Security professional here. This is legit a good call on their part. It’s because those types of addresses won’t bounce emails but aren’t necessarily in your control; it’s very, very easy to spam those petition forms with mail@ for a million real domains without bouncing the emails, making them seem legit.
You own your domain, obviously, so it’s really as simple as creating a forwarding/alias address of “[email protected]”. If creating a forwarding/alias address is that much of a problem for you I suggest that you likely shouldn’t be hosting your own email in the first place.
Your laziness isn’t a good reason to be upset with a company taking steps to reduce their security overhead significantly
Yeah I agree that one seems silly on the surface but for their specific situation I understand why: services like Gmail allow using a + to create faux-labels. So for example foo@gmail, foo+bar@gmail, and foo+baz@gmail all get delivered to the same account. For change.org that’s a problem because it allows a single email account to fill out the form many times.
Ideally, they would simply truncate everything after and including those symbols but it’s possible other services have different rules (maybe yahoo let’s you prepend faux-tags instead of appending them, or something like that) so simply blocking their use altogether could be the more robust solution
I imagine because it can’t be used to add additional junk characters to the address, they probably just strip them out before doing their string comparison
For the same of checking uniqueness it’s probably fine to just ignore them. Yeah, it sucks if [email protected] and [email protected] can’t sign the same petition but outside of the big email services I imagine that kind of collision is pretty rare
Eh, honestly I think blocking plus addressing as a workaround to block people from using multiple identities on the site is very weak argument and ignores completely the reason plus addeesses are being used in the first place, tagging.
And the addition of “-” just tells they don’t really know what they’re doing, considering it’s not only valid but also very common symbol in email addresses
I don’t think the reason they’re being used is relevant to their problem though. “Think like an attacker” wins the day here: as an attacker, I don’t care what it’s meant for, only how I can use it to my advantage. If it’s something they observed as a problem, I understand why they would want to stop it.
As for “-”, yeah, I don’t have a particularly good explanation for that one except the assumption that it’s something similar to + addressing on a different service.
“-” is the default delimiter in qmail. I administer a system, where both + and - are valid recipient delimiters for historic reasons and we can’t really get rid of it.
Believe me, it has caused all kinds of problems, where we have to go deep into the finer differences between aliases and virtual aliases and transport maps in postfix to route mails correctly. Especially since we have a lot of Mailinglists with - as a valid character in them.
So to summarize: the assumption by changeorg is valid, however the execution seems rather flawed.
Yeah, I can’t say their solution is the most elegant but it certainly makes a kind of sense when their criteria for success is “maximize participation while satisfying ‘uniqueness’ critics”
The local parts of email addresses are standardized, and there is an RFC handling subadressing as well, see RFC 5233 - it’s not like Gmail invented this behavior.
Also, RFC 5321 clearly states (2.3.11) that the local part of an email must only be interpreted by the receiving server, so that part should not be parsed, modified or mangled in any form - the assumptions poor web forms or validation libraries make these days are incredibly annoying and simply not compliant.
So no, non of your suggestions are good, let alone ideal. Ideally, people would simply implement the specs and stop making lazy and false assumptions. In the case you cited, it turns out email validation is simply not the proper tool to limit how often the form can be submitted. Similar websites use e. g. text messages.
Requiring SMS validation is a massive barrier to entry and not a viable option for a service like Change.org that relies on a certain level of participation.
There’s literally another comment made at almost the same time as yours complaining blocking the use of + and such is too high a barrier to entry and just the devs being lazy. Meanwhile your suggestion is raise the barrier to entry even higher if you care about uniqueness of submissions
It’s a no-win situation for Change.org so they went with something that meets their business needs. Can’t really expect much else from them tbh
I’m aware of that, but let’s be honest here: social and political changes are not introduced, let alone solved, by technology.
You said it perfectly: this is about business needs. I’d like to argue to make the barrier for entry even higher (tie it to a form of citizen identity) and mandate the petition must be reviewed / acted upon once it has become significant - frameworks like this do exist already in several countries.
Everyone has multiple email addresses today, does that not fundamentally erode the validity of change.org as a platform for direct democracy then? I do believe this is the case, so I’d love if another website would at least stop violating already existing standards and force their erroneous interpretation of how email addresses work down our throats.
Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, I think change.org as a product is hot stinky garbage. I don’t take anything they produce seriously lol
I just don’t expect them to do anything differently under the current circumstances is all heh. And their business is married to the design at this point, so I don’t see them pivoting any time soon. As you suggest, they need a competitor that can do it right to come along and actually produce some kind of meaningful results in the political arena, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”
I’d assume one needs to verify the email by clicking a link, so to spam [email protected], [email protected] would mean you need access to those inboxes. That means you need to go through the effort to actually create those emailadresses on whatever freemail service you chose, or you need to host the emailserver yourself and have all mails run into a catchall inbox.
Hosting your own emailserver is definately not “basically no extra effort”, even for a lot of tech-savvy people, paying for a hosted email service using your own domain is easier, but also seems like not a good investment just to spam a petition website.
The [email protected] functionality, however, is pretty well known tool - even by non-tech savvy people. Even some people I know that I consider basically tech-illiterate have known this for years, they have told me when they found out about it and asked me if I was aware of this functionality.
The first one I mentioned requires preparation, setting up email accounts or an email server, the second one is basically already set up for most email users and ready to go, the latter is therefore definately a lot less effort to pull off.
Spamming user+1@gmail, user+2@gmail takes absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever - anyone can do it with 1 gmail account.
Spamming user1@domain, user2@domain etc requires 1 of two things:
you can sign up for multiple email accounts using a third party service. You’re going to run into trouble with Gmail or other big providers if you start creating accounts en masse.
you create your own email server. this requires someone with selfhosting knowledge and some basic coding (or rather server config) experience.
You’re not wrong, but this isn’t really a security matter, it’s an “apparent uniqueness” matter. Their goal, I assume, is to satisfy critics enough that a given petition’s participants are sufficiently unique while keeping the barrier to filling out the form as low as possible. So they end up in a situation where neither of perfect, but they’re both “good enough” for what the business needs.
I dealt with this in the anti-cheat space: my goal was never to remove all cheating, because that’s too expensive (insanely so). My goal was to make the public believe they weren’t playing against cheaters too often. If the solution was forcing the cheaters to perform at a level that was just below the most skilled human players, that was actually a success, because if the players can’t differentiate between cheaters and pro players, then they can’t effectively determine how prevalent cheating actually is.
Part of me hated that we had to treat it that way, but another part of me understood that if I pushed too hard on “eliminating cheating” my department would become more costly than it was worth and they’d pivot away from gameplay that needed anti-cheat at all
I spent about a decade in the enterprise software development space, so I totally get it. I couldn’t put it into words as well as you did, however.
After watching the FCC bigwigs debate robocalls several years ago, I’ve become a believer in a future where your internet access is always authenticated to your real life ID, dark web excepted of course.
In their case, it was posited as a best-in-class solution to the problem of spam in the telephony space. Same logic applies to email. I mean, look at what Twixxer did with the verified checkmark requiring a credit card. The trend is already there.
I get the fear of being de-anonymized on the internet, but it may be the case of something we hate being something we need, when you start to throw deepfakes into the mix.
Funny you mention the robocall thing… I’m literally leaving a company that works on that problem (though not as their primary business) Wednesday. It was a short stint - mostly because they are resistant to solving massive technical debt problems and I’m not trying to doom my future self - but what I witnessed was…depressing. Getting anything done was like pulling teeth, and that’s with the recent FTC pivot to taking this stuff more seriously. STIR/SHAKEN is a reasonable start but it still has almost no teeth behind it.
I’m with you on the identity issue. I mean, if we’re being really honest, the only people losing out by not implementing strong personal identification verification are the legitimate end users because the threat actors have gotten so unbelievably good at fingerprinting user behavior. And it’s only going to continue getting worse. With ML growth as unfettered as it is, there is nothing we can do. So I’d much rather take the reigns and make identity verification a robust feature instead of a bug we can’t squash.
Kudos for looking out first your future self - I had to leave the field entirely after it got to the point where I couldn’t stand to look at a computer anymore. Still can’t for more than an hour, two years later.
I intend to reply more later, because this does deserve a longer reply, but I am short on steam.
In the meantime, have you heard of login.gov? Check that out. The day that .com gets a hook into that is the day that identity problems are (mostly) solved.
Yes! I LITERALLY just set up my stuff there a few days ago for TSA Precheck and CBP because I’m heading to Japan next month. I love what they’re doing.
Heh, I saw it on news.ycombinator.com back when it was announced- they have made strides if you can access TSA now!
In the beginning it was just a form for every manner of authentication and then a big CTA, essentially telling other .gov entities to start making project requests.
Risk management is the name of the game, as always, eh?
That’s a slick technique for anti-cheat, heh. What did you think of the Call of Duty “fake data” approach? That cracked me up - things in game that only cheaters can see, so they end up self-reporting themselves as cheaters lol
As it ever will be, much as it may pain our moral sensibilities.
