Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

It’s not really the same… There are people that like guns for a variety of reasons and 99% of them will never take a life. Their only reason for existing isn’t to go on a murderous rampage.

This was the example where I just said “you know what, banning guns isn’t going to fix it”

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsberg_attack

Another person replied about an attack with a van in Canada.

I think we genuinely need to treat this as a mental health crisis, but like for real. Not the Republican “thoughts and prayers” mental health crisis, but a real thought out use of resources to figure out why so regularly we have people in our society that want to kill a bunch of random people.

We should also do more background checks and close loopholes, even though that wouldn’t have helped here.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of that detail when the comment was written last night.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

That’s not the point at all. The point is that there are mentally ill people who want to kill and they’ll find a way. We’ve got a record number of people that are seemingly in this category as of late.

In prior decades mass shootings like this were not issues like they are today, the first AR-15s were available in the late 1950s. You can find “mass shootings” going back into the start of the 20th century, but they’re not the same mass shootings we’re seeing today. They’re much more targeted violence.

Now… It’s “I’m going to kill you because you’re at Walmart(?)”

Keep in mind the US has roughly 10x the population. If we want to do an apples oranges comparison of the two countries … that’s potentially 10 van incidents in the US in place of mass shootings.

But that’s not a fair comparison either because Canada has an accessible health care system.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I suspect lawyers are stonewalling expansion for fear of making their monopoly cases worse

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Ofc, you can still make eye contact with someone and have them then say “oh my god, I didn’t see you there!” because there were spacing out/wandering in their mind.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Wow, I missed that they banned it in Ohio. It must only apply to new systems as I’m fairly sure Fairlawn is still operating municipal fiber.

That’s really irritating though, of course they snuck it into a budget bill.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Ah good! That simplifies things for Cleveland then.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

That’s fucking stupid. But yes, I had the same problem, and the article is behind a paywall 😥

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Yeah… It was a culture shock going from Marietta/Parkersburg area to college in Akron … just in terms of like “wait, you went on vacation out of the country!?”, “cedar point wasn’t the vacation but just a thing you did one, two, three, many times during the summer?!”, etc

Pretty much fully incognito as a college educated urbanite now, but the roots are still there…

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

There are plenty of liberals that aren’t sold on the gun control strategy. I’ll join the party here.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Drugs aren’t protected by copyright. They’re protected by patents.

In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they’re genuinely useful concepts.

Copyright in particular doesn’t just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: hhs.gov/…/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-…

Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course … so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

If you have some disposable cash and you’re running into the “watch this video about antivax stuff”. I recently discovered Kagi’s summarizer works on as many YouTube videos as you want (seemingly by processing the audio itself).

It’s been a bit since I’ve received a video like that, but I think it’ll be a huge time saver for the next one… Or the next similar one…

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Very easily, you compile it.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I’d be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn’t exist for a reason or ever do any good… Isn’t helping actually lead to a solution :)

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

They don’t falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you’ve come up with your own definition where there can be multiple “centralized” entities in control of the system.

There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).

Nostr is also decentralized but it’s decentralized by a relay (? – the name of this sort of thing isn’t super well established; they’ve never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

There is no central authority in mastodon.

There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.

Those are completely different products, and you’re continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.

I’m sorry but you don’t know better than everybody else about what’s centralized and what isn’t.

If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server.

Wrong again.

blog.joinmastodon.org/…/how-to-migrate-from-one-s…

And yes, that’s a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn’t mean these things can’t be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of “data transfer” to an entry new server, automatically, but it’s a lot of work that hasn’t been completely finished yet.

It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past.

If you don’t like any of the existing servers, start your own. There’s no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) – which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.

Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes.

I’ve moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.

One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else’s server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.

People don’t choose other providers because Google does it for free and they’re a household name. There’s not much pressure to go use Proton’s more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.

The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.

🙄

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I’m not sure what you would’ve expected Biden to do here. Break years of US foreign policy work to side with attackers?

Honestly the whole Israel and US thing feels like Israel is the angry friend that’s little brother just got bullied at school and the US is trying to be supportive while talking them down.

President Biden headed home on Wednesday after a wartime trip to Israel, where he forcefully vowed that the United States would stand fast with Israel in its war against Hamas and unveiled a newly brokered deal to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt.

