There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code (cyberinsider.com)

Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking...

cmhe ,

If a game offers multiplayer, they should also offer a dedicated server that people can setup for themselves.

For MMOs, they can make the servers optionally federated.

cmhe ,

Who was that developer? Where are those numbers from? Any sources?

I remember ~9 years ago the Blizzard CEO said this: “[…] I would assume most of those people also have access to a Windows or Mac device capable of playing Blizzard games.” www.change.org/p/…/9982826

Which is pretty disrespectful, but just one part of these arguments.

cmhe ,

People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.

cmhe ,

Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that “look good” in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.

This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.

cmhe , (edited )

What a strange selection of censored words… “fail to comply”, “The billionaire owner…”, “would strenghten the Australian”, “has yet to be passed”

cmhe , (edited )

There are two kinds of freedom, negative and positive liberty. US has a lot of negative liberties, they dictate little in what you can or cannot do, but is lacking in positive liberty, they don’t support you very well to do what you want to do.

While Europe might have less negative liberty, their generally better social welfare system grants people more positive freedom.

cmhe , (edited )

I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.

Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)

So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.

cmhe , (edited )

Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).

(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)

cmhe ,

What if I put poison on my teeth, bite someone and they die?

cmhe , (edited )

In german there is only one word for it, which is a gift for german speakers.

cmhe , (edited )

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism

But I also suspect that there are poisons which are deadly when injected and more mildly toxic when ingested. But I am not a chemist.

cmhe , (edited )

The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.

Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)

Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).

If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.

Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.

cmhe ,

Sure it isn’t a good system, but it is the one we have. And if you have concrete improvement ideas, it would be interesting to hear.

I mean, where ever we set the age limit for instance voting to 14, some 10 or 9 year old will feel disenfranchised. We could remove it completely and let toddlers vote. What would the consequences of that be? I have no idea!

cmhe ,

Isn’t all of it evil, because they bought bread in a plastic bag? Use a paper bag. And if the bread gets hard, steam it, bake it, and its fresh again.

cmhe ,

Well, you can always bring your own cotton bag…

cmhe ,

I don’t throw away the plastic bag, because I don’t have the plastic bag. Because the bread I bought was in a paper bag.

I you live in a country where you don’t get bread in paper bags and you want to avoid plastic waste, you can put the bread in a cotton bag in the store, which you can wash and reuse.

cmhe , (edited )

Were I buy bread it is on a rack, and you use tongs to put it into a paper bag. You can also put it into a slicer first and then in the bag, but I rather slice it myself at home.

Or I buy it a a bakery, where some employee packs it for me, you can ask them to put it into your cotton bag, if they only have plastic bags.

I don’t buy prepackaged bread.

cmhe ,

Yes, and labels suck. Don’t limit your yourself involuntarily just to fit into one.

cmhe ,

Nobody? That was a general statement, sorry if that was unclear formulated. I just see many people that first set a label for themselves and then try to fit into it, instead of just doing what ever they want and just use them as a short hand to explain themselves.

cmhe ,

Yes, but not with an unmodified toolkit, which opens levels as read-only, and disallows creating new levels. But there is a patch for the toolkit on nexusmods which unlocks the toolkit and makes the map editor and other stuff available. If you know what you are doing, you should be able to edit the main campaign or make your own.

I played around with it a bit, and all I can say, its complicated.

cmhe ,

The achievement enabling is part of the script extender

cmhe ,

Right, they saying “We are just following the law.” as if that was an apolitical statement. While they still get to choose whom laws to follow by deciding where to make business, which are political decisions.

As you see with Twitter or starlink, they decided to be do business in Brazil, but when the country actually have laws against uncontrolled mass propaganda and hate speech, they are suddenly against the law, and do not try to stop or limit doing their business there, when they do not want or can’t abide by these laws.

cmhe ,

AAAA games are clearly inferior to AAAAXY games.

cmhe , (edited )

So similar to kakoune? I tried that for a while, but it was missing some features so I went back to vim/neovim.

I need to know vi anyway, because that is available everywhere (as part of busybox), so using vim/nvim for bigger systems just fits.

cmhe ,

Or you get a message at 3 am the next day, where they apologize that they didn’t made it, but that they will deliver sometime between 8 and 22 that day.

cmhe ,

What about Lua/Luajit?

In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.

cmhe ,

E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.

cmhe ,

Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.

cmhe ,

Nothing about mod support or releasing the toolkit, like they did in DA:O.

cmhe ,

I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.

cmhe ,
  • Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.

Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?

cmhe , (edited )

Some firefox users like firefox” vs “many chrome users enjoy what they have” sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.

cmhe , (edited )

So generally the pro of coreboot is that it is open source, but the con is that it is open source.

What I mean by that, you can fix any issues yourself, however, if you are unable to do it yourself, you have to wait until someone does it for you and often what features are available and stable are a hit and miss.

Compared to proprietary bioses, the company has some kind of standardized process for developing the bios. So you often get want you would expect. However, if the money flow from the pc vendor to the bios vendor drys up, you, or the community of owners. will not be able to fix any issues.

