Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc , 1 day ago

The muppet on the wall?

Dark_Arc , 1 day ago

I don’t know if I would call that a Muppet but fair enough lol

Dark_Arc , 2 days ago

lol

Dark_Arc , 3 days ago

Yeah, I’m thinking that’s the case … maybe it’s a tweak to their Android text boxes. That seems like something that’s got to be keyboard independent.

Dark_Arc , 2 days ago

Seems they’re discontinued?

Dark_Arc , 4 days ago

This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.

YouTube as a service is … actually a great service, it pays creators well, it’s fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.

It’s monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.

Dark_Arc , 3 days ago

Literally read about regional pricing and how important it is. It’s incredibly ignorant to be against regional pricing.

The alternative to regional pricing is people just don’t have access at all.

Dark_Arc , 3 days ago

I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.

I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.

Linus Tech Tips did a video about this … which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI

Google also isn’t in the business of “running things at a loss in hopes of future profit” anymore … so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it’s “too profitable”, maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use … but you’re absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between “annoying but profitable” and “annoying but we’re losing users.”

More competition is always good … but Google isn’t stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn’t stopping competition from showing up, they’re just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it’s ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).

Dark_Arc , 4 days ago

Valve’s Artifact Classic card game. I actually found the basic formula to be really fun.

I think this game died for two reasons:

A) The game was review bombed for its monetization (IMO a lot of this was the non-target audience trying it and leaving a bad review)

B) Valve said following the review bombing that they were going to make major changes. This resulted in a lot of Artifact fans (IMO) leaving the game because … why invested and learn a game that’s going to undergo major changes.

So Valve worked on Artifact Foundry (and never finished it) … before eventually everyone at Valve gave up and released both Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry for free. The original Artifact Classic is still a great time with a friend and all cards are now totally free so you can build whatever decks you want.

It’s basically a AAA studio card game, with cross platform support, released in complete, for free … because of some poor decision making. Some things may be unbalanced but if you’re playing with friends anyways … just have a friendly agreement to not use the cards that cause problems in your decks. It also could bounce back into active development if it starts to acquire a player base again (because Valve).

Dark_Arc , 6 days ago

Yup… It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.

It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.

I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim’s competitor, but this wasn’t going to be it… I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.

Dark_Arc , 5 days ago

s/you/one/ I don’t think it’s really about YOU in particular, just “you” the author or “one that is saying things like this.”

Another example, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime” isn’t about “you” it’s about the concept of “an individual (that might be the reader).” This phrasing seems to be more agreeable with some people and possibly there’s different tolerances geographically.

I’ve tried to use “one” in place of “you” to remove this ambiguity but it’s at times uncomfortable to type lol

Dark_Arc , 7 days ago

Hot take: GitLab is sluggish, buggy, crap. It is the “Mega Blocks” of source control management.

If you have source files that are more than a few hundred lines and you try to load them on the web interface, forget about it.

They can’t even implement 2FA in such a way that it isn’t a huge pain to interact with. There’s been an open issue for over 7 years now to implement 2FA like it is everywhere else, where you can be signed in to more than one device at a time if you have 2FA enabled (gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/16656).

Not to mention this was not a GitHub failure, this was a failure by the NYTimes to secure their developer’s credentials. This “just in house/self host everything and magically get security” mentality that’s so prevalent on Lemmy is also just wrong. Self hosting is not a security thing, especially when you’re as large of a target as NYTimes. That one little misconfiguration in your self hosted GitLab instance … the critical patch that’s still sitting in your queue … that might be the difference between a breach like this and protecting your data.

Dark_Arc , 7 days ago

This is “hack” like the kid that guessed your grandma’s Facebook password is “ilovecats1953”, “hacked” Facebook.

Dark_Arc , 7 days ago

Haven’t used it first hand, but I think it’s more promising.

Dark_Arc , 5 days ago

Yikes, thanks for sharing that one!

Dark_Arc , 8 days ago

I’m surprised, I was pretty sure anything with Battleye flat out rejected virtualization.

