Look, I can see where you’re coming from about the over-emphasis on winning; but it just sound like you’re talking about an entirely different issue to what Valve is trying to address.
Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly, is to have the game automatically make a judgement about every player’s individual skill during the match itself, and apply some buff or penalty if it detects a major discrepancy between players. Is that what you are suggesting?
I suspect that the existence of mechanics like that would lead to a lot of angst, regardless of whether it ‘works’. People already have a tendency to blame their team and blame match-making for making them lose. Imagine if they could also blame the game itself for holding them back. … It could be a perfect system that never gets it wrong, and it would still cause a lot of people to get upset. And I don’t see how it could fix the problem of smurfing anyway unless it is a seriously over-zealous system that erases basically any skill advantage.
Also, I don’t think such auto-detection would be reliable. But although we could could discuss the technicalities of what might or might not work… I just don’t think it’s worth pursuing in dota anyway. Perhaps it would be better suited to some other game.
Heck, I’d say if they are actually playing a game and streaming it, then that’s legit… but I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of “stretching” and “exercise” streams where it’s basically just strategic shots of a girl’s arse. As in, that is genuinely the purpose of the stream. There is no actual exercise happening. Some streamers even have “!phub” in their description, suggesting users type that for more info about the streamer… And the ASMR category seems to be a 25-75 split between people actually trying to do ASMR, and people doing a kind of soft-core porn show.
The worst thing is that if you watch one of those streams, for curiosity, or if you were just in the mood for it, Twitch then makes your recommendations look like a porn site for the next couple of months. (I’m not against porn; but I definitely don’t want to be getting porn recommendations when I go to twitch.)
Ah, but if you use the rules BODMSA (or PEDMSA) then you can follow the letter order strictly, ignoring the equal precedence left-to-right rule, and you still get the correct answer. Therefore clearly we should start teaching BODMSA in primary schools. Or perhaps BFEDMSA. (Brackets, named Functions, Exponentiation, Division, Multiplication, Subtraction, Addition). I’m sure that would remove all confusion and stop all arguments. … Or perhaps we need another letter to clarify whether implicit multiplication with a coefficient and no symbol is different to explicit multiplication… BFEIDMSA or BFEDIMSA. Shall we vote on it?
Too real. I booted up windows last week because I wanted to test something quickly before going to bed… starting it and testing my thing took about 5 mins; but then shutting down took more than half an hour.
It’s true. I installed Mint on this computer to dual boot with Windows, expecting a gradual experimental transition away from Windows. But it has been months now, and I haven’t used Windows on this computer at all, other than to just test a couple of things for a minute or so.
Switching to Linux wasn’t perfectly smooth. I’ve definitely run into some problems. But the functionality is there, and the problems are mostly about my lack of experience. I doubt I’ll install Windows on any computer ever again. Windows is getting more and more annoying with nags and ads and bloatware, while Linux continues to slowly but steadily improve.
I agree that this is an easy way to try out Linux; but I wouldn’t advice doing it like this if you have intentions to eventually make Linux your main OS. If you’re using Linux in a virtual machine, then it will always feel like it’s another layer of work, another layer of abstraction, another few clicks to get started… it just adds a bit of friction. So although the virtual machine can show you what the OS looks like and how it works etc. The experience of possibly using it as a main OS will be skewed in a negative way by having to set up and run a the virtual machine.
So I’d say virtual machine is ok if you just want to look around for curiosity; but if you have intentions to make it your primary OS, then I reckon go straight to dual boot, and make Linux the default boot option so that the friction is in switching back to Windows rather than in trying the new and unfamiliar OS.
Yeah. Timeshift is good. Fortunately, it is part of the default Mint install, and the Mint ‘getting started’ instructions say to set it up.
I personally needed Timeshift on my second week of using Mint. What happened was that I was that I saw some setting somewhere for linking a google calendar to the calendar app or something like that; and I thought “I don’t really want to see any mention of Google anywhere in the OS, even in a setting that I can just not use”; so I uninstalled the thing that lets you link those accounts… what I didn’t realise is that uninstalling that also uninstalled a heap of critical parts of the Gnome desktop. So after restarting, I had no desktop or anything.
