zoroa's recent activity

  1. Comment on Avatar: Seven Havens | Official trailer in ~tv

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    Could you expand on this. I'd always been under the vague impression that Nickelodeon was the big bad in the story, given how they barely gave Korra airtime and largely abandoned one of their most...

    The more behind the scenes I learn about ATLA and Korra, the less I trust Bryan/Mike.

    Could you expand on this.

    I'd always been under the vague impression that Nickelodeon was the big bad in the story, given how they barely gave Korra airtime and largely abandoned one of their most enduring IP for almost 20 years.

    But I've also never looked into to it, and am interested if there's a story to tell.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Avatar: Seven Havens | Official trailer in ~tv

    zoroa
    Link
    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago. None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I...

    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago.

    None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I can't tell if it's an issue with my computer, but the animation looked a little choppy at times. Especially in comparison to the new Avatar movie, or even to Korra from 14 (!!) years ago. But that's easily forgotten if the story is good.

    I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "hating the avatar" thing (even if I do agree that Korra was pretty meh). The feelings of hope and reverence the Avatar inspired in the first show were often really effective character building moments, since they either highlighted something about the character or about the Avatar that inspired the feelings in the first place. Unclear if I should put much faith in the showrunners sticking the landing, so I don't know that I'll be buying a Paramount subscription to find out.

    9 votes

  3. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    Android UI Automation with ADB I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting...

    Android UI Automation with ADB

    I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting you export your bookmarks, there's no way to restore backups of your bookmarks.

    That hasn't been a problem before, since Android's "Use Your Old Phone to Setup Your New Phone" feature would carry the data over. But I couldn't use that approach the latest time I had to setup my phone anew. A feature request would've fallen on deaf ears, since Glider was abandoned shortly I started using it. And despite how simple I imagine the implementation would be, I had no interest in rebuilding the app.

    So I started doing it manually, and after only a couple minutes I was researching how to automate the manual tapping I was doing in the UI.

    Unsurprisingly, adb can do that. It just takes enabling Show Pointer Location in Developer Settings so you can see the coordinates of the UI you want to hit. Then you can use adb to programmatically send touch events.

    So after only an afternoon debugging a surprisingly long Python script, a detour into a hackernews api, and another detour in programmatically clearing my bookmarks from the app, I successfully automated restoring my bookmarks. A process that probably would've taken an hour max if I just did it myself :)

    This exercise had me go through those bookmarks for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised at all the interesting stuff I had saved. A lot of it would be useful to me right now, but I only happened to look because I was setting up a new phone. Maybe its time to start using an actual bookmarking system.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on GPS tracker for an interstate move in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet. Unless you're...

    Whatever I get, I also plan to get two airtags as backup. Maybe that's enough by itself, but I like the idea of having an active option, even though I know they could all fail for different reasons.

    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet.

    Unless you're expecting your parents stuff to somehow end up away from anyone with an iPhone, Airtags seem to have the edge in almost every way:

    • Way better battery life
    • Integrates into a software ecosystem your parents already use and understand (?)

    The one advantage a dedicated GPS device would have is real time information, but that doesn't sound like what you're looking for in the first place.

    12 votes

  5. Comment on Who’s making these AI copies of my work? in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo This video adds additional perspective: Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated...

    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo

    This video adds additional perspective:

    • Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated videos, have had their style cloned by AI slop to the point where they are now getting accusations of being AI themselves.
    • In addition to how lucrative fully automated viral videos are, many of the people running these grifts also sell courses on how to start.
    • The resulting content often has egregious misinformation, which is especially damaging in the context of educational videos
    6 votes

  6. Comment on Stalking the wily hacker: forty years later | DEFCON 34 in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching...

    40 years ago today, I tripped over a 75-cent accounting glitch in a Unix system. That tiny clue led to a year-long chase across networks, modem banks, and international borders, ultimately uncovering a crew of German hackers working for the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. We had no budget, no roadmap, and no “cyber” anything. We improvised with soldering irons, shell scripts, logbooks, curiosity, and far too much coffee. Let’s revisit the chase – not just to remember, but to ask what changed, what didn’t, and why it still matters.

    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching skills. But that characterization ignores all the other things he's done.

    I found this video worth sharing because its a joyous dose of Cliff Stoll, an engaging retelling of his adventures in cybersecurity in the 1980s, and a reminder of how much has changed in the last 40 years and will change in the next.