I thought Destiny used Battleye but I must be mistaken on one of these points.

Dark_Arc , 9 days ago

OpenGL is an older graphics API with a lot of issues I won’t get into here.

You’re almost guaranteed to be better off using DXVK.

Dark_Arc , 10 days ago

FOSS isn’t inherently left wing. It is often charitable work but that’s far from unique to the left wing. That can also just stem from “I wanted this program to exist and it didn’t, but I don’t want to put even more effort in to monetize it.” Plenty of FOSS projects start as someone wanting to learn something early on in their career as well (which is both a pro and a con because … if you’re learning you might be making some bigger mistakes).

Anarchism … I just don’t really agree with that at all. Lots of larger FOSS projects do very much have governing bodies that decide what to do and how it shall be done. In many cases FOSS authors are a one person governing body making all the big decisions.

Organized charitable work is far from anarchy even though anarchism dreams of everything being organized charitable work.

Dark_Arc , 10 days ago

There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.

EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).

Dark_Arc , 11 days ago

It’s stuff like this that makes me distrust a lot of lifetime price guarantees and lockins. Take for instance pCloud (not to be confused with Proton Drive) and their purchasable lifetime cloud storage…

Dark_Arc , 12 days ago

A state wide mono-culture based on an unsolved cultural issue isn’t “education” it’s inherently heavy handed.

It also actively harms schools that may be trying to teach students how to use cell phones productively in their lives to help them solve problems rather than pretending as though they don’t exist.

Dark_Arc , 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

Part of that is teaching people how to control their impulses and stay on task.

Your workspace isn’t going to have you hang your phone up on the wall somewhere when you come into work and have someone tell you “now is the time to use your phone.”

College isn’t going to do it either.

We also could take some cues that maybe this isn’t all as serious as we make it out to be. My high school back in the 2010s gave us a ton of busy work, insisted on making it effectively mandatory if you wanted a decent grade, didn’t let people go to the bathroom without asking permission and using a sign out sheet, insisted every second of every lesson was crucial, and was very strict about not pulling out your cell phone basically ever (kids still snuck texts here and there).

I see more merits for small children, but in general I’m strongly in favor of radical changes to how we approach education … because learning should be fun but is not for so many people … and we forget so much of what we’ve been “taught” anyways.

Dark_Arc , 11 days ago

Ahh yes, hostile partial quoting to make my country seem unintelligent; welcome to my block list.

Dark_Arc , 13 days ago

I mean, in the Steve Jobs Apple it might have.

Steve originally pushed for web apps to dominate on the emerging open web standards.

Apple used to care about the customer more than they do now (IMO).

Dark_Arc , 15 days ago

I confused Alzheimer’s with Autism for a minute and was like … haven’t I been on this ride before? Didn’t the paper get retracted ages ago?

🤦‍♂️ lol

Dark_Arc , 16 days ago

That’s a really silly take … a Paywall is just an authorization mechanism.

That’s like saying the source code of lemmy leaks and you expect your account to be compromised any second.

Dark_Arc , 16 days ago

Consider paying for the news…?

Dark_Arc , 16 days ago

I doubt this will affect much … that’s a lot more source code than I’d expect though, dang.

Presumably a lot of it is for internal operations (custom editing software or something of that ilk).

Dark_Arc , 16 days ago

I’m not sure what you’re saying here …

Dark_Arc , 16 days ago

Ahh, yes I agree on all points; thanks for the clarification!

Dark_Arc , 15 days ago

I was wondering if that’s where you were going in part.

I think it’s a bit of the phrasing; you stated an opinion that’s vague to the point of tiptoeing towards the potentially loaded question: “who’s independent media?”

It’s not uncommon in the conservative media sphere to see a similar (typically series) of leading ambiguous questions. They’re never genuine, it’s always in the style of:

You know what the best operating system is? I’ll tell you what the best operating system is, it’s Linux. Do you know why Linux is the best operating system? It’s because it’s got penguins and penguins are great! Do you know why penguins are great? I mean, can you think of a more iconic bird? That’s why, that is why … and Big Microsoft is out to destroy your hopes and dreams aren’t they? Yes, yes they absolutely are, with their soulless Windows operating system that’s manufactured by the flying spaghetti monster. Now obviously folks, only use Linux if you support freedom not the unholy flying spaghetti monster. The flying spaghetti monster will destroy America. It’s its one true mission. Support freedom, support penguins, stop the flying spaghetti monster.