Re: CoD - I loved it. Laughed my ass off. Absolutely a big fan of creative approaches to getting cheaters to tell on themselves. I proposed something similar to my team when we had a problem with players manipulating the position of objects in the world so they were directly in front of the player: add an object of the same type inside map geometry and attach a “kill volume” to it, so it was like a landmine. Move the object in front of the player and they instantly die :P Wish we’d done it but couldn’t get the level designers’ time to implement it unfortunately
One we did do though: back when the product I worked on was on PS3 one of the big problems was hacked consoles spoofing platform entitlements (the thing that tells the game what purchases they should have access to). So we added an entitlement that couldn’t be acquired in any legitimate way, and gave you a specific item in game. Then we just checked player inventories once a week for anyone with that item and banned their account, their console, and any account that played on that console for a meaningful amount of time. Did the same thing with an item you could only get to by clipping through geometry. Even put the word “intrusion” in the item’s name haha.
The cheats are so technically complicated at this juncture that the creative stuff is often the most effective. I mean, people are literally voluntarily installing hypervisor rootkits to run the cheats, so they can talk to their drivers below even the kernel. It’s so hard to come to with technical solutions to a problem like that that doesn’t wind up costing massive server processing power to validate every input.
Haha that is a great idea! Give the landmine kill a special animation just to make sure that the cheaters get the message or let them figure it out in time lol?
Heh, did you share that inventory technique on news.ycombinator? I could have sworn that I read a story there a team doing that.
I know exactly what you are talking about - I was digging into the modding of this one game and happened upon a cheater’s forum. Blew my mind that the first step was to completely gut your computer’s security lol. But at the same time, was enlightening to see that. Seems like some of the work has been moved to the Anti-Cheat systems, but I’m guessing that there must be large gaps in what the AC can actually do for you at the application level?
Let em figure it out. Wasting their time is a core strategy in reducing their impact and will to continue cheating
I certainly didn’t share it myself but it’s possible my old boss did!
TBH, in my very personal opinion the third party anti-cheat apps are like 50% placebo. Just makes people feel better. They are very protective of their “secret sauce” but I can say none of them are anywhere close to perfect. The thing they’re best at is taking the easy stuff off our plates so we can focus on the more difficult problems of hardening the game itself and analyzing telemetry.
My understanding is that signing a petition and creating an account aren’t necessarily linked, and it’s up to the person who created the petition whether verification is required.
After signing the petition, they pop a large notification about needing to validate my account by clicking on the link in the mail they sent. If I didn’t do it, the signing wouldn’t count
Right I’m saying I always thought that was an optional feature, determined by the person who created the petition. I don’t think it’s a universal requirement for all change.org petitions
I have been using catchall on my domain since 2002. I have never told anyone any of my real accounts. When I have to send an email, I just add that account (change@ whatever), send the e-mail and delete the account afterwards, rebanishing the company to my catchall. I’ve had it scripted for ages.
When I do get an unsolicited email from let’s say ShittyCompany Inc, I set up a rule to forward all incoming shittycompany@(mydomain) emails to info@ shittycompany. This way they just spam themselves. Takes 2 seconds to run the script and I never see emails from shittycompany again.
Web developer here. The problem here is not with emails but with change.org’s business model, which is reliant on lying to people that their petitions actually mean anything. But, anyone with half a brain cell can easily spot that they don’t have any legal backing whatsoever nor do they do any kind of identity verification, therefore those petitions are completely worthless. They might as well not give a fuck and allow cheating. For all they care, it only boosts counters and makes them appear more popular than they actually are.
Honestly Reddit doesn’t infuriate me anymore. I haven’t been on reddit for 2 weeks now and I no longer feel the urge to check that site. I expect I’ll still end up there occasionally when I search for stuff, but gone are the days when I spend an hour or two every night on reddit.
The quality of the posts being worse makes sense, I’m guessing some of the Reddit power users moved here and they were generating the majority of quality OC on Reddit.
I also feel like it's become more right wing. Or at least now that some people have left, the balance has shifted further to the right. I went on yesterday, and r/WhitePeopleTwitter, a fairly left wing sub, is now having a lot of Republicans. Really killed my desire to go back. It was something I know a lot of people predicted would happen, but still sad in a way to see.
Edit: Also the fact that the main niche subs I went to are dead. They used to be pretty active, but since they reopened, a lot of users were not happy. So now it's a post every few days. I think one of the subs just got completely deleted. Sadly they're not as active here.
Same for me. When RIF stopped working I went into Lemmy and haven’t went on Reddit since. The FOMO I thought I’d get isn’t there because I’m active and welcome here. I have people to connect with, and that’s what I really only wanted out of a social site like this.
There’s still quite a few subreddits I miss. Plus the larger community. Some communities are here, but they’re dead with no users, and I don’t really have what to contribute.
I wanted to try listing all of them, but I realized there’s like 40 of them.
Mostly, I miss r/batteries, r/ElectroBOOM, r/linuxmint, r/ManjaroLinux, r/LinuxMasterrace, r/SpaceXMasterrace, r/pcmasterrace, r/computers, r/laptops, r/amateursatellites, r/whatisthisthing and r/RTLSDR which also had cool people like developer of noaa-apt and Ryzerth, the developer of SDR++, plus many more.
Edit: Oh, how could I forget dereksgc, another cool guy who puts out lots of useful info.
I can leave the larger community, but I do miss a couple subreddits.
The good thing about the Reddit before the dark times of 3 weeks ago, was that it had a large enough user graph that there were enough people with niche interests to have an active community. Facebook also has this critical user graph.
The good thing about ActivityPub based communities is that there is the potential to have much larger federated user graphs than the individual closed business-based platforms.
The only sub I go to now is my local city’s subreddit for a good stream of local news and happenings. That hasn’t migrated to Lemmy yet and I don’t want to moderate it so I’m not making it here lol
Why I went to DVDs. There is libre software to rip them and depending on country it’s legal, so basically you get a DRM-free legal copy with ability to archive or lend to a friend.
I’ve been buying preowned DVDs off ebay every few weeks or so for the last year. I don’t even bother looking to see if they are available to stream anymore.
This. My only media expense monthly is my VPN at $10. Everything is pirated.
Even that though - I just download only my favorites for the collection. Everything else is available on stand alone websites these days (multiple) so if you’re paying for a streaming service or really even using bittorrent then you’re living in the past as far as movies go.
It’s really good quality. In my opinion low resolution only matters in static images or when video is paused, I’ll take high bitrate and superior sound every day instead of today’s streaming.
Sure you can just download, super convinient and gives best results. But sometimes it’s good to do things the way that can scale in society or just actually own something you like :).
I have 4k TV and 5.1 studio speakers and noone in my house can see the difference from modern streaming besides a little grain on still images. Always buy newer, at least two-layered disks, they are much better.
Of course that’s nothing compared to 4K/DTS/DA/HDR Blu-Ray rip, but it’s not that the movie is not watchable. DVD is the basic experience, 2010s cinema like, where Blu-Ray is just a crispy fresh layer added.
Comparing to max quality >10-30GB torrent is not fair. You need to compare it to other DRM-free legal options, oh, there’s none. Side to side with Blu-Ray, really bad. But Blu-Ray is many times more expensive and less freedom friendly. Side to side with Netlix-like streaming, assuming you don’t use some high-end service, DVD is just better in real watching and not pausing and glaring at pixels.
Why isn’t it fair? No reason you can’t just torrent a 10GB Blu-Ray rip of the movie. It’s free, easy and probably takes less time than going out and buying a DVD.
I would say that side-to-side the quality of Netflix-like streaming is A LOT better, at least when it comes to video. Audio is probably comparable since both DVD’s and streaming services usually use Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus.
Plain VLC can do it. You may need to at least install libdvdcss and libdvdread packages, they are 100% open source and easy to obtain, but you need to read the guide for specific OS because some system distribution repositories does not ship them by default for legal reasons in a few countries.
Thanks! I’ve read that VLC can do it before, but I’ll look into giving it another shot sometime. The guides I found weren’t exactly the best, but with the mentioned packages I should be able to better narrow the searches to better guides, I think.
Old school pirating or new school? Last time I remember pirates was like… Napster, Limewire, Kazaa… Then went to TPB before it got raided like 8 times… What’s the current? Is it still torrenting with proxies?
I’ve been pirating since Napster and you’re right, it’s changed a lot. These days, I usually just stream from third party sites. Takes less room on your PC and is faster than downloading a torrent. Dopebox is where it’s at for most stuff. 9anime if you like anime, it’s better than the paid alternatives like Crunchy roll or Funamation.
If you want to stick to torrents I’ve found 1337x to be the best since TPB died.
New skool is to use automation tools to grab and manage your media. You can still use torrenting but IMO using usenet is more reliable and doesn’t flag your ISP. I highly recommend anyone pirating to use 'arrs wiki.servarr.com
Yeah I can’t argue with the usenet fees but all three of my index sites I’ve had no issues with their free version so long as you do go wild and download ten terabytes in a night. I’ve actually had better luck with the selection compared to torrenting, pretty much is there in all of the popular resolutions. The only thing I have finding is some of the obscure adult swim shows but I can’t find them on my private trackers either.