Fortunately, Timeshift is super easy to use, and I fixed it in a few minutes. Easy to break, easy to fix.
Hot tip: If you’re switching to Linux and you’re not sure how to do something - ask your favourite LLM AI chatbot for help.
There’s typically some terminal command or config file or something that you can do to get what you want, and I’m sure it all makes sense to an experienced linux person, but its not easy to guess what to do as a novice. But since all the commands and such are well documented, you can get pretty good advice from the AI. As usual, it won’t be completely reliable - but you can think of it as a bit like asking a tech expert for help over the phone. They know a lot and can help you - but they can’t see exactly what’s on the screen and they may ‘misremember’ some details from time to time. So it isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly good enough to find what you are looking for.
(Or you can just ask a real person. Those are pretty helpful too.)
Hold on, let me get this straight. You say that Google and Microsoft are already using your personal data for the benefit of their company profits, without permission - but that Mozilla are the bad guys for calling them out on it, and offering alternative products that don’t exploit users. Is that right?
Fair enough. I didn’t really mean to direct what I was saying at you specifically; rather I was just kind of continuing the conversation.
And yeah, the only reason that the AI stuff works at all is because people have taken the time to write down good advice in the past - which has then unforeseeably used as AI training data (without consultation or compensation…) So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if your work was in there somewhere.
DM tip: the real trap is that the players put themselves in danger by spending too much time searching for traps. (Perhaps a routine patrol overtakes the party due to wasted time; or perhaps there is literally a timed trap or whatever.)
I guess different people like different types of jokes. It’s ok for you to not like this particular joke. It’s fine to not get the joke. None of that is a big deal. So there is no need for you to get all defensive and hostile about it. Some people thought it was a good joke; but you didn’t. It’s not a big deal. Just say nothing and move on. It isn’t something worth fighting about.
My understanding is that the ‘all’ feed only shows posts that come from accounts followed by people on your instance. You can follow anyone from any federated instance; and when you do, their posts will appear in your personal feed, and also in the ‘all’ feed for everyone on your instance. People are aren’t followed by anyone on your instance won’t show up in the ‘all’ section.
Ah yes. How fitting for a young new person in the world. A reminder that 2°C of warming above the pre-industrial mean would be catastrophic, but also is a good lower-limit of what to expect based on current intentions.
It’s too late to avoid problems; but it’s certainly not too late to take action. This is not a binary yes / no or climate change / no climate change situation. It’s a continuum. We can’t avoid it completely, but the longer we delay action the worse it gets. There is still a lot of room for it to get worse. So reducing emissions is more important now than it has even been, even if some problems are unavoidable.
I’m vaguely interested in having a few different encrypted folders on my computer, with different passwords on each. I don’t have any particular strong requirements. It’s more of a velleity; mostly just to try it so that I know more about it....
I guess it’s mostly because it way written by CryFS people - but that does make CryFS sound pretty good; with the main downside being that it is less mature than some other tools. And it gives useful info on the others regardless.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘good luck’ here. Perhaps you got some really cool random encryption blocks or something? In any case, I hadn’t heard of that one yet. So thanks for mentioning it.
Their approach with separate key-files is probably a wise idea for serious security… but I don’t think I’m that serious right now.
The puns in the commands feel like they are a style from the past. I don’t think people would do that in serious software made today. I guess this one has been around for awhile!
Yeah, Cryptomator does sound like a good option. But I personally found the comment from the developer at the bottom to be a bit off-putting. I don’t like when people needlessly trash-talk other options.
If you value privacy higher than availability and integrity, this certainly is a point for CryFS. With Cryptomator, we strive for the best of all three primary security targets […] […] I personally dislike snakeoil statements on their website like “the security of CryFS has been proven”. While I don’t see a problem with the cryptography, I prefer to keep some distance from phrases used by all those “military grade security” bogus companies.