I think it’s made a bunch of if antsy lol

Dark_Arc , 17 days ago

No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.

I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!

Dark_Arc , 17 days ago

Few can make it to the third lesson.

Dark_Arc , 17 days ago

The only thing you can really do is create new communities and wait for them to grow.

Dark_Arc , 18 days ago

My hot take: hostile reads are in pore taste. It’s unique to the internet, and we need less of that.

Dark_Arc , 19 days ago

I would not describe Wayland in its current state as experimental. We’re past that point by a fair bit.

It is actively used as the default by multiple major Linux distributions and is the advised default by both GNOME and KDE maintainers.

Dark_Arc , 21 days ago

I’m not sold given that you’ve got the mechanical complexity of two types of engine systems in a hybrid.

I think just getting the charging network sorted out would basically make EVs fine for most people.

Dark_Arc , 21 days ago

I don’t particularly care about code size as a user or as a programmer.

Hard drive space is the cheapest thing you’ve got on a computer.

You could always run gentoo and use -Os … that can make things a lot smaller but also slower.

Dark_Arc , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

It’s an invented problem. A program takes what a program takes. Everyone cares way more about the code being legible, the code being fast enough, and the code not using a ton of memory (and even that last one is kind of shrugged off depending on context).

Applications taking 3mb take 3mb because they do next to nothing or they do it with a bunch of shared libraries … which is a whole other dependency management mess and wasting a few mb on a drive.

There’s also a huge difference between being wasteful of something that pollutes the planet in mass and is not renewable like gasoline (which is the only reason you’d be upset about that now) and wasting a few mb on a drive.

The equivalent of your complaint 3mb vs 200mb is like complaining about a person taking a trip to the grocery store… It’s insignificant and often necessary.

You can say that program does way more than you need, but … nobody is catering to “only what you specifically need” and using the larger program almost certainly covers your needs.

Furthermore, like I already said making things smaller often makes them slower… Since CPU is more expensive to improve, of course things are bigger, that’s what more people care about. Some video games take that to an extreme with uncompressed files and 250GB install footprints … but 200mb?

Dark_Arc , 20 days ago

And then you look at real life and notice that code everywhere is slow, bloated and inefficient.

That’s not true in practice. I mean, that code does exist. However, the vast majority of code is reasonably performant.

Not everyone is an expert at optimization and that’s fine … we’d have a lot less software in general if only the best of the best were allowed to author it.

It would be great if more things went back to native (or at least not “I need an entire web browser for my app to function”) that to me is wasteful… But a few hundred MBs for a program as large, complicated, and feature rich as LibreOffice is not.

Terrible analogy. A better equivalent is someone renting a garage to store stuff inside and now, because they have so much space, there’s that urge to fill it, whether it makes sense to or not.

No, that’s … just wrong. It’s not like people are just writing code and leaving it there to do nothing except increase code size or are actively trying to fill the drive.

It’s usually the other way around. As a rule of thumb, less code = smaller size = faster execution. In theory, 1k lines of code will require less computation, less processing, than 10k.

That’s not inherently true, though it is a common misconception/oversimplification. When you do things like code inlining, you increase code size (because you’re taking that functions code and having your compiler copy it around to a bunch of places) but the increased locality speeds things up. There’s a reason -Os and -O3 are not the same option.

Now sure, if you execute fewer instructions that’s better than executing more localized code (though even that can be wrong given process cache and relative instruction speed). Lots of programs have added features that you might not use, but that doesn’t really “hurt you”, that’s not the source of your program or your computer’s slowness, it’s just some bytes on the drive.

