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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).

    Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).

    TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.

    I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.

    I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.

    Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.


  • It would probably take a lot of information to its grave, but the more known “servers” would probably get crawled by archive teams.

    Also - assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access - all new information would be easier to access.

    When Discord started, they marketed it primarily as a voice chat software for gaming. I remember them marketing it as “superior audio quality to TeamSpeak” or similar wording (which by the way wasn’t the case). It obviously has chat, video chat and screen sharing conveniently built in which TeamSpeak is only starting to add now in 2025 with the TS6 beta (they seem kind of lost atm).

    I always preferred the decentralized nature of TeamSpeak and Mumble though and at least from my own experience, TS tends to work better with fewer connection issues and better autogain and voice leveling.

    I don’t like the fact that most people happily gave up decentralized voice chat for a centralized alternative and we still use TeamSpeak in most of my circles to this day.


  • Couldn’t remember the passcode of my phone a few years ago and I had been using this passcode for quite a while. I guess I only really remembered it through muscle memory and that somehow went away.

    I didn’t recover the muscle memory for the whole day so I decided to reset my phone and restore from backup, setting a new passcode. The next day I tried to unlock my phone and out of habit typed in my old passcode (that obviously no longer unlocked my phone), had a big AHA moment and that was that.

    Relying on muscle memory is not a great idea, mine left me for a good 24 hours before suddenly coming back.

    I have a few passcodes/passphrases like this but nowadays I store them in a password manager as well, just in case my muscle memory lets me down again.


  • So…

    • You can just add a member to your “family” of your Apple ID
    • Child accounts created this way can make purchases using the payment method of your Apple ID, but every single transaction requires confirmation by you, so you can deny anything you don’t want your child to purchase
    • Non-child accounts added to your family can make purchases with your shared payment method without your confirmation. I assume Apple does this so you only add people you trust instead of random people you just want to share purchases and subscriptions with
    • No matter who initiated a purchase in an Apple family (you, a child or your partner for example), you get an invoice to your email stating exactly what was purchased, by whom it was purchased, when and how much it cost

    But no, you apparently created a “regular” Apple ID for your child, added your payment method to it and after THREE MONTHS you noticed that 8k are gone. Then you run to the press and complain that this was even possible and wonder why neither Apple nor your bank marked any transactions as a fraud.

    YOU authorized your child to use your payment method freely. There is no fraud (except for you). There were multiple ways to notice what’s going on (bank account, invoices from Apple) before your child spent 8k. You should show more interest in what your child is doing, especially on the internet. That’s bad patenting.

    I hope you don’t get any more money back, you deserve every bit of it.




  • I’m planning to upgrade my 7800 XT to a 9070 XT assuming availability allows that and actual AIB pricing is close to MSRP. The uplift should be around 45-50%, or more in RT. And you get FSR4, whatever that’s worth.

    My main reason is that I used to play at 2560x1440 and the 7800 XT is great for that, but now I’m playing at 3440x1440 which means almost 35% more pixels and I want to get back to the same performance level as before albeit the higher resolution. The 9070 XT should allow that with some headroom.

    Your 6950 XT is slightly faster than my 7800 XT already, so expect the uplift to the 9070 XT to be more around 35-40%. And you get FSR4 in select games, and AV1 encode fwiw, as RDNA 2 didn’t have that yet.

    All assuming AMDs marketed numbers aren’t complete bs of course. Wait for independent benchmarks to be sure.

    Noise obviously largely depends on the cooler, I had a great experience with my PowerColor Hellhound 7800 XT, it’s quieter than any MSI, ASUS (Strix) or Zotac card I ever owned. So I’ll try and get a PowerColor card (Hellhound or Red Devil) again or if they’re out of stock maybe a Sapphire Nitro (even though I’d prefer 8-pin power instead of the 12VHPWR connector).




  • Fabric with some performance-enhancing mods is a great choice as well, yes! I’ve been wanting to test it on my server for a while now, just haven’t got around to it yet.

    Paper changes some of the more quirky vanilla redstone behavior, although - again - it’s very configurable so some of that original behavior can be restored.

    I’d mostly base it on which plugin/mod ecosystem you prefer/require.



  • World simulation (ticks) is single-threaded, but things like world generation are multithreaded. I’d recommend Paper as server software as it’s more performant out of the box (vs. vanilla) and configurable (ex. how many threads world generation is allowed to use).

    If you host multiple worlds I recommend spinning up a Paper instance for each world separately and connect them with Velocity.

    Ryzen 7000 should have better single-threaded performance than your i5-9500 but as it’s a VM ymmv depending on whether Sparked Host overprovisions their machines.








  • Many people buy games outside of Steam. Sure, relatively speaking it’s a minority and if a game is available on Steam and elsewhere, most will pick it up on Steam.

    But part of the reason why Steam is so good is because these other platforms exist and there’s nothing actually stopping anyone from buying their games from other stores. Cloud saves, game streaming/remote play, online play, family sharing and many more features are all free/included with the game purchase on Steam and they also pioneered many of these features. Steam Workshop adds great value as well, there isn’t anything remotely comparable on any proprietary console.

    Steam is good because it has to be in order for people to choose to use it.

    And “deep discounts” are the same as ever, I see some games 90% off on sales events. Sure, successful AAA titles usually don’t get a big discount 2 weeks after release, but in the end the publisher sets the pricing anyway. Generally, even when comparing full price, games are just cheaper on Steam compared to PSN (10 to sometimes 20 $/€ for big titles).