In a speech, Mr. Biden talked emotionally about the “all-consuming rage” Israelis must feel after seeing 1,400 people slaughtered by Hamas terrorists in cross-border raids on Oct. 7. But then he cautioned Israelis not to be so consumed by rage that they make mistakes. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States,” he said. “While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Sounds and awful lot like “I’ll help you kick the ass of the fools that hit your brother, but don’t make the mistake I did, you don’t need to kick everybody’s ass.”

www.nytimes.com/…/heres-the-latest-on-the-war?smi…

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

It’s Google… Chances are an automated system would go “nope it’s legit, buzz off”

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Because they are this disorganized and stupid. Their platform has been “get 15 seconds on TV to scream about it” for years.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

You don’t. I play lots of multiplayer games (they’re pretty much all I play these days). You just play different games with different groups of your friends at different times.

I didn’t like Balder’s Gate, RPGs just aren’t my cup of tea. Some of my friends played it, I did things with other friends that interested me.

This person’s argument might apply to some people, but for the majority of people I’ve met, they have more than a couple of friends or at least have friends that are decent enough to say “okay we all like X, so we’ll play that instead since everybody is here.”

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

IIRC that’s what the income tax was supposed to be like … it wasn’t even supposed to be an “income tax”, it was supposed to be a tax on the employer side based on the amount of money they’re paying their employees. Somehow it ended up being that employees individually have to deal with the headaches and your actual take home salary isn’t obvious.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you’re on the other end, and it’s either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Some places do eventually listen. Crytek stealth dropped easy anticheat support for Hunt Showdown a few versions ago.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Have you tried timberborn?

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/

A really neat city builder where you’re basically trying to survive as a civilization of beavers fighting the seasons and growing larger and larger.

There’s very little focus on traffic, 100% focus on managing literally everything about your civilization though… and it’s a voxel style game so you can come up with some really cool setups.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I can see it.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

This is another way of saying “boys will be boys” and ignoring the problem.

I don’t think that’s at all similar. “Boys will be boys” is “we know it’s bad, but we can’t stop them.”

The argument is… is it really bad? After all, isn’t it the “scandal” that really causes the damage. It’s not like any harm is directly done to the person, someone could’ve already done this to me, and well, I wouldn’t be any the wiser. It’s when they start sharing it and society reacts as if it’s real and there’s something scandalous that there’s a problem.

If we stop considering it scandalous… The problem kind of goes away… It’s not much different than AI photoshopping a hat on someone that they may or may not approve of.

This opens persons up for attack, and regulation to increase friction to access these tools is one of the next most important steps to take.

I’ve never researched these tools or used them… But I’d wager that’s going to be next to impossible. If you think the war on drugs was bad… A war on a particular genre of software would be so much worse.

Like a lot of things… I think this is a question of how do we adapt to new technology not how do we stop it. If I actually believed this was stoppable, I might agree with you… But it actually seems more dangerous if we try and make the tools hard to obtain vs just giving people plausible deniability.

You mentioned bullying, definitely empathetic to that. I don’t know that this would really make things worse vs the “I heard Katie …” rumor crap that’s being going on for decades. Feminism has argued for taking the power away by removing the taboo of women having sex lives … and that seems equally relevant here.

Either way, it really seems like a lot more research is needed.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Keep in mind that the exact same techniques could be used to sabotage adult relationships, marriages, careers, just as easily as teenage bullying.

And a “video” should ruin those things why?

Literally everything you listed is because society is making a big stink of things that don’t matter.

Why should your job care … even if it’s real?

If somebody didn’t cheat and there’s no other reason to believe that than a … suspiciously careless video of someone that looks like them… Why in the world should that end their relationship?

Not to mention, AI isn’t going to get the details right. It’s going to get the gist of it right but anyone who’s actually seen you naked is presumably going to be able to find some details that are/aren’t off.

Also in terms of privacy, your privacy wasn’t violated. Someone made a caricature of you.

Video floating around that looks like you having sex is a very different thing to hearsay rumors.

It’s really not, the only reason it is, is because video has been trustworthy for the past century, now it’s not.

I hope you folks down voting me have some magic ace up your sleeve, but I see no way past this other than through it. Just like when the atom bomb was invented, it’s technology that exists now and we have to deal with it. Unlike the atom bomb, it’s just a bunch of computer code and at some point pretty much any idiot is going to be able to get their hands on convincing versions of it. Also unlike the atomic bomb, it can’t actually kill you.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

That’s a really really really bad comparison.

Separating the base system and user installed apps is a good thing for security.

Having flatpak smooth over distro compatibility issues is great.