    7 votes

  8. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either: Not an option Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it

    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either:

    • Not an option
    • Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it
    5 votes

  9. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from...

    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses

    My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from my phone. I was somewhat lucky that recovery was possible (but costly).

    Given that I might not be as lucky in the future, I need to make the sudden loss of my phone as painless as possible.

    Goals

    Make my phone a "thin client" (I know I'm bastardizing the term, but it's a useful north star).

    Data should not only live on my phone; my phone should never be a singular point of truth for anything I care about. Either:

    • Synced from a remote
    • Backed up frequently

    As a byproduct, I hope this also makes the process of switching phones easier

    Requirements

    • Self-Hosted
    • None of the following should only be saved on my phone
      • Contacts
      • SMS and Calls Logs
      • App Data
      • Files in /storage/emulated/0/

    Challenges

    We're almost 20 years into Android, and its backup story is still dogshit.

    The best option on stock, non-rooted Android is Google's backup system which I don't think is great:

    • It's cloud-only. So you have to pay a subscription, unless you have less than 15GBs to save
    • It isn't guaranteed to be end-to-end encrypted

      • Google says, duplicitously:

        How your data is protected

        To help keep your data safe and secure, it’s encrypted.

        All data, including photos and videos, messages and more are encrypted as they move between your device, Google services, and our data centers.
        Some data is further encrypted with your device’s screen lock. Photos and videos in Google Photos, and MMS media received from your carrier aren’t encrypted by your device’s screen lock.

        • "Are encrypted as they move" is just standard https
        • There's no clarity about what data is encrypted at rest, so it's only safe to assume that none of it is.
    • It isn't a true device backup
      • Contacts, SMS, Calls, and Files are saved
      • App Data is best effort, since individual apps must opt-in.

    Apple was doing full, offline backups of their devices back in the late 2000s!!

    Solution

    Contact syncing was pretty painless. I set up radicale a couple months ago and its been rock solid.

    Initial Plan

    For everything else, I initially planned to reduce the problem to a file sync problem:

    • I don't use RCS, so I could use SMS Backup And Restore to make periodic backups of the SMS database and Call Logs
    • Most of the non-SAAS apps I use support dumping backups to disk, either on a schedule or manually, which was good enough for me.

    This transformed the backup problem into "how do I mirror files from my phone to my backup location".

    Syncthing seemed like the solution that most people used. But I wasn't filled by confidence seeing how the official Android client was discontinued, or the seemingly fragmented stewardship of the community fork.

    What I Actually Did

    In comes Seedvault. It's essentially Google's backup system, but backups are incremental, encrypted and stored on your own storage. That means that it shares the same limitations with respect to app backups, but it was good enough for me.

    The real catch is that Seedvault needs to be integrated at an OS level, which practically means that you need to install a custom ROM to use it. Luckily, I'd been somewhat interested in doing that since the Cyanogenmod days so I spent an afternoon prepping the swap and installed a new ROM on my phone.

    From there, it was just a matter of configuring which folders and apps I want to backup, and it's been running daily ever since.

    Epilogue

    I do have some concerns about this solution...

    I've read that some people have had reliability issues with Seedvault. I'm currently unsure whether its SMS backups are actually doing anything for me right now, since it claims to have backed up 1.0 MB of data for a corpus of messages I know is substantially bigger.

    The right thing to do would be to reset my phone again and validate the backup, but I have yet to summon the willpower.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in...

    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in a dark age of asking questions.

    I've largely abandonned my reflex of using search engines like Google. When I try, I'm hit by articles that feel sloppy or bot challenges that don't run because I haven't whitelisted cookies for that domain yet. Repeatedly watching LLMs (including frontier models I have to use at $JOB) confidently lie to me has made me deeply skeptical of their output.

    I'd be interested to hear more on how you've been finding good information lately. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

    28 votes

  11. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
    Link
    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys. On their face, they're really interesting to watch...

    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys.

    On their face, they're really interesting to watch because they're often shot beautifully, show really beautiful views, and follow someone on a really interesting journey where they're pushing themselves through an experience most people wouldn't dream of doing.

    Unexpectedly, I've come to love this genre because of how often the films reaffirm how many good people are out there. So many times, you'll see examples strangers maintaining food and water drops in remote places, welcoming travelers into their homes for free, or spontaneously sharing a convivial moment. Especially now, when it can be easy to get trapped in negativity about our communities and neighbors, I value the reminder of the kindness that's still out there.