He seems to belittle the importance of a key advantage of CryFS, and then goes on to accuse them of being ‘snakeoil statements’ because CryFS said their security was ‘proven’ in a masters thesis. I’m sure that ‘proven’ is not a great choice of word here, but I don’t think CryFS was trying to trick anyone. They’re just saying that the tool has been thoroughly analysed in a masters thesis and found to be secure.
One of the ‘advantages’ being touted for Cryptomator is that it is more ‘stable’ than CryFS. But the claim of stability coimes from CryFS saying their software is in beta while Cryptomator says theirs is complete. The way I see it, that’s not really a measure of stability; it’s a measure of caution from the developers. Stability and reliability are not things you can just claim, or base on whether or not something is called ‘beta’. It’s about testing, and analysing. So, in that context of CryFS expressing caution, to say their masters thesis statement is a ‘snake oil statement’, I think is disingenuous.
(Note: I’ve given an in-depth explanation of something that really isn’t a big deal. What the developer said is not that bad. I just wanted to articulate why I found it off putting.)
I appreciate all the comments and links, everyone. Thanks a heap. I feel like I’ve got a much stronger and up-to-date understanding of what’s available now.
While checking out various links, I’ve found this detailed comparison provided by GoCrypt. It includes comparisons of features, encryption methods, and a couple of performance metrics. So that’s valuable information for decision making. I found the CryFS comparison page useful too, but that felt more about highlighting the advantages of their tool rather than a thorougher comparison of different tools.
One advantage of directory-based encryption is for online backups. I use SpiderOak to backup some stuff, and so I can tell it backup my encrypted data without it ever seeing the unencrypted data. I don’t think that’s so easy with full-disk encryption. (I suspect only a handful people in the world still use SpiderOak, but the idea applies to whatever cloud backup thing you might use.)
Similarly, it means I can lend a portable HDD to someone to share videos or something, but still have private stuff stored on there as well if I want to.
The thing is, I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux. Most of it is pretty straight-forward. (The only tricky bit that comes to mind is making the USB that you’ve put your distro on bootable. That probably isn’t obvious; and it might not be obvious how to get your computer to boot from a USB anyway if you’ve never done it before.)
Anyway, the way I see it, Microsoft’s guide is more about how you can use Linux while still having Windows. If someone is searching for “how do I install Linux?” Microsoft would obviously prefer the answer to involve something that preserves Windows. First preference: WSL, second preference: Virtual Machine, third preference: dual-boot. And after that, you’re on your own.
Umm… I really don’t know why you’re coming at me with some sarcastic anti-linux shit right now. All I said was that it was pretty easy to install. I didn’t say or imply that it was problem free. As for the problems being ‘made up’, I made a reasonable assumption that GRUB doesn’t care what day of the week it is - and so what you described was hypothetical only.
I did a Mint install a few weeks ago, and I’d say that if you want to preserve some existing OS (i.e. dual boot), then it isn’t super easy. You have to tell it what new partitions you want - and therefore you have to know something about what partitions you should have. The good news is that you don’t actually need any swap or home partition. You can just put it all on one partition - but I don’t think it’s obvious what to do.
On the other hand, if you aren’t trying to preserve something you already have, you can tell the installer to just go with all the defaults, and then you don’t have to know anything about it.
Note: Microsoft’s guide doesn’t mention any of that detail. It basically just says to follow the instructions of the installer.
I agree; but please take my comment in the context of Microsoft’s guide - which doesn’t tell users how to do any of things that you’ve mentioned. My point is that the underlying purpose of the guide is not so much about how to install linux, but how you might try linux while still keeping Windows.
I had a friend who had orange juice with cereal instead of milk. I figured that was super-weird, and so I never tried it. But… trying stuff and liking unusual things is fine.
Agreed. And I want to go a bit further to talk about why else this might be bad.
Some people believe that losing jobs to AI is fine, because it means society is more efficient; and that it gives people time to do other things. But I think there are a few major flaws in that argument. For a lot of people, their sense of purpose and sense of self, and their source of happiness comes from their art and their creativity. We can say “they can just do something else” but we’ve basically just making their lives worse. Instead of being paid and valued for making art; they can get paid for serving coffee or something… and perhaps not have as strong of a sense of purpose or happiness. Even if we somehow eliminate inequality, and give everyone huge amount of free-time instead of works, it’s still not clear that we’ve made it better. We just get people mindlessly scrolling on social media instead of creating something.