Set up your profiles for Radarr/Sonarr to pick the quality of release you want (1080p, min/max file size, etc)
Feed Radarr/Sonarr your qbittorrent info, nzbget & Usenet info
They will automatically search the indexes (I use 1337x for torrents & nzbgeek for Usenet) for the files that fit your parameters, download it, and organize it.
All you have to do is point Plex at the output folders and BAM, automated pirating.
I even took it a step further and set up Doplarr - a Discord bot that handles requests. Now friends/family can ping the bot with their movie/show requests and it’ll sync up to Radarr/Sonarr and add their requests!
Word on the street is that reddit’s arr slash piracy has a pretty good guide to it in their wiki, including lists of generally trustworthy torrent sources. I of course don’t torrent, because I’m terrified of legal consequences–I just browse shady but technically legal websites to stream my anime
Content leaving isn’t a problem. If they give up some things they have more money to get the rights to other content, and usually by the time it leaves I’ve either watched it or don’t want to. If it’s one of the rare things I want to watch several times, I can just buy it. But cracking down on password sharing is ridiculous. They’ve been functioning fine with people sharing passwords. I bet the current pricing accounts for password sharing. But now people in college can’t be on the family netflix? Pure greed.
Content leaving is totally a problem. I’ve lost track of the number of times my spouse and I say, “Oh hey, what about we finally watch xyz that’s been in our queue for ages? Yeah that seems like a good one for Friday pizza night! …oh, it’s vanished from our queue, hooray.”
It’s not my full time job to keep tabs on what’s coming and going from the damn entertainment service that I hope to use in my ever dwindling reserves of free time. Especially when there’s alternative means available that are not too difficult to use.
This is incredibly annoying for series. Crunchyroll dropped Bleach, a series with over 350 episodes, when I was at episode ~100. A few years ago I started to manually keep track of the episodes I watched, since you lose your progress when they drop it (true for crunchyroll, prime and netflix)
They may not have as many ebooks as Amazon, but they do offer DRM free ebooks, and may be worth keeping in mind to check before going straight to Amazon.
Absolutely no surprise there. When you keep the barrier to entry low and throw in an algorithm to increase “engagement” via outrage, the soup turns to poison quickly.
This is why every time someone says the Fediverse is “too confusing,” I just smile and nod. That attitude of petulant, lazy, self-imposed gatekeeping is what’s keeping the Fediverse a much nicer place to be.
If the “hot” and “active” filters continue to work as expected and bots get reasonably moderated or blocked, I don’t even think Lemmy needs a high barrier to entry or petulance. The most important thing is to not optimize any recommendation or sorting algorithm on session duration, ads seen before closing session, and revenue per user.
This is so true and people seem to have a really hard time seeing this. The cultures on other social sites are far more manufactured than we’d like to believe. I think the human driven systems of Lemmy and Mastodon are brilliant but the true killer feature of the fediverse is going to be an open content recommendation algorithm. A collectively developed non-profit driven algorithm would undoubtedly be better at surfacing positive impact content than either system.
Completely agree that this is where the really exciting potential is, but equally a potential for misuse as algo development will be a black box to most.
Actually yes and I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Sentiment analysis is not a hard task nowadays. If overused the site would become a bunch of artificial positivity, but I think there could be a place for this. Could be part of a mod toolkit too.
I’d imagine if it uses the sentiment as a weight but not a gate when selecting what content to boost that would probably provide a good balance. Especially if you get some controls to adjust the weights in the settings panel
I definitely don’t think something like that should be used to only show one emotion though. If AI were used to control content based on how it makes people feel it should try to balance, not control how we feel. Give us an equal amount of everything.
It’s not good to cloak ourselves in only feelgood stories and lies that sound nice and ignore all the bad stuff just because an algorithm wants us to feel nice and cozy. If no one cares about the bad stuff, the bad stuff gets worse.
It’s been noted on the GitHub. It seems the bug is amplified on small instances. I’ll regularly get posts from two weeks ago with no comments on the top of All/Hot when using this account.
The default “Local/Active” sort algo needs to be tweaked. It makes it look like there are no new posts for days. If you use All with Top Day, Hot or New there’s way more going on.
I don't really think it's fair to pretend that, before two weeks ago, anyone under god had any idea what an instance was unless they were already heavily tech-oriented.
It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand what the hell I was looking at and what kind of consequences that unexplained choice would have, and it really seems like a good number of users that initially struggled forget the learning curve extremely quickly the moment they're over it.
It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand
I started off going down that road of trying to understand it, but my laziness and impatience got in the way and said "just start using it and you'll work it out." And that's exactly what happened for me. In a way, the explanations made it all sound much more confusing than it really is. Sometimes you just gotta take a deep breath and dive in.
Honestly, you're right, and I think the analysis paralysis that the fediverse immediately presents isn't really helped by the fact I'm just generally a neurotic person. Wanting/NEEDING to understand how every aspect of something works and why lends itself really well to things like linguistics and biology, but I feel bothered when I skip the tutorial in a game I already know. What if I missed something and I'll never be able to figure out how buttons work.
Don't worry, I hear ya! I'm currently 4.9 hours in on my first run of the story game, Detroit. People in the reviews say it is a short game and they have less than 3 hours playtime ... but I don't wanna miss any narrative or clues! haha!
I joined Mastadon in December and that's when I first tried to understand it all. I researched a server to join and it was right confusing ... what if I picked the wrong one? Then I pretty much abandoned the account because I didn't understand how to stay on my own server while browsing around (also didn't help that I'd never used Twitter either, so I didn't actually know what I sposed to be doing lol).
Then the whole reddit debacle happened and I signed up for a Lemmy & Kbin. And there was all the jargon again. But I think because I was actually jumping ship from reddit, this time I wanted my move to have staying power. So it was unusual for me to "skip the tutorial" but I was getting so frustrated with the jargon, while I could see others were already having conversations. And it was through the participation that the jargon finally defined itself. I even use my mastodon now, as well!
Oh, I never realized the storylines in Detroit were that short. I'm exactly like you, and I've also found that the more games I play at once, the less I enjoy any of them. So my hands are a bit tied in terms of backlog and that one's been on the backburner for...years, now that I think of it. But That bumps it up my list considerably if I can 100% it in like 3 days.
I was very close to giving the fuck up initially, though. You know what the biggest encouragement was when I was signing up? When I was looking through the comments on kbin, someone said all the hoops would keep the idiots out, and I will put in a _lot _ more energy if it means both showing off and being where the idiots aren't. I'd say having a barrier there really has done some good for the overall quality (for now), but the people claiming it's good to make sign-ups as hard as possible are sometimes the same people claiming there isn't a barrier at all, and it comes off as very strange elitism.
Reading the explanations and advice people were giving to each other made a whole lot more sense than anything the internet was handing me, but even some of that could be head-scratching, and hands-on is probably the best way to go. Not without its dangers. I still think I got incredibly lucky to end up on an instance I like this much. Imagine having admiration for the dev for once.
I never realized the storylines in Detroit were that short.
quick Google search tells me average play-thru time is 12hrs and completionist is 32hrs, so I dunno what I was looking at. I'm 5hours in, so it remains to be seen whether it's gonna take me 32hours or 64hours minimum. 🤣 You'll have to forgive me, it's the steam sale so I've been looking at lots of games. Not that I need any more because I've probably only ever touched a quarter of my library, if that!
someone said all the hoops would keep the idiots out,
Yeah I liked that take as well. That layer of jargon really is a fantastic filter.
It was a case of: Lemmy.ml isn’t accepting new users atm BeeHaw requires me to tell them why I’m a good user So does this other instance… Why do I have to justify myself!? Hey, Lemmy.world let’s me just sign up! Perfect!
And that was how I chose an instance. Thank you for joining story got with Valek
Decision paralysis is real even for stupid things. Like, “what are the implications if I pick the wrong instance?” Was something that made me put off finishing signing up for mastodon and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Acting like it’s trivial isn’t helpful to anyone even if it was trivial or you
Yeah decision paralysis definitely delayed my joining any ActivityPub based sites, but really most of what it affects is stuff that wont matter until you’ve spent enough time on the platform to understand the difference to begin with
I’ve been explaining it like email. There’s no email webpage you go to to create an account. It’s just a protocall a bunch of people have agreed to use, so you go to one of them and you create an address. I also think your username in the fediverse should be called an address too, but I don’t think that’ll catch on. It makes it a lot easier to explain, because everyone can use email, even the most tech illiterate people.
Maybe I’m setting the bar too low but a lot of people have no clue if their emailing, texting or messaging. They just know that their phone pings and they can either reply or not. I learned this when I worked support for a smartphone manufacturer
I know I’m an old school techie, but was there really a high entry bar for lemmy compared to say twitter or Instagram? I honestly don’t know, other than r3dd!t the last social media I signed up for was what? Facebook well over a decade ago?
If the few steps it took to make a user name, pick an instance, and then get my head around the fact that I had to also join any instance I wanted to respond to, is enough to keep the unwashed internet masses out, well, they are just even dumber than I already thought.