    A couple of my favorites:

    Though, one of the great things about this genre is that the content is so compelling that's lots of really small videographers on the platform that make great stuff

    12 votes

  12. Comment on Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Assign custom colors to usernames.

    You can enter multiple usernames separated by a comma if you want them to use the same color.

    If randomize is enabled then all usernames will be given a random background color based on a hash of the username. Manually assigned colors will be applied normally.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Ploopy A+ | Open source trackball in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation I'd been thinking about getting a trackball...

    Three years ago, we released the design for the Adept, a unique trackball perfectly suited for the use of QMK, for 3D-printing, and for ambidextrous use across a wide variety of applications.

    The Adept has been consistently popular ever since we released it. It’s been used by people for many different purposes, and spurred many of our community’s members to make innovative modifications for it, taking advantage of it’s open-source nature.

    Today, I have the privilege of sharing the next iteration of our Adept design. It’s been improved in every way we could think of, leveraging the enthusiasm that we’ve seen for the design in our community.

    Here it is: the A+.

    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation

    I'd been thinking about getting a trackball for a while as an investment towards wrist health as I get older. Ploopy's hardware checks a lot of boxes for me that other devices don't. I can avoid being locked into manufacturer software for configuration (it uses Via). I have access to the design files, if I ever want to mod or repair the device.

    And I like a lot of the design decisions they made. I'm weirdly excited that it has knobs.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    zoroa
    Link
    Now that this monstrosity is done, I'm back catching up on some games I missed and grinding through demos. Ithaca This was featured during Day of the Devs 2026. The pitch seemed interesting so I...

    Now that this monstrosity is done, I'm back catching up on some games I missed and grinding through demos.

    Ithaca

    This was featured during Day of the Devs 2026. The pitch seemed interesting so I requested access to the playtest, but only got to it the past week. I wish I got to it sooner, I really enjoyed my time with it.

    It's a narrative RPG. The playtest is spent in your car, while you're on a roadtrip, and you pass the time calling and texting people in your contacts list. This sounds really boring, but the fun is in the execution. Your gameplay isn't mediated by an objective tracker, quest log or HUD. The game leaves you with just your curiosity to drive you towards the answers to the questions the game presents.

    Light Premise Spoilers What's the deal with the dude in the trunk? What's the deal with the family dynamic? ... boyfriend? ... politics? ... Greek Mythology?!

    That curiosity is constantly rewarded by interesting developments in the story and world building. Which is delivered through great voice performances from the entire cast.

    I was taken by the mood the game sets. In the background to the conversations, you can enjoy a first person POV of your car ride. Something about the muted hum of the car and landscape drifting by really transports you back to being lost in your thoughts on a long car ride. A feeling mirrored by the storytelling when the protagonist lets her mind wander and reminisces on her past. Even the radio shows and the music capture what you might be listening to on the road.

    I'm not really a narrative RPG guy. The only other one I've played was Pentiment and it set a high bar. Ithaca so far has met that bar for me.

    Disco Elysium

    Starting this after Ithaca just made me realize that narrative RPGs might be one of my favorite genres.

    What I'm often looking for in games is meaningful self-expression that the game responds in satisfying ways. Disco Elysium is that idea on steroids. There's so many ways to engage with it, and the game always seems to respond with something satisfying, even to the most innocuous action

    Despite spending years hearing how good Disco Elysium was, I'd never heard how funny the game is. It oozes a sardonic humor that complements the otherwise dreary world.

    I'm still really early (~15 hours) but I'm having a great time. I will admit the political side to the game is going over my head, but even so there's still so much to enjoy in the experience.

    Demos

    Broken?

    • Brekekekekex: Art is fun, humor is fun. It felt unplayable on controller; it's a 1v1 arena fighter with no lock on, so you're constantly trying to track with an imprecise right stick. Feels better on a mouse, but you need to be able to track like you would in Counter Strike or Valorant.
    • Loading...: I don't know what this demo was supposed to be. I couldn't find anything to interact with, and the most interesting thing I found was the demo's game asset disclosure and a TV with the game's trailer.

    Seems Good, Not For Me

    • Never's End: Art is beautiful, combat felt clunkier than I'd like, and I didn't feel like the demo was showing me where the fun was.
    • Titanium Court: Love the humor, love the art. I did not latch onto the gameplay at all.
    • Corebreaker: It looks gorgeous and plays beautifully. I wasn't finding combat satisfying, and the roguelite upgrades weren't helping. Might revisit.