We’re a long way from the Unix style “everything is a small program that gets piped into other programs to do interesting things” days. That paradigm just doesn’t work for GUI software. Nobody does that because … normal folks would rather have one office program than have to go shop for 275 programs so that they can have separate programs to edit the document, print the document, convert the document to pdf, update calculations in their spreadsheet, run macros, etc (which if you use all/most of them would likely be more expensive in terms of disk space anyways).

Dark_Arc , 22 days ago

I recommend kopia. It lets you backup automatically to a primary location, copy that data periodically to a secondary location, and it has a command that you can use to verify all the data is actually what it was when the backup was created.

Dark_Arc , 21 days ago

Kopia uses content addressable storage. So basically when it copies things, it only copies what data is new. Files that haven’t changed will not be overwritten.

You kind of need to run the verification command on both the source and the “backup copy” for maximum paranoia. If you’re running it on a local copy, that should be a relatively fast process as you don’t need to download stuff.

You’d basically connect on the command line to the copy you just updated via sync-to and then ask kopia to verify 100% of the file integrity … it should then run through everything and make sure it matches what’s supposed to be there. I’m not sure how you fix it if it detects something wrong, I’ve yet to run into that … I’m sure there’s a way 🙂

You could also use two backup drives and sync to both, then if you get an error restoring a particular file from one, you could in theory restore it from the other. A ZFS cluster with redundant copies and/or a RAID-1, RAID-5 or RAID-6 style setup could also help … but most people aren’t going to run an entire NAS just to turn it on periodically and backup their data “offline”. Most people are going to be better served (IMO) by using cloud storage like B2 (where bitflips aren’t really a concern) or a NAS (where bitflips similarly are a minimal concern, ideally in another location) with a periodically updated offline copy (on say an external hard drive) should be enough to protect most people’s data well.

Also going to like to what I’m talking about:

• kopia.io/docs/advanced/consistency/
• kopia.io/docs/advanced/synchronization/

Dark_Arc , 22 days ago

I think we’re probably a lot further than that.

Dark_Arc , 22 days ago

I don’t particularly care…

It sucks for people that live in countries that Sony doesn’t sell to … but also Sony just doesn’t sell to those countries.

Ultimately they made people use an account, something that’s long been extremely standard behavior.

I think people are overreacting, particularly those that are in a situation where it’s just “create a free account with your throw away email address.”

Dark_Arc , 23 days ago

I think it also depends on what communities you interact with.

I got fed up with it in the Lemmy.world news community and unsubscribed. I’ve been much happier following that change.

There are still some leftist and both sides hot takes I run into … but it’s a much more acceptable pacing now.

Dark_Arc , 25 days ago

Cool! It Takes Two is a great game; hopefully this lets more people enjoy it!

Dark_Arc , 27 days ago

Kagi Summary:

Open source software alternatives like GIMP, Kaden Live, and Inkscape often fall short compared to their closed-source counterparts like Photoshop and Premiere. This is because open source projects tend to lack dedicated designers, quality assurance teams, and overall management, resulting in subpar user interfaces and missing key features. However, there are successful examples of open source software like Blender and Thunderbird that have overcome these challenges by building dedicated teams, standardizing their designs, and engaging with users. The open source community faces difficulties in competing with the ease of monetizing software today, as independent developers are more likely to create their own closed-source apps rather than contribute to open source projects long-term. While open source has produced many great tools, improving the user experience and management of larger open source projects could help them better rival their commercial competitors.

As for “why the downvote” … this is a click bait title with a “tell me something I don’t know” levels of content. The #1 problem facing all OSS is a lack of volunteers. It’s rare that a project owner is actively malicious towards their user base or doesn’t understand that things like UI/UX and QA could be better.

This has similar energy to a Twitter argument I had with Liam from GamingOnLinux that made me lose all respect for him. OSS authors are not indebted to their users. If you want OSS to be better … go spend some time making it better or donate money to the authors of the software to allow them to spend more time on it.

Dark_Arc , 26 days ago

One possible answer is to allow anyone to see votes categorized by instance, so you know where they’re originating from.

Small/single user instances could be aggregated together/anonymized or maybe that’s just the price you pay for having a single user instance.