People genuinely give up at the “pick an instance” stage.
Part of it is a slight failing for not blasting “if you join any of these communities you can respond to messages on any of these communities” but also the level of tech literacy has fallen off of a cliff post-smartphone world.
Bolstering technology literacy (I’m talking simple things like: what is a file browser, where do things you download go by default, what are some common file types for music/videos/applications) need to be added to public education because there’s clearly a decline happening here that will have downstream ramifications.
I’d say it’s less so a decline and moreso a lack of literacy to begin with. The number of relatives I have that are fucking stupid with the internet is insane. And surprise the kids are just as stupid with tech, since the parents are dumb and companies made tools for them and the kids.
Yeah, I think the late 20th century and then some of the 00s were a sweet spot where there was finally cool stuff to do with tech, but you still needed to learn some skills to do them. Though even those skills were pretty basic.
I remember a kid in high school coming to me to see if I’d burn him a custom CD and he’d pay me and I was surprised because I thought it was all pretty basic shit that all it took was trying to figure it out. Though on the other hand, that was during the era where many discs were lost to buffer underflow and you had to be patient enough to not really use your computer for anything else while a CD was burning at like 2x speed (the hardware would go faster but then the underflow was more likely).
Though in hindsight, that might have just been my family’s shitty computer at the time. My dad was semi tech savvy but generally bought shitty computers, compaqs with Celeron CPUs and no graphics card. Though we did at least have a dedicated 56k line (which would only get speeds of like 48k, though later when the line was switched I do remember seeing the occasional 64k which confused me because I thought 56k was the fastest a connection could be).
I used to think the next generation was going to out code, design, and trouble shoot me in five years, and that the one after that would make me feel like a dinosaur in my 30s.
Now I’m almost 50, and the army of tech savvy teens coming for my job simple hasn’t materialized. With the ease of use of so many devices, a world where “plug and play” actually exists, the effort and skill requirement for most things has gone way down. On top of that, the battle for attention is so great that there is always something easier to go play with, and if it requires a bit of noodling to make it work, screw it.
For a bit I thought “Great, job security!”, but now I’m at the point where I need to think about finding interns and replacements, and unless they come from one of the historic tech pipelines like PC gaming or the makers community, not a lot of kids have that kind of background.
There are great programs now in the schools for making app, 3D printing, graphics, music, etc, that draw kids into technology. However, like everything else it’s all slick and user friendly. You don’t have to spend hour after hour figuring out how to make the thing work.
I watched my two year old nephew trying to swipe on the pictures in a magazine and was confused why they didn’t move. He was basically born with an ipad in his hands.
I agree completely that a basic computer class covering those things and more should be standard in schools. Now we have niche tech courses akin to the woodshop and autos class of my high school, but they are electives, and don’t cover the fundamentals.
Non-techy guy here. I read an infograohic and made an account. 0 issues whatsoever. And the infographic was just to help me understand how it works. You don’t really need to understand lemmy to interact with it
Because stating a wrong fact is the fastest way to get the right answer?
So, if I have an account on one instance, and I want to login / reply to another, how do i do that. I’m using the liftoff app.
I take it I shouldn’t have more than one instance login? Don’t worry, at this point I’ve only got two, it really didn’t seem right when I was making the second one.
Yeah I dove into Lemmy and Mastadon with very little research and even Mastodon with its “pick an instance you like first” step was extremely easy. I ended up on smaller instances for both and honestly I like it. Best part is, if you feel some FOMO either make another account on another instance or in the case of Mastadon export your account and migrate it to the new instance
Man I’d love that. I feel like we will soon honestly. I just hope the lemmy/Kbin apps bring these other federated projects inside, so we can do it all on one app too.
Wasn’t IRC itself pretty much federated, just maybe not calling it that yet? Networked I think they called it. You’d have a bunch of servers in a network and users could join channels and chat with users on other networks. Every now and then you’d get a server split where some subset of servers would lose connection with the rest and a bunch of people would all leave the channel at once. Then, it would resolve, and they’d come flooding back in.
Yes. For example, you’d have a collection of servers that federated to create EFnet. DaLnet, etc. Joining any of those servers would get you onto that federated network. You could be banned from one server but you could always choose another to still get into the same network. And yes, netsplits happened. A lot.
The Matrix but they use the Matrix protocol on a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel talking about talking about The Matrix in the Matrix protocol in a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel (woops sorry that is the Matrix 2 I think my bad)
There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?
My first instinct would be to say, "This is the 21st century, learn to use a damn computer already!" But then I think of the long term and WANT people to think it's too hard to join Mastodon or Kbin, just to keep the average IQ of these sites above room temperature.
IMO if technical difficulty is the filter, it would actually only select for people good at computers. There are otherwise dumb, shallow people who are good at tech.
(I’m not saying its difficult using lemmy, just replying to the idea in general)
This this this. The fediverse being “confusing” keeps the idiots, boomers, trolls, and overall horrible people away. Having to learn something new is too much for those people. Lemmy/Mastodon and so on are “nerd” platforms, and I really like it that way.
Easy on the boomer stuff. You just lumped “horrible people” into the same group as regular people that happen to have lived more years than you. If you are looking for a “nerd” platform, you’ll do well to remember that there are a ton of extremely nerdy boomers out there and you just helped turn the soup to poison for them
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
If you copy something you are not entitled to because of copyright, it’s copyright infringement.
With theft the originally owner loses what is stolen, with copyright infringement the owner only loses the license fee for 1 copy.
Not the same thing, and calling it theft is purely a propaganda term invented by the media industry.
It should also be noted that copyright laws usually have all sorts of exceptions for fair use such as satire, education, etc. Typically, keeping and even using a copy without permission is legally allowed under certain circumstances.
Just a word of caution. Even if you have a valid fair use claim they have to be adjudicated and the legal costs can get pricey. Worse if you’re found liable.
Check out Lawful Masses on YouTube for plenty of examples of copyright trolls using this as a bludgeon.
It’s just a fear tactic. If enough people self represented themselves individually the companies would die. You can’t draw blood from a stone… which the average consumer is basically close to. The recovery rate vs the lawsuit fees would destroy the entire legal system if people stood their ground.
Canada decided to have none of that. Downloading without keeping a copy (streaming) was basically thrown out as copyright infringement, the whole lost income idea was generally laughed at, and the final result was a maximum judgement of $500 for all non-commercial copyright infringement prior to the suit. Which basically would pay for about one hour of the plaintiff lawyer’s fees. We don’t get a lot of copyright suits like that in Canada any more.
With theft the originally owner loses what is stolen, with copyright infringement the owner only loses the license fee for 1 copy.
There used to be an anti-piracy lobby group in Australia literally called “Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft”. I always had an issue with their name since they were really against copyright infringement, not “copyright theft” which is just a nonsense term like you said. It’s been ruled several times by courts both in Australia and in the USA that it can’t be called “theft” (e.g. techdirt.com/…/surprise-mpaa-told-it-cant-use-ter…).
I like to think of it as something similar to watching a football match from the other side of the fence. People who paid the ticket, are loyal fans. People who didn’t pay, but still want to see the match, probably aren’t even part of the target audience. Some of them might be, but that’s a small number.
So, when the football company says that they’ve lost the sales of x number of tickets, they are actually saying that if those people had enough money and if they cared enough, they might have paid this amount of money.
Right, so I suppose George Lucas was stealing from all the movies that inspired his work when he made Star Wars. Or when Mel Brooks made Space Balls, as a more blatant example
Mel Brooks’s works are protected under the Fair Use provisions for satire under the DMCA. Lucas never copied anything directly, but, if pressed, much of his work is “heavily inspired” by works in the public domain and/or could be argued to be “derivative works”, also covered by Fair Use provisions in the DMCA, although any claim of copyright violation would be pretty difficult to make in the first place.
not in any legally reasonable way, and certainly not by anyone who understands how AI (or, really, LLM models) work or what art is.
If it’s not redistributed copyrighted material, it’s not theft
but that’s exactly what OpenAI did-- they used distributed, copyrighted works, used them as training data, and spit out result, some of which even contained word-for-word repetitions of the author’s source material.
AI, unlike a human, cannot create unique works of art. it can old produce an algorithmically-derived malange of its source-data recomposited in novel forms, but nothing resembling the truly unique creative process of a living human. Sadly, too many people simply lack the ability to comprehend the difference.
it can old produce an algorithmically-derived malange of its source-data recomposited in novel forms
Right, it produces derivative data. Not copyrighted material.
By itself without any safeguards, it absolutely could output copyrighted data, (albeit probably not perfectly but for copyright purposes that’s irrelevant as long as it serves as a substitute). And any algorithms that do do that should be punished, but OpenAI’s models can’t do that.
Hammers aren’t bad because they can be used for bludgeoning, and if we have a hammer that somehow detects that it’s being used for murder and then evaporates, calling it bad is even more ridiculous.
Some safeguards have been added which curtail certain direct misbehavior, but it is still capable - by your own admission - of doing it. And it still profits from the unlicensed use of copyrighted works by using such material for its training data. Because what it is producing is not a new and unique creative work, it is a composite of copyrighted work. That is not the same thing.