    Meh

    • NOIR BLOOM: This demo felt like the devs pulled from Katana Zero in the most distasteful way they could. Same aesthetic, down to the chromatic aberration in your roll's motion trail. Same tone. Same camera in gameplay. Same level design. I'm pretty sure I saw slightly different version of a Katana Zero boss in the trailer. But the combat feels so much worse. Playing this demo just made me hungrier for the Katana Zero DLC we've been waiting for since 2019.

    Want to play

    • Digimon Story: Time Stranger: Story seems like a basic anime story. Environments look and feel really really bad. But god does this blast me back to loving the Digimon anime. The battling and team building is fun!
    6 votes

  16. Comment on Test 3 in ~test

  17. Comment on Look Back | On 4K UHD and Blu-ray September 8 in ~anime

    zoroa
    Link
    The period between Chainsaw Man Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 felt like such a special time in the manga world. I didn't even know a popular manga could just end itself midway through and comeback almost 2...

    The period between Chainsaw Man Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 felt like such a special time in the manga world. I didn't even know a popular manga could just end itself midway through and comeback almost 2 years later. And instead of relaxing, Fujimoto drops 3 banger oneshots.

    This post reminded me that I'd been meaning to read through Fujimoto's anthology of oneshots from before Chainsaw Man. Turns out, those got animated last year. I'll need to spend a day binging the anime for those and Look Back.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

  19. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    TIL Tildes has a character limit Addendum cont. Random Thoughts On Combat Status Effects are essentially useless. Game goes out of its way to make status effects the strategy for an early boss....

    TIL Tildes has a character limit

    Addendum cont.

     

    Random Thoughts On Combat

     

    • Status Effects are essentially useless. Game goes out of its way to make status effects the strategy for an early boss. But you can't repeat that success, since status effects proc so infrequently.

    • Weirdly, some of the most broken builds in the game revolve around running the same archetype on your entire party

    • Realtime combat in the Overworld sucks. Attacking locks you into animations, which can make certain enemy attacks frustrating when they catch you mid swing. In normal play, this isn't really a problem because of how little time you spend doing this. But if you ever end up needing to farm, you're in for a frustrating time.

    • Metaphor is Pay to Win*

      The Merchant lineage is a class where skills cost money. It's extremely broken, managing to side step many of the game's systems:

      • Breaks the resource economy: Metaphor: ReFantazio designed MP to be intentionally hard to recover, as a pacing mechanism in dungeons. None of the Merchant's attacks cost MP, and attack costs are negligible in the long run
      • Breaks the turn economy: Hitting a crit gives you an extra turn, and it's somewhat trivial to always crit with a Merchant
      • Breaks the equipment economy: You're meant to regularly cycle through equipment in Metaphor. The Merchant can equip a weapon that doubles the strength and costs of his attacks. I had this weapon equiped for a most of the game, because its damage somehow scaled well, until I found an upgraded version with the same effect.
      • Breaks role separation: The merchant can clear debuffs, is the most efficient healer in the game, has one of the highest damage ceilings, can bypass most defenses, etc...
      • Break the progression economy: Merchants have a skill that let you farm one of the game's progression currencies.

     

    Fast Travel Doors

     

    You get fast travel early and use it often. You'll frequently teleport in front a door, that you annoyingly can't interact with unless you move your camera a tiny bit after arriving.

     

    There's Still Juice in the Lemon

     

    The conflict of most stories in the game, from the main quest to mundane side quests, unfolds against a backdrop of the "systematic mistreatment of groups".

    But I don't think Metaphor: ReFantazio really contends with any facets of this mistreatment.
    The game limply uses it to justify the violence and societal harms seen throughout the game, in ways that only leave players with the takeaway that "mistreating people or groups is bad".

    There's so much juice left to squeeze out of this theme, but Atlus never goes deeper than "thing bad". It doesn't help that some of the deeper explorations are undermined by fantasy elements in Metaphor: ReFantazio's world. The worst of it, however, is that Atlus' mishandling of the theme suffocates the genuinely interesting ideas the game presents about anxiety, self-actualization and the power to effect change.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on Test 3 in ~test

    zoroa
    (edited )
    Link
    Bug: A line with a leading HTML comment breaks line wrapping on wide displays (i.e. desktop). Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et...

    Bug: A line with a leading HTML comment breaks line wrapping on wide displays (i.e. desktop).

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

     

     

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.