Locking down a platform to an app store is not.

There are also ways to change the base system still. It’s just the model is to do the ideal thing, which is to install the apps designed into the modern system.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

That sounds like a lot of FUD.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

The majority party in this country is the party that doesn’t vote.

The second major party is the party that complains endlessly about “both sides”.

The third major party is the party that votes one way because that’s what they’ve been told to do their whole life.

The fourth major party is the one that actually does research and engages that’s being driven mad by the other three.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Well, at least you’ve got dreams

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Google’s advertising system definitely predates Facebook. It was the inspiration for Facebook and Twitter’s monetization models … There are interviews where people in those companies talk about being inspired by this Google model where they just give everyone away for free in exchange for ads being placed on their site.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Honestly at this point… I’d be surprised if they are seriously undermining encryption. NIST and NSA need encryption to work to protect the government itself … they’re to my knowledge not staffed by idiots, and a lot has changed since the 90s and early 2000s. Encryption is a core portion of security in 2023.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

There are limits to this argument … at some point buying a shitty game is on gamers and they need to shop around for something else.

There aren’t that many tricks prepurchase of a whole new game publishers can use. The big one is non-refundable preorders and at this point I’d hope people have learned their lesson on that (I still do it for, e.g. Bungie, but I don’t trust many studios to that degree).

If you’ve got a refundable pre-order or you bought it post release and the game gets overwhelming negative reviews and you’re personally dissatisfied with your purchase, keeping the game is on you and presumably your friends that also did so. There’s plenty of other stuff out there to play, especially in the shooter space.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

This argument acknowledges that we got it wrong when we started putting up “warning jumping off this cliff will hurt” signs.

If someone buys a bad game and they’re happy with it, then it’s fine, it’s not a bad game to them. If someone buys a bad game, they don’t like it, and they keep it, that’s on them.

There are so many ways to spend money here and so much competition. If someone doesn’t like the game then they just shouldn’t buy it, one shouldn’t blame Activision for making a game one doesn’t like and saying “they tricking me.”

Activision is not going to hit their numbers solely on people who are clinically lacking impulse control. Activision is going to hit their numbers on apathetic people that blame Activision for the poor purchase they decided to buy anyways.

This isn’t “the grocery store gives plastic bags and it’s on the consumer to recycle them, so therefore it’s consumers fault that plastic bags are littered.” This isn’t “the only option in town is unhealthy food so that’s why I eat poorly.” This is an expensive game, the primary product, something that exists purely to entertain that nobody needs to buy. Truly if ever there was a case, this is the case where consumers needing to stop paying for junk they don’t want (or heck what do I know, maybe they do want it).

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

You’re telling me I haven’t done enough research while not pushing anything more than your own opinion. Where’s your research and sources if your opinion is more than that? If you have sources, great, otherwise you’re just misleading people and being self indulgent about how your opinion is backed by research and mine is backed by a lack of information and understanding.

Who says there’s anything wrong with cosmetic micro transactions. I pay for them, I know others that pay for them. It’s fine, it gives me some cool looking stuff, and gives the game developer some extra cash. You’re moving the goal post going from badly reviewing games to games with microtransactions.

There are plenty of resources out there that cite manipulation in terms of loot boxes and gambling. Destiny 2 doesn’t do that, but it was in your list. Bungie is largely actually releasing content people appreciate and the game is overall very well received, as is CSGO in spite of its lootboxes.

Actually purchasing the base game of CoD, which has numerous issues, and is what we were originally talking about (at least I thought) also doesn’t involve any of those shenanigans… But people keep doing it, and that’s the biggest part I’m saying needs to change.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

except other than new powers which the expansions offer there is little to be gained by playing any expansion before the most recent as the gear you get will be useless once you hit the current expansion.

That’s not true at all, there are plenty of old guns and pieces of gear from previous expansions that are still great guns.

Not to mention it’s a game… Playing the campaign itself, learning the story, etc, is something to be gained.

Not to mention all the vaulted content that you will never get to play.

And you’re not paying for that… Everything that was vaulted is no longer charged for or charged for at a significantly reduced price (e.g. the Foresaken pack for exotics). The prices on old content (even the sticker price) also drops over time.

No it’s not a cheap game. Yes it’s free to play, and then you need content expansions to really unlock the whole game. Destiny is free to play in the old school “free to play” sense. It’s free to access some content and do some stuff with your friends then you either buy expansions (the route Destiny and WoW went) or you pay a subscription (the way RuneScape) went. These are very old models and they’re not scummy in the slightest. They’re the moral equivalent of a free trial.