That’s just one angle. Another angle is that by removing the kind of jobs that AI can do well, we remove the rungs on the ladder that people have been using to climb to other higher-level skills. An artist (or writer, or programmer, or whatever else), might start out by doing basic tasks that an AI can do easily; and then build their skills to later tackle more complex and difficult things. But if the AI just takes away all opportunities that are based on those basic tasks, then people then won’t have those opportunities to build their skills.
So… if we put too much emphasis on speed & cost & convenience, we may accidentally find ourselves in a world where people are generally less happy, and less skilled, and struggle to find a sense of value or purpose. But on the plus side, it will be really easy to make a picture of a centaur girl or whatever.
I don’t think it is as simple as that, but I certainly do see your point of view. And I’d probably agree if I didn’t feel like society is accelerating towards a very problematic future. (The problems I’m thinking of are not directly related to what we’re talking about here; but I just see this as part of what it might look like to start changing direction).
I’d just advise that we think about what the end-goal is meant to look like. What are we hoping for here. What does it mean to have a good life. In many stories and visions of the future, people seem to envision utopia as people spending their time on artistic and creative pursuits; as in, that’s the thing we were meant to free out time for. So the automate that part away might be a mistake. We’re likely to just end up freeing time for something destructive instead.
[A]n INI configuration file in the Windows Canary channel, discovered by German website Deskmodder, includes references to a “Subscription Edition,” “Subscription Type,” and a “subscription status.”
I use to follow /r/degoogle on reddit… but it felt like pretty much every discussion was people shitting on every alternative, and implying that all measures are totally pointless unless you stop interacting with any form of computer for the rest of your life. It’s just so weird having people say there there’s no point switching from Chrome to Firefox because google is the default search engine on Firefox. I got to the point where I really did believe there was some deliberate destabilization going on, to weaken the community. (And it worked. I unsubscribed; and I’m sure it struggled to keep anyone who actually had anything useful to say.)
Anyway… I wouldn’t be surprised if /r/RedditAlternatives was similar to that.
On that one hand, that’s kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.
With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It’s just like the past, but worse. Isn’t it?
No? The code for the model can be open-source - and that’s pretty valuable. The training data can be made openly available too - and that’s perhaps even more valuable. And the post-training weights for the model can be made open too.
Each of those things is very meaningful and useful. If those things are open, then the AI can be used and adjusted for different contexts. It can be run offline; it can be retrained or tweaked. It can be embedded into other software. etc. It is definitely meaningful to open source that stuff.
Mozilla’s Firefox is essentially the only competitor to Google’s Chrome. So to say that Mozilla is pro-google is kind of weird. Almost every other browser uses Chrome’s engine, and thus is enforcing Google’s view of the internet. Firefox and Safari are the only significant holdouts. (And Safari is obviously backed by one of the largest companies in the world, with its own reasons.)
In many instances it is very convenient to think of antimatter as normal matter going back in time. This is what makes Feynman diagrams so easy to use and powerful.
Furthermore, CPT symmetry is a necessary condition for basically all scientific theories. This means that reversing time is literally identical to reversing ‘charge’ and ‘parity’ together - and in this context, reversing charge means swapping all matter for anti-matter and visa-versa. Reversing ‘parity’ roughly means swapping left and right across the whole universe.
… Anyway, CPT doesn’t directly tell us that anti-matter particles are normal matter going back in time, but it does imply that that isn’t a bad way of thinking about it.
As individuals, a lot of people are content to live a simple life of prosperity. They have a basic job, and a small family, and some basic luxuries - and they call it enough. Some people have a one-eyed focus on increasing their wealth throughout their lives; but not everyone is like that. People generally recognise that their lives are finite. Some try to aim for some kind of imaginary high-score in their life, and others just live a ‘normal’ life.