And if you are comparing LLMs and hammers, you’re just proving how you fundamentally misunderstand what LLMs are and how they work. It’s a false equivalence.
but it is still capable - by your own admission - of doing it
…
And if you are comparing LLMs and hammers, you’re just proving how you fundamentally misunderstand what LLMs are and how they work
And a regular hammer is capable of being used for murder. Which makes calling a hammer that evaporates before it can be used for murder “unethical” ridiculous. You’re deliberately missing the point.
And it still profits from the unlicensed use of copyrighted works by using such material for its training data
I just don’t buy this reasoning. If I look at paintings of the Eiffel Tower and then sell my own painting of the building, I’m not violating the copyright of any of the original painters unless what I paint is so similar to one of theirs that it violates fair use.
it is a composite of copyrighted work
It’s stable diffusion, not a composite. But even if they were composites, I’m allowed to shred a magazine and make a composite image of something else. It’s fair use until I use those pieces to create a copyrighted image.
Lol… I hope you didn’t sprain something with all those mental gymnastics. In the meantime, perhaps you should educate yourself a bit more on AI, LLV’s, and, perhaps, just a little bit on art.
OK, if you think what you just said made sense, then you either didn’t read the link you just posted or you clearly didn’t understand it. And you certainly have no clue what you’re talking about.
But you’re certainly helping to make my point for me
AI, unlike a human, cannot create unique works of art. it can old produce an algorithmically-derived malange of its source-data recomposited in novel forms
Find me a single sentence in that entire article that suggests AI art is composites of source data
You can’t, because how it actually works is wildly different than how you want to believe it works.
Mhm, I’m sure that’s why you couldn’t find a single sentence about compositing images
DALL·E 2 uses a diffusion model conditioned on CLIP image embeddings, which, during inference, are generated from CLIP text embeddings by a prior model.
I admit that you misinterpret my response and have been throwing a psychotic, childish, name calling tantrum for hours, and you really need to take a break from the internet until you learn some self-control.
You already provided the evidence in your link. It’s not my fault you don’t understand. Also, it’s not my job to educate you, nor to soothe your bruised ego.
I recommend some ice cream. Perhaps that will make you feel better.
And I provided evidence the article says something wildly different than what you want it to say, and all you have is “read it again until it says something else” lol
No, you didn’t. All that you proved is that you didn’t understand what the link said. But that’s what I’ve been saying over and over.
Also voting with two accounts is pathetic
The fact that you’re so insecure that you think that’s what’s happening is what is pathetic, and so is the fact that you’ve been crying about this for two days.
Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).
It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.
GTA V story mode was an excellent game, but it’s hard to realistically say a game from one genre is better than another, apples and oranges and all that.
GTA V’s online multiplayer, however, at this point is such a shitstain that I think it alone is enough to make the distinction clear.
It is. But only in so far as the content and scope of the game far surpasses anything a smaller developer could ever hope to accomplish. You may prefer one over the other, totally fine, but objectively speaking you get way more out of gta 5 content and scope wise than bg3.
As others point out gta online is a dumpster fire but it’s still massive and allows you to do endless amounts of things, racing, heists, owning property, running businesses, etc.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do.
Quoting for emphasis. We control the purse, we have the voting power of the wallet.
Blaming consumers, in this instance. You could well be right that the problem is internal but in that case that’s where it needs to solved. Or if they want to get the support of consumers, be honest with their reasoning. Crying that the expectations of consumers are too high doesn’t help at all. It just makes them seem out of touch with reality.
Fuck Meta and all but this isn’t news. Meta litterally said straight up that they would be doing this before threads ever launched. If you have an instagram account then that is also your threads account. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s exactly what they told everyone they were doing. It’s no diferent than linked accounts for google services.
Yeah this Threads issue is getting into the tin foil delusional territory now. Just as you said. They literally say “well use your Instagram acccount” of you bother to read their disclaimers they literally tell you that they are literally using your Instagram account. It’s “Threads by Instagram”. When you first log in it ll import all your Instagram contacts and you cna “follow” them. And if they don’t have it yet it’ll say “you’ll follow as soon as they join threads” there is no “Shadow Threads account, because they are using the Instagram account.”.
You can definitely be against threads and Meta. I Personally am not super thrilled about it. But there is way more than enough to hate a out meta and threads without making stuff up.
I think the difference is that the Threads user count keeps getting thrown around as an indicator of its success and viability, but it’s not a great KPI.
I do think people are using this “realization” of accounts being automatically created as a conspiratorial gotcha, but it’s still important to remind people of this scenario as they evaluate their prospects.
No because they’re only doing this for Instagram users who are located in the United States. It hasn’t launched anywhere else yet.
Probably because it will be quite illegal in Europe so they probably are not going to do it for European users but it hasn’t launched there yet anyway so we don’t know.
It’s a conspiracy just in the sense that they are seemingly counting these towards their growth numbers. If they’re saying they have 20 million accounts, but they created 3/4 of them as placeholders, then no…they have 5 million accounts.
I really think they are not, those are all account from people who have actively signed up. Threads really is that much bigger than Mastodon, and it’s not that surprising.
Knew a guy who wore a trenchcoat, black, and a kilt, standard red tartan, even when it was 110 out.
Was chilling with his younger brother one day bitching about how fucking hot it was when this badass walks up in said attire with his guitar slung over his shoulder, goes “shut up you pussies”, pulls out his guitar, and does a bit of improv chords while singing the last couple of things we’d said, something like “it’s hot as balls out here”
I wish I could be even a 10th as cool as that guy was, because goddamn
Doesn’t even question what employees are possibly doing. Just says there are too many and they must be put out on the street. Says the people who are left are making too much money.
I say this a lot but…seriously…when do we start burning things?
I’m not for people only interested in benefiting themselves being the ones rewarded most by society, let alone being the ones effectively in charge of society as they are.
It isn’t heroic, benevolent, or even minimally pro-social to spend your life trying to accrue private profit for the sake of private profit. It just makes you greedy and selfish. Or as they call it with their orwellian language manipulation, “rational self-interest.” being greedy, selfish, and unconcerned with the effects your actions have on others makes you a vile, broken, contemptible person, and humanity seems to have forgotten that entirely, or at least we’ve been propagandized to forget it by the owner class.
We punish people that dare to pursue vocations that benefit society, like teachers and paramedics, and reward selfishness.
I can’t root for my own species in this state. Slitting eachother’s throats when there’s another dollar to be had by it. If this is truly what our species has chosen as it’s most practiced purpose and meaning, I want no part of it, and I will be grateful when it’s time to leave it.
I’ve heard humanity described as being composed of “self-interested, rational economic actors” to help us understand economics.
Like, we all want the eggs from the farmers’ market that were laid by the happiest hens. A farmer can assume we’re rational & self-interested when pricing her eggs so she can try to sell enough of them to make a living. $2/egg won’t fly because stores sell them so much cheaper.
Think I’m saying morally bankrupt, anti-social hoarders have rational self-interest but so do normal people like you & me. I’m fizzling out here but either way hoarding’s bad :)
Right, but there’s no term for being greedy, sociopathic, or engaging in hoarding in economics.
They fall under Orwellian double speak terms that make them complimentary, “rational self-interest, creating externalities, curtailing redundancies” etc. Language designed to turn their sins into their achievements.
Considering the central prominence of greed in our economy, it’s a glaring ommission that the capitalists and economists themselves seem to have forgotten that word, or to create an economic term for greed that isn’t complimentary.
They are driven almost entirely by insatiable greed, yet the term is never uttered in their earnings reports or economic news.
They seem to want the concept of greed as the pejorative it is to be forgotten entirely, despite it demonstrably being their core value.
Greed is the best descriptive word and incredibly negative as you’ve said. No reason to make a more negatively charged word. The tale of Midas, and others, demonstrate how destructive and harmful greed is.
Midas has always stuck with me since I first heard the tale and in a way informed who I am today, especially my political leanings.
With the amount of people who get manipulated with sales and other tactics I don’t think we can argue that humanity is composed of rational economic actors. There are some rational economic actors, but the vast majority probably isn’t acting rationally with regards to their economics. And that’s okay, because humans aren’t rational beings first and foremost. We’re primarily emotional beings. We make most of our decisions based on emotions, then we may try to rationalize our choice.
It takes a lot of effort to be rational about things.
I own a little Google stock. I don’t mind they pay their employees a shit ton. I want them make good products. I’m not a fan of most their products but that’s just me
My hatred of the owner class is matched only by my disappointment in my fellow humans for not only taking it, but often defending it.
The people we struggle for have abandoned their humanity. That’s what it takes to be one of society’s supposed winners or be in their good graces: practiced sociopathy.
And half of the peasants fantasize about being the sociopaths instead of ending their reign and this despicable con game of an economy.
Summed up concisely. I’ve unfortunately given up hope that anything can be done or can improve. It feels the fight, whatever fight there ever was, has been lost.