We literally just brought someone in, unfortunately the best way to do it is to wait for a sale. It’s ~$20 for the majority of the old content (legacy 2023), ~$15 for bonus content (armoury collection – what’s left of foresaken and the 30th anniversary celebration DLC), ~ $40 for the current expansion and season pass (lightfall + annual pass), and I think a fixed $10 for the 2022 dungeon key.

That’s $85 for the better part of ~4 years of game content/development and ~4 more months of yet to be released paid and free content.

Then yes, $100 for next year (which if it was a subscription would be <$10/mo). To put that in perspective, if bowling was your hobby, it would be significantly more expensive. We’re all adults and can afford it… No harm is being done and it’s all in all a good deal for the hundreds of hours we’ve spent in the game.

micro transaction give you easy access to all the best cosmetics which is quite manipulative at its core.

Cosmetic micro transactions where you know exactly what you’re getting are again not a problem.

Types of mechanics used to trick money out of players

I didn’t watch the videos (I don’t even watch long videos friends send me half the time) but I skimmed the articles. The first is just some person’s blog not exactly “research worthy.” It’s also not talking about what I’ve been talking about (i.e., if you just bought a $70 game you didn’t like, you haven’t been tricked, just refund the thing and/or don’t buy it).

The second is much more credible as a source, but they’re talking about loot boxes and gambling mechanics… And yes, those are a problem 100% but they have nothing to do with Bungie/Destiny 2 and they gave nothing to do with people buying the Call of Duty base game despite its numerous issues and horrible reviews … and then also not refunding it … and/or buying it again next year.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I don’t think the kids are that dumb

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

How so? I remember King being a primary target of the acquisition

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

To be fair to Microsoft… Mojang has seemingly been doing gret as another Swedish company under their roof. This might actually be a reprieve from Activision Blizzard management?

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Yup! They might be the first game that became large scale to do it honestly. Because their game was getting quite big but they were a Java applet they (speculating a bit) wanted to maintain the fast load times as they added more and more content and get new players into the game quickly.

Plenty of innovation out of Jagex back in the day (sadly not so much now). The founders sold their shares and left the company, the founding programmer started a company where he’s been working on a new game engine concept that’s supposed to make multiplayer as easy as single player to program for, I try my best to keep an eye on it (www.fenresearch.com).

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Man this is like saying proton isn’t made by Valve… Matt Mullenweg was one of the cocreators of Wordpress and went on to start Automattic which is a pun on his name. He’s literally got (or at least had) the title of lead developer in the Worldpress Foundation and he’s CEO of Automattic.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Feels like the typical “I shouldn’t have to spend money for things!!!” attitude that goes around on here.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

I don’t understand how that doesn’t get brought up in the court room in front of a jury? And what jury would convict knowing the dude was arrested when the murder occurred?

There’s got to be more to the story than that

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

it was just an example of a compatibility layer

It’s a different problem under the same name. You’re comparing apples to oranges by comparing WINE and Rosetta.

WINE (as I understand it) explicitly does its best to maintain the instructions and basically just implements functions that are missing.

Rosetta actually changes out every instruction (and presumably has to do a WINE-like thing as well to handle dynamically linked code, though in theory this is more of a 1-to-1 mapping since you’re not swapping OSes).

if there’s no viable way to translate those x86 legacy applications over to ARM

For a properly written application that doesn’t have a lot of third party binary dependents… This really shouldn’t be that big of a job. You just recompile the code on ARM, test, and fix any bugs.

I’d speculate that most of the time this stuff comes up like: “this was written for Windows with some very specific Microsoft libraries/tech in mind and we want to run it on Linux and ARM as cost cutting measures.”

Granted, it’s not unusual for a large enough code base to contain some code that wasn’t written in an architecture neutral way/does some shady stuff.

Dark_Arc , 9 months ago

Go look at Fallout 76’s reviews, it was unpopular at launch (IIRC) but it’s doing very well now … and that’s the point, they kept the lights on until the majority of players were happy.

Minecraft has had several games derived from it, that were entirely different games set in the Minecraft universe.

Microsoft bought Bethesda 3 years ago. To say that they had no ability to influence and/or didn’t take a risk on Starfield is … lazy at best.

And yes, they own Redfall as well, time will tell if they fix that one or it’s just a straight up failure.