I’m now making an analogy. As a species, we can recognise that are time is finite; and we can choose to live that out in a stable simple prosperity, where we just look after our world (house) and get what we need for some basic luxuries, and be content. We could have a billion years of that. It’s a very long time. Or… we could aim for endless growth. We could consume as much as possible, and always aim for more. As we run out of resources and livable habitat on Earth, we must look to interstellar travel and spread to other planets. I don’t necessarily think that is a better choice.
When I was young, I use to think that humans needed to settle on other planets. But I don’t think that any more. Partially because I learnt about special relativity, and decided that unless we’re very very wrong about science so far, having connected colonies on other planets is not possible. But also because I realised that there is no intrinsic goal to spread human life as much as possible. There are other things of value. We don’t need that particular goal. I also use to think that personal immortality would be a good thing. I don’t really think that any more.
Being in a car or aeroplane is totally different from playing a game, VR or otherwise. The motion sickness is a result of a mismatch between the sense of your own motion from what you are seeing, and the sense of your own motion from your inner-ear (which is basically an accelerometer).
In a car or an aeroplane, as long as you are looking at the window then there is no problem. (But often people get car-sick if they try to read a book or something, because then they can’t see the motion - they can only feel it.) But in a game, you can see the motion but not feel it - so that can also give motion sickness.
Many modern first-person games have an option for ‘mouse smoothing’ (or something similar), and that generally help reduce or eliminate motion sickness.
When I bought my first (and only) smartphone, I figured that since it was using this partially open source linux-based OS, I’d be able to customise it, get rid of crapware, and remove google’s hooks from it. But I was wrong. I wasn’t able to do any of those things. Because of that, I don’t have a particularly favourable view towards Android.
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.
Trig (lemmy.world)
Valve lures thousands of Dota cheaters into bans with fake Christmas presents as it declares 'this year is gonna be a bloodbath' (www.pcgamer.com)
Twitch will now allow "Artistic Nudity" following the viral topless meta (www.dexerto.com)
Twitch Updated their Sexual Content Policy:...
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
zeta.one/viral-math/...
But Windows 11 is so good!!11!1! (feddit.de)
stolen from linux memes at Deltachat
The slow decline isn't slow anymore (lemmy.world)
deleted_by_author
Mozillas petition to get an answer from Microsoft, is it using your data to train its AI? (foundation.mozilla.org)
Microsofts new Terms and Service agreement is rather questionable. In short; It does not clarify if Microsoft will use your data to train it’s AI....
unabashedly stolen meme (ttrpg.network)
Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma (www.theverge.com)
Got to love Mastodon (files.catbox.moe)
A meme for math people (lemmy.world)
Windows: we noticed that you kept the useless search bar disabled since 2015, so we sent an update that re-enabled it without your permission (feddit.it)
For my “convenience” and because in this way they can show ads and clickbait...
MOM! (programming.dev)
Requesting folder encryption recommendations
I’m vaguely interested in having a few different encrypted folders on my computer, with different passwords on each. I don’t have any particular strong requirements. It’s more of a velleity; mostly just to try it so that I know more about it....
Microsoft published a guide on how to install Linux. (programming.dev)
Time to grow up. (lemmy.world)
Results of the "Can you tell which images are AI generated?" survey (i.vgy.me)
Previous posts: programming.dev/post/3974121 and programming.dev/post/3974080...
Windows 12 May Require a Subscription (www.pcmag.com)
[A]n INI configuration file in the Windows Canary channel, discovered by German website Deskmodder, includes references to a “Subscription Edition,” “Subscription Type,” and a “subscription status.”
r/RedditAlternatives doesn't like a Reddit Alternative (lemmy.ml)
Music too (lemmy.ml)
Mozilla.ai is a new startup and community funded with 30M from Mozilla that aims to build trustworthy and open-source AI ecosystem (mozilla.ai)
I wonder what they thought of furbies (lemmy.world)
Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory (www.nature.com)
One million years from now... (lemmy.world)
VR still makes 40-70% of players want to throw up, and that's a huge problem for the companies behind it (www.pcgamer.com)
Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.
Superiority brings controversy (aprogrammerlife.com)
Re-creation of someone else’s post because the original was removed and I found it funny when I first saw it
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)