kazerniel

@kazerniel@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.

  There was even some intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.

  In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed

  as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why I always look at negative reviews. I often come across “downsides” that aren’t downsides to me, or outright appealing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be Wary of Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It not necessarily about evil intentions, instead that without an easy off-ramp for users, a platform is eventually guaranteed to get enshittified, especially if they rely on investor money (which Bluesky does, see their post 1, post 2).

  Cory Doctorow wrote a few pieces about the topic:

  • Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again