Yeah, I’m not sure I really get this whole “reduce employment” logic. Like if some product just isn’t profitable and you lay off the employees you hired to work on it, that’s not surprising, but if the employees are doing something profitable, and you actually needed to hire that many to get whatever it was you hired them for done, shouldn’t it be more profitable to a company to keep them, even if one had a large number?
Moreover, if all the oligarchs are doing it, and they are, who will be left to buy their products/services?
They’re breaking their own ponzi scheme economy for a few more quarterly profit boosts because there’s nowhere else to grow/metastasize. Media companies are making less media. Food makers are making less product types. Their profit is coming out of gutting workers and their ability to produce what their economic sector produced in the first place.
This is a terminal stage market capitalism fire sale. The snake is eating its own tail having conquered the board.
Because this is the End of the Line. The snake has found its tail and Oroborous awakens to transform the end into the beginning. An ideology of everlasting consumption will eventually consume itself.
Bold of you to assume the stock market has anything to do with finite resources.
When the ultra wealthy and their companies run the system into the ground they will buy up the failed stocks and cheap land that nobody else can afford then come out ahead when the economy recovers like they have in the previous economic crashes. They can afford to buy low and cash out when it is high because they have zero pressure to act at any given point in time due to their ridiculous wealth and zero legal repercussions.
But even then there reaches a point where they run out of things to buy, and people to buy them from.
Eventually they poison the one thing they worship: the sanctity of private property rights. It has to serve at least some portion of the populace if it’s going to remain tenable, but they’re doomed to discover and undershoot that number.
The Western world spent a century demonising socialism with “they’ll take your home and car” but it rings hollow when you have neither.
The stock market is the reason for chasing quarterly profits and a massive part of what gets counted as the economy. It is the main driver of all the shitty late stage capitalism practices we are discussing.
Most of them are not. That’s the beauty of a cash cow like Google. They’re working on things that may be profitable in the future. By cutting the future, you’re cutting future growth.
It’s why I dislike hedge funds. They’re stripping value instead of creating value.
He says they aren’t needed “operationally” but Alphabet is not supposed to be merely operating anything. They are supposed to be inventing and experimenting and pushing the envelope. This discontented billionaire just wants ever-increasing rent on existing IP and should be called out as a simple landlord and not called an investor at all.
The rich person only cares about short term profits. They want to liquidate any good will and long term preparedness. Once the host corporation has been sufficiently bled of value, the parasite will move on to the next source of value it can find.
Correct. R&D only creates future value. Usually in the VC model, R&D is done by individuals or small groups and then funded (bought) by VC to get it to market. So even though the R&D do-er can cash out their future profits for immediate profits, the value of that R&D can’t be realized immediately.
I personally think the VC and legacy models are currently competing, and VC is winning out. As we see here, even large, established companies aren’t immune to impinging VCs.
I’m genuinely not super revolutionary but I didn’t get halfway through this letter before coming to the realization that this person needed to not exist anymore and same for anybody else of the same ilk.
Holy hell, if some fairly rational person got such a book and did their research on who needs to be written down the world would probably look a lot different in a short amount of time.
Because he doesn’t care. He’s looking out for himself.
“Hey Googs, you have too many employees and that’s cutting in my investments. Shitcan 150,000 so my investments go up and I make more billions kthxbye”
The source matters, too. This is a dude exploiting people and hoarding so much needed wealth. To an obscene amount. Like, he has more than enough to do everything he could possibly dream of, for the rest of his life. And long after he’s gone, all his descendants will be set and will never have to worry about money for their entire lives…
So what does this psychopath obsess about? “Please kick people out into the street and reduce the pay of anyone who remains. Number go up… Fuck em, got mine lol”
Yes you should take it, if you got no other options.
Then you immediately update your CV with your new job title and jump ship for more pay. If the orginal company offers to match the pay you say “you had the chance to pay me more. If you valued me that much, you could have paid me that much from the start”
Don’t go back on your intent to leave for a better job. Some employers will see you as disloyal if you take the raise and stay. You’re usually better off leaving anyway.
There is rarely a situation where you should allow your employer to match the offer you have in hand.
They had the opportunity to do so and then failed to properly retain you. If they realize how much losing you will cost them in productivity, that’s on them, not you.
If they ain’t paying you enough to stay they’re highly unlikely to honor the idea of regular raises. They’ve already shown they’re willing to low ball you if they can get away with it so fuck taking the risk of staying.
If you take the raise and stay, you’re now a bigger number on the same asshole bean counter’s spreadsheet. Maybe the biggest in your role. That’s not a long term move.
This. My buddy/former manager accepted a counter offer and lasted less than 6 months before they fired him, and made his working life miserable during that time. Just reinforced the mentality in me to never trust the counter offer of a place I already want to leave.
Yep. Soon as you commit to looking, you commit to leaving.
I told my last supervisor about every interview I was on; how it went, what I thought, etc. After a year I left abruptly (ie the pace at which they’d fire me). They were surprised, even after I’d been telling my supe about my hunting for a year.
I cannot understand why this is so hard to get. People on here whining about their employer using them. Well, yes they are. Use them back. It’s just business, it’s expected on both sides of the table.
Last three times I jumped, I increased my pay by $12 -> $22 -> $32. I could go again, but I’m kinda fat, happy and lazy ATM.
One of the biggest hurdles for me is the gap in medical coverage and uncertainty of what is covered next. I have a genetic condition that requires very expensive medication. Jumping jobs and hoping COBRA payments aren’t insane is a big risk, so I don’t feel confident jumping quickly between jobs if one doesn’t work out.
Yep. Enjoying about $400 more per paycheck after my last employer shuffled my duties around for no additional compensation. “Duties as assigned” being vague works both ways.
I guess the part I don’t get about everyone saying to take it and immediately start looking for a new job using your new title is that the new job doesn’t ask you how much experience or time you have with your new title?
Like, do they really not ask for 2+ years experience in that position or do you just lie to them or do you say, “Yeah, about 3 days now!” ?
From what I’ve heard is recuritment has a sort of preference for candidates.
So that’s starts: People they know that can do the job.
People that they know, that know someone that can do the job.
Then I guess it would be people already doing the job.
So you’re not going to be in as good of a position as someone that has 2+ years in the business. But what it does show is that the company you worked for, for a while, thought you was good enough to promote to that level. It’s definitely going to make you more likely to get the job at a competitor. If it doesn’t just keep apply for 6 months. By that time you will have 6 months experience.
You might need a month on the job, ratger than 3 days, just to show you been trained to run that job.
Also just because a job says 2+ years experience doesn’t mean they wont overlook that. It’s just that’s what they prefer.
Don’t you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it’s own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
…UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
This is Culver’s. They’re a burger fast food joint located throughout the Midwest and have things called “Scoopy Night” where a percentage of the proceeds go toward a specific cause. Schools, dance groups, etc can partake and the kids who attend that school/dance group/etc help take orders and deliver food to tables. Not quite as dystopian as OP has made it seem.
Why pay any attention to manufactured outrage? If there’s actual events to be outraged about, then we should talk about them instead of fictions. If there’s only manufactured events, then it isn’t an issue in the first place.
This is different from hypotheticals too. A realistic hypothetical holds as much water as an actual event. If there’s a 1% chance of a catastrophic hypothetical, and it happens hundreds of times daily, that’s a big fucking deal.
To put it another way, if there’s something to be legitimately outraged about, why bother with creating fictitious scenarios?
For a few hours? Sure, why not. They’re not actually useful labor. The store is doing you a favor. Your average 8 year old peeled away from Minecraft and told to do a task is going to fuck up more than they help. I know, because I was that kid and I fucked up a lot. Sometimes in very expensive ways. My only worry would be that they would leave the job thinking every day will be fresh and new like that day, and that people are gracious and polite.
For a few weeks? Oh hell yes, now we’re talking. Then they’ll see the monotony and how much corporate sucks. Even more, how much customers suck. At that point, the value of learning a skill that keeps you out of the fast food/retail mines will be obvious.
Yes, of course I would. It’s a great experience. We actually did that back in school, had a week when we all went out to check out different jobs. It was a great thrill and fun for all. Certainly not labor. We got to do grownup things. That was shortly before seventh grade, iirc.
And then, we’ve had school things where we would bake and cook and sell it right there on campus. Is that labor as well? Oh, and when I was in the boy scouts, we sometimes went door to door raising funds and selling trinkets. Child labor?
It’s not like we had to do eight-hour days, week for week. A few hours, once in your life. That’s not labor. That’s a fun thing to do.
Depends on the kid. Do they treat workers disrespectfully, or not understand that money shouldn’t be recklessly spent? Absolutely have them work fast food for a night – so long as an adult is there to make sure there’s no safety issues and they’re paid full minimum wage for it, I’m all for it.
I had a chemistry teacher in high school who maintained that everyone should have to work retail or fast food once, and as I’ve grown older I completely understand what they meant. Some people are naturally not dicks. They don’t look down on workers at Walmart or McDonald’s. For others, it’s a lesson they have to learn. They need to work in that position to understand what it’s like.