Linux support should be the same, regardless if you choose proprietary or open source bios. But that depends on how well the coreboot was ported to the platform. So officially supported coreboot bioses are likely better than others.

Personally, if all other attributes are equal, would go with coreboot, because I like to support vendors that offer that choice, and IMO a open source solution, that you can review and build yourself is intrinsically more secure than a binary blob, where you have to blindly trust some corporation. But other security minded people might disagree, which is fine.

cmhe ,

IT guys will stop using it…

No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.

The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.

They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.

They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.

But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.

So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.

Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!

cmhe ,

That is how capitalism works, privatize earning and nationalize losses.

Capitalism needs the deep pockets of the government to not collapse into itself.

cmhe ,

Apple looks more like a cult, similar to Scientology. Linux user as well.

cmhe ,

Well… cults with an exit are just groups of people.

cmhe ,

I would be careful about assuming knowledge based on age. Young people might use technology without understanding it, and old people might understand it and don’t want to use it.

Technology needs to be regulated, and I would not trust people with profit incentives to do so.

IMO, it is always important to investigate if a regulation wants to prevent a real issue or if they just mention some populist reasons for doing whatever they want.

cmhe , (edited )

Sure, it is largely the fanbase, however I also think that the game industry seems to sometimes do somewhat of a “woke-washing”, meaning opically supporting the LGBTQIA movement because of financial, shitstorm-prevention or other reasons than just wanting to create more diverse and inclusive games.

For instance I like Hogwarts Legacy, but it also takes place in the Victorian era, and it seems to project the modern tolerant society ideals onto the wizarding world of that time.

Depicting the society as inclusive and diverse is somewhat history revisionist. If you play as a non-binary or trans person at that time, then you should have to deal with prejudice and marginalization, otherwise it is just “woke-wash” the history.

So, IMO there are some cases, especially in historic (fantasy) games, where injecting modern ideals and standards might not fit or needs to be better addressed, than just let it be cosmetic.

They shouldn’t do a halfhearted job.

cmhe ,

It is Oblivion, so the crash might be unrelated.

cmhe , (edited )

Until some time ago, I always though that “side-loading” is something different. Since I first saw “side-loading” used in ADB, so I thought that it means using another system on the side to load and install software onto a target system.

So to me that seems fitting, but now it seems to be used differently. How is installing software using just one device “side-loading”. What side do they mean?

cmhe ,

But to install from local storage, you first download or fetch a storage medium from a remote location with the file on it. There isn’t that much of a difference IMO.

I would not call it side-loading when I download a file and then install it on the same device. Because that is how it has always worked. I never before heard people describing downloading and executing a setup.exe as “side-loading”.

Disney hack leads to 1.2TB of Slack communications leaked online (stackdiary.com)

In a significant data breach, hacktivist group NullBulge has infiltrated Disney’s internal Slack infrastructure, leaking 1.2TB of sensitive data. This breach, posted on the cybercrime platform Breach Forums on July 12, 2024, exposes many of Disney’s internal communications, compromising messages, files, code, and other...

cmhe ,

Why would Disney demand that?

Why would they choose slack if they want to host, maintain and be responsible for the internal chat themselves?

They choose slack because they do it for them so that they don’t have to do it themselves. That is the selling point for them.

Businesses buy cloud services, because they do not want to manage stuff themselves.

cmhe , (edited )

Protects against what?

What I read here is just a vague critic from him of the relation between hard- and software developer. Which will not change just because the ISA is open source. It will take some iterations until this is figured out, this is inevevable.

Soft- and hardware developers are experts in their individual fields, there are not many with enough know-how of both fields to be effective.

Linus also points out, that because of ARM before, RISC-V might have a easier time, on the software side, but mistakes will still happen.

IMO, this article doesn’t go into enough depths of the RISC-V specific issues, that it warrants RISC-V in the title, it would apply to any up and coming new ISA.

cmhe ,

This is the “consumer choice” argument.

The problem is that consumers likely don’t have that choice. The “free market” is really bad in incentivising good long term behavior, they favor short term gains for their stockholders. Thus they likely all switch to practices that seemingly lower cost or raise short term profits. If they can fire employees and replace them with AI, they will do so.

If they would think long term, they would prefer to hire humans instead of AI, because that way they would give their future customers money to buy their stuff. AI will not be their customer. They would pay them enough money to be a happy and good consumer.

Customer choice doesn’t matter here, they either just have to buy whatever is cheapest, or die, because their employers (if they even have one) don’t pay they enough for them to have choice, because short term profits.

cmhe , (edited )

My point is there never will be enough people to leave. Consumer boycotts do not work.

Between thousands of different factors to consider wherever to buy a product from a certain producer or not, child labor, environmental waste, political attitude of the CEO, etc… it isn’t possible to make any decision on what product to consume.

It isn’t about 'unless enough people leave" it is about “unless enough people protest to the government for market regulation” and “unless enough law makers care”.

The free market is not self regulating, at least not with a long term positive effect.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines