one tap on the phone app to authorize any transfers that you make on the website.

Linux phones (and custom Android ROMs) don’t benefit from this same chain of trust, and so even if they have the secure chip in the hardware, the banking apps don’t have a convenient API to query it, so the banking apps just don’t work.

Banking fraud causes a serious amount of money lost to criminals each year so it’s not surprising that the banks want better ways of determining if a request is really coming from their customer('s device) and not a criminal who phished their online banking password.

This situation won’t change unless either Linux phones gain in popularity enough that the banks decide to port their apps to the platform or a law is passed saying that banks must support more than just Google and Apple (ie. custom roms etc.) at which point the work will be done to use the hardware attestation available in the phone on other software platforms.

Paywall?

It might help, but I don’t think one paywall can account for a whole country’s GDP.

I read this post in a book.

Form over function. They probably have aspirations of getting VC funding and for that you need to look like every other web app.

Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192

The joy of having the freedom to make your PC do what you want and not have to constantly struggle against the machinations of Microsoft cannot be understated.

goto is the standard way of performing error handling in C, since there is no exception system or destructor mechanism to free resources when they are going out of scope.

Thank you both for telling me the answers to your security questions.

I generally do not trust manfucturer preinstalled OS.

Especially pertinent for Lenovo.

What if you symlink the SD card steamapps directory (since its unmounted the mount pount will just be a regular directory on the root filesystem) to your internal storage steamapps directory?

“Cloud storage” in the North is just a drawer full of usb sticks confiscated from people smuggling K-dramas in from the South.

You get incremental backups (snapshots) by using

--link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged

To use this you pass in the previous snapshot location as DIR and use a new destination directory for the current snapshot. This creates hard links in the new snapshot to the files which were unchanged from the previous snapshot, so only the new files are transferred, and there is no duplication of data on disk (for whole-file matches).

This does of course require that all of the snapshots exist in the same filesystem, since you cannot hard-link across filesystems.

I haven’t used Discourse, but what you describe sounds like the way that Slashdot has been doing moderation since the late 90s, by randomly selecting users with positive karma to perform a limited number of moderation actions, including meta-moderation where users can rate other moderation decisions.

I always thought that this was the ideal way to do moderation to avoid the powermod problem that reddit and lemmy have, although I acknowledge the other comments here about neglecting minorities being a result of random sampling of the userbase, but it is likely that this also happens with self-selected moderation teams.

Within minority communities though, a plurality of members of that community will belong to that minority and so moderating their own community should result in fair selections. Another way to mitigate the exclusion of minorities might be to use a weighted sortition process, where users declare their minority statuses, and the selection method attempts to weight selections to boost representation of minority users.

A larger problem would be that people wanting to have strong influence on community moderation could create sock-puppet accounts to increase their chance of selection. This already happens with up/downvotes no doubt, but for moderation perhaps the incentive is even higher to cheat in this way.

I think a successful system based on this idea at least needs some strong backend support for detecting sock-puppetry, and this is going to be a constant cat and mouse game that requires intrusive fingerprinting of the user’s browser and behaviour, and this type of tracking probably isn’t welcome in the fediverse which limits the tools available to try to track bad actors. It is also difficult in an open source project to keep these systems secret so that bad actors cannot find ways to work around them.