That doesn’t mean we should draft all kindergarteners into the work force. But the occasional experience to show them what a minimum wage job is like? Absolutely. If we want kids to grow up voting for minimum wage increases and universal labor rights, they have to learn these things somehow.
No, that’s still idiotic. It doesn’t matter what the context is of why a child is working at a fast food restaurant. There’s a child working at a fast food restaurant. This isn’t selling chocolates to raise money for a class hamster.
Being intent on remaining outraged is idiotic. Spending a few hours doing a handful of minor tasks at a fast food restaurant for fun is worlds apart from being required to labor for day after day for a pay check.
That’s why we need to have ubi for everyone, even these kids. Then they will just have money to spend on their dance clubs and stuff without having to work for it.
Selling chocolates is so much worse though. That always creeped me out because it’s either A) kids learning how to hawk wares on the street outside of stores, B) kids learning how to be door-to-door cold call solicitors or C) run a MLM pyramid scheme by convincing their parents to push their product at work.
Maybe even D) a combination of all of those for the ultimate street hustler training.
This is just kids “playing house” for a few hours. Most probably love that shit. I would have killed to see what the buttons on the register do and how the fries are made.
This is what it is, and it’s sad that it’s so normalized that people are defending it.
Everyone knows the kids aren’t technically required, but they’re “required” by social pressure.
I remember having to go door to door selling things when I was a kid. It may have been voluntary in a technical sense, but I was pretty well mandated to do so if I wanted to be part of that group with my friends. And there was even more pressure from my mom and dad because they didn’t want to be the family whose kid didn’t do the thing.
I think it’s time we start taking a long hard look at some of these things like fundraisers and de facto coerced employment of youth (without pay) and ask ourselves if a healthy system would allow this.
It’s indicative of a larger effort by republicans to force children back to work, this is part of that dystopia even if it’s on the “light dystopia” side of the spectrum.
Fuck off whiteknight, keep enabling corporate’s ability to normalize and capitalize off of child labor. This ain’t no goddamn bake sale or car wash.
It’s a fundraiser likely for an after school program. It typically pays out a lot better than a car wash or brat fry. Typically the students run orders out to cars.
And yeah, we probably should put more funding into schools for stuff like this instead of asking kids to fundraise.
Our schools do a “spirit night” fundraiser at a business once a month. The business donates a portion of the sales to the school during a specific time frame. Child labor is not involved.
Yea it makes it worse tbh. We won’t fund fun things at the schools so instead we make them work fast food to earn that funding.
It is indeed even more dystopian when you put it like that. It’s got the same energy as people giving their coworker PTO so they can deliver a baby or whatever.
The way this thread is going it sure would seem that way. A little bit of menial work to earn money for an activity is hardly the same as if this kid was on his 9-5 grind just itching for his next smoke break.
when we needed to do fundraisers THE PARENTS IN THE PTA DID IT FOR THE MIDDLE SCHOOLERS.
We had plenty of ‘kids’ working at fast food and grocery stores but not until 15 minimum. this kid looks like he’s 9. that’s too young to be fucking around near fryers and hot grills.
The containers still run an OS, have proprietary application code on them, and have memory that probably contains other user’s data in it. Not saying it’s likely, but containers don’t really fix much in the way of gaining privileged access to steal information.
Sure, there’s also the scratch image, which is entirely empty… So if your app is just a single statically linked binary, your entire container contents can be a single binary.
The busybox image is also more barebones than alpine, but still has a couple of basic tools.
Containers can be entirely without anything. Some containers only contain the binary that gets executed. But many containers do contain pretty much a full distribution, but I have yet to see a container with a password hash in its /etc/shadow file…
So while the container has a root account, it doesn’t have any login at all, no password, no ssh key, nothing.
It will not surprise me at all if this becomes a thing. Advanced social engineering relies on extracting little bits of information at a time in order to form a complete picture while not arousing suspicion. This is how really bad cases of identity theft work as well. The identity thief gets one piece of info and leverages that to get another and another and before you know it they’re at the DMV convincing someone to give them a drivers license with your name and their picture on it.
They train AI models to screen for some types of fraud but at some point it seems like it could become an endless game of whack-a-mole.
While you can get information out of them pretty sure what that person meant was sensitive information would not have been included in the training data or prompt in the first place if anyone developing it had a functioning brain cell or two
It doesn’t know the sensitive data to give away, though it can just make it up
Oh give me a break with this nonsense. Android has an 80% global market share, your average dipshit uses it just fine. It also “just works” and very frequently works better than iOS.
Safari is a shit tier browser when it comes to web standards and performance. It’s hilarious how iOS users try so hard to justify blowing $1000 on a phone when an Android 1/2 of the price does exactly the same thing and is just as easy to use. Why can’t you just enjoy your apple garbage without having this weird superiority complex?
Uff, projecting a bit aren’t we? I didn’t start the flame war, the other guy started by shitting on iphone users.
And yes, android phones do the 80% of Iphones for less money, but you know what? Those last 20% I do care about.
Just something as simple as switching my wireless earbuds between my computer and phone seamlessly, compare the experience between android + windows/linux and the experience with Iphone + macbook with airpods.
Small shit like that " just working" makes a huge difference in UX and thats what I care about.
Not sure how Safari being garbage is relevant, so is chrome, I use firefox, so, whatever?
I have has wireless bluetooth earbuds since like 2018, all of them had the issue that if I put my phone in certain pockets they would cut out, etc.
Even my airpods had that issue with my latest OnePlus phone, guess what, never happened once with Iphone, it just works, I don’t have to think about which pocket I should be putting my phone into.
The most annoying thing about the Iphone is the keyboard, but I am getting used to it, tried swiftkey, but just as much of a laggy poece of shit as it is on android
Vivaldi is my go to browser. Brave does a better job with blocking ads. I’m switching to Brave whenever I need to stream something on a site loaded with ads, or when YouTube manages to detect my Adblock for a few days.
You think Firefox is the only browser that can use extensions and add-ons? Brave just doesn’t need them for adblock because it’s built in. But, like all chromium browsers, you can use loads of extensions for loads of use cases. Anything that works on Chrome works on Brave.
It’s maybe a few clicks to find the add-ons store in Firefox then searching “uBlock Origin”. Hell, when I switched to Firefox last year, I want to say there was even an onboarding that pointed me to the extension upon setup.
Why does it suck though? Works fine for me. Granted, I’m a software engineer, but even looking through my “end user glasses”, I don’t see anything wrong with it.
I wouldn’t say Firefox sucks but there are definitely some things that made me use Edge occasionally back when I used Firefox as my main browser. It was mainly stuff like a webpage that doesn’t support Firefox and extensions not having a Firefox version. Which sure aren’t problems with FireFox, it’s more a problem of it not having enough adoption, but to an end user if the thing they wanna use doesn’t work in FireFox but works in Chrome then that’s FireFox’s fault.
I’ve used edge before my university disabled profile syncing (only reason I was using it, to be honest). Edge was fine. Switched to Firefox just to see how it is nowadays, never looked back. Honestly, can’t think of any extension I’m missing. Got quite a few myself, but probably not the same niche as you.
So far I haven’t encountered broken websites yet. Fingers crossed to keep it that way. Though I’ll probably steer clear of such a website unless absolutely necessary.
I have very few issues with Firefox. I fine across a site that does not render properly maybe once every other month. I did have some resource issues with it in Windows 10 with it using too much RAM (regularly using 3-4GB) but that has been fixed since I switch to Linux.
You can get one but not the other. Orion has been pretty solid for me, has all the lovey iOS integration so the happy chemicals Apple spent R&D on does it’s magic while blocking all sorts of things, but it’s closed source :/
Generally there are few privacy friendly/Foss browsers on IOS.
Um, Safari is so privacy friendly that Google regularly asks me if I’m human. For example it has “private relay” which is similar to TOR* so trackers don’t even know your IP address — combine that with blocking third party cookies (and even some first party cookies) by default and providing false data to fight fingerprinting even if you don’t block trackers entirely - and blocking them entirely is as simple as installing an extension. Private Relay also adds a layer of encryption on top of DNS queries and otherwise unencrypted http traffic… so your ISP/Cellular provider/Work/School/abusive husband/etc can’t track you
99.99% of the Safari’s code is FOSS — dual licensed under LGPL and BSD.
It’s not the browser I use - pretty lacking in the feature department, but it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.
(* if anything, it’s better than TOR… with that service there’s a risk your entry/exit nodes are tracking you. With Private Relay it’s always one of Apple’s servers for the entry node and a reputable cloud company like Akamai for the exit node. Both would have to be compromised in order to identify you… maybe a nation state can do that, but a big data tracking company definitely can’t)
I mean they did say few. Generally speaking, every browser is basically safari (WebKit) on iOS and apple doesn’t allow support for 3rd party browser extensions (least natively, Orion supports this somehow). So you’re already limited in that regard. If you don’t use safari , a browser like FF + VPN is IMO a better experience. You also have the option of just using wireguard and controlling your traffic at home/VPS if you’re into that.
WebKit might be open source but the browser deployed by apple is not. That’s like saying chrome is open source. They both use open source engines.
it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.
You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.
No they don’t, that’s exactly what they said. Safari makes them do CAPTCHAs so it is the most privacy friendly. It is true that it has better blocking features than Firefox on iOS (because Firefox doesn’t have extensions).
Firefox is deliberately gimped by Apple on iOS, along with every other browser. It’s not a fair comparison. It’s basically Safari without a ton of extra features that Mozilla was never going to be allowed to implement, which is why the EU decided Apple was being anti-competitive.
Firefox doesn’t even need extensions to match Safari, but it does need gecko and all the settings it supports on other platforms.
Apple is a shady company and trusting them with your data is a big mistake.
I don’t disagree that Firefox is deliberately gimped, and it’s built in blocking features on desktop match Safari on iOS. I’m not sure I really agree that Apple is a “shady company,” in many respects they are doing a good job with end to end encryption and ensuring that they don’t have access to your data in the first place (not to excuse their extreme walled garden approach, which stifles competition and limits good options like Firefox [real Firefox] with uBlock Origin [or uMatrix]).
That’s because so far every browser on iOS had to use WebKit as it’s HTML rendering engine, meaning that even if you installed another browser manually you were basically still using Safari under the hood. IIRC the new DMA rules include allowing other browser engines like Gecko, so Mozilla is probably already working on making addons available. I mean they are available on Android, so why wouldn’t they make them available on iOS now that they finally can?
I wouldn’t be sure because of how stupid Apples compliance is. But if they do I would definitely switch. I guess it’s just going to be Firefox focus until then.
Because it blocks ads out of the box. I know its new tab screen causes a lot of y’all’s buttholes to clench because it mentions cryptocurrency, but there are harder things to ignore
Idk if I would advocate for or defend it, but I find mobile ads especially abhorrent cuz they take up more relative space on the screen and my upload speed isn’t good enough to be VPNing through my pihole anytime I’m outside the house
iOS browsers are just skins for Safari anyways, and Brave addresses my issue out of the box, so yeah
Vivaldi is a proprietary rebranding of Chromium. Can’t say I’d recommend it over (or in addition to) Firefox.
We need less forks of Chromium. Any one company (Google in this case) having total control over browser engines is dangerous, and is a big reason why the whole Apple/Safari/Webkit situation is such a big deal to begin with.
Remember kids, if it’s Chromium based, it’s still part of the problem. The Chromium project only exists to provide the illusion of choice. Don’t let Google have the power to dictate web standards at will.
One exception I’m aware of: GNOME Web (aka epiphany-browser) uses WebKitGTK, which is based on Apple’s WebKit rather than Google’s Chromium/Blink. But it’s Linux desktops first and foremost. Not on mobile platforms, not exactly intended for Windows (might be usable with Cygwin/WSL) or macOS (seems to be on MacPorts) either, and even on non-GNOME desktops like KDE it might seem a bit out of place.
I daily drive Firefox but Epiphany is my first choice fallback on the rare occasion I encounter a site that’s broken on Firefox.
True but if you use Vivaldi and then you try to go back to Firefox, it’s like going back in the early 2000s. I always say this, Firefox should have been like Vivaldi. Super customizable and packed with features. Instead you have to rely on extensions and thus put your trust in the creator of said extension that they will not sell it. Heck even with extensions, trying to mimic the new tab page from Vivaldi is a masterclass in patience.
You go ahead and destroy something that cost you hundreds of dollars. Be it a TV or cans of Bud Light, I’m not going to destroy something I already got out of some need for a moral victory.
I hate ‘smart’ TVs. I wish they didn’t exist. But telling someone to destroy the one they already had- meaning that if they want to watch TV, they’ll just have to buy another- doesn’t really make much sense to me.
I don’t see how this is giving up though. Been doing this to close to two decades in one form of another and I wouldn’t consider any other way. Except kodi instead of plexus here.
I still watch TV through a Laptop running Windows Media Centre. MS have given up on trying to kill it. The Microsoft remote has seen better days but is still functioning.
I mean, steam made it work with games, you telling me that 6-7 of these giant media companies can’t get it to work for video? The giving up part is that you have to embrace piracy (again?) to get to acceptable levels of service per dollar
So here’s how I’m running things: At the top level it’s a Raspberry pi 5 running raspbian, then everything else (jellyfin, prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, Usenet download software, etc) is a docker container. If that sounds like how you want to do it feel free to message me and I can try to get you on your feet
I’m not who you replied to but I’ve been looking to set up something like this (I have a year old dedicated tower for hosting)
But I don’t know anything about docker, and it seems like a pretty big learn - is it required for the sonarr radarr and overseerr stuff, or just a nice to have thing?
I used CLI for setup, the GUI is just for ease of file management and checking libraries. I recommend hotio for super easy images to just fire and forget. Links I hope will help you: hotio.dev/containers/jellyfin/wiki.servarr.com
Step 1. Get docker up and running (Portainer helps with other containers) Step 2. Use prowlarr to set up all the search engines you’ll use on other *arr apps Step 3. Set up your libraries with Jellyfin
Honestly you can just run the app on your computer and tv connected devices. You don’t have to get fancy. I had trouble getting it setup to recognize and remember my library server address at first, but somehow I got it to work. I don’t like the UI though, and just use PLEX instead.
Other server software are available of course. The concept stays the same though. Very much recommend doing this. I’m halfway there, running Plex on my desktop PC and watching on my TV and other devices at home. Very comfortable setup. But I wish I had a small computer like a Pi or something, and a NAS to hold my drives. That way my desktop PC could rest.
Personally I was a fan of buying something like a Dell optiplex as my my NAS and Pihole but I do wish I had a better enclosure for the drives as any truly good one seems to be hundreds of dollars and mildly defeats the idea of self hosting being cheaper.
I just use an old crappy hand-me-down mid-tower gaming case I stuffed some drives into. As long as you can keep them cool, dusted, and away from vibrations (with HDDs), plenty of (used?)cases will have enough HDD slots to get you started.
Also old rackmount servers on ebay have plenty of slots I hear, but rackmount fans are waaaaay louder.
Room is my main issue. Living in an apartment I can’t have large boxes/computers just standing anywhere. So it has to be very small and quiet. 😅 Pi should be perfect. Maybe mount it underneath my desk where my desktop PC is or something. 👍
If you’re not planning on storing absolutely tons of data at first, you can also squeeze a lot into so-called “1 liter PCs”. Traditional platform, a little more power and room than a Pi, and you can neatly tuck them away!
I hear they float around eBay quite readily these days.
Sadly haven’t been hearing the very best things about the Pi 5, but earlier ones can do well as little servers.
I’ve been learning a lot from the self hosted podcast lately haha. Also one of the hosts runs this site (which I happened to find first) that can be pretty helpful!
I remember some folks on reddit saying USB isn’t the most reliable connection for long-term drives, but I’m not 100% sure what that was about. Maybe the connectors wear out?
What I’ve heard about the Pi 5 specifically is that they dropped hardware acceleration support for video encoding. Which is kinda weird, but admittedly I’m a bit out of the Pi loop to really weigh in.
I believe I heard this on the “Self Hosted Podcast” a while back. (Edit: oh I mentioned them already lol)
I imagine that might hurt for someone trying to use it for streaming Jellyfin or something like that 🤔.
Plex is a great example of how proprietary software will inevitably become exploitative, and only purely Free Software systems can ever be trustworthy in the long term.
Interlacing only sucks on progressive TVs because they have to interpolate and scale the Missing information causing artifacting, watching interlaced content on an interlaced television is actually unnoticeable from a progressive display in my opinion, perhaps less sharp, but still.
Honestly, I’m just using a cheap Android TV box with stremio and smart tube. Those two apps pretty much cover everything I’d wanna watch. Those $20 Walmart ones are super easy to root/bootloader unlock too, so you can put lineageOS on it if you want
Just get a cheap PS4 or Xbox and watch all your stuff on there. We have an LG “Smart TV” that just doesn’t need to be connected to the internet because our PS5 (formerly PS4) is fast and snappy, and has all the apps we could want to stream off. Plus, both have a Bluray player installed right off the bat, so we can even watch those if we’re up for it.
Don’t bother with sluggish performance on your Smart TV, it’s just not worth it.
The UI is better and not as slow as on smart TVs from what I’ve heard. Plus you can play games on the console and watch DVDs and Blurays if that’s your thing. Apart from that, not much.
This is true, because smart TVs have shitty processors, and consoles do not. Consoles are made for media, smart TVs have shitty embedded software on slow hardware, comparatively.
Sony famously pushed DVDs into the mainstream and won a generation of console wars by building a pretty good DVD player into the PS2 which also happened to cost not much more than most DVD players did at the time
Who said that? There are lots of streaming devices you can connect to your display, from game consoles to streaming boxes like Apple TV, Nvidia shield, Android box or if you really want to tinker a PC connected to the TV. The point is, don’t connect the TV itself to the internet as it has the most access to the whole viewing experience to drop ads on you.
Or, if you must (cringe), use anonymous credentials, have a router level VPN, and maybe even run pihole. But much better to just hook up a PC to your TV and run all of your apps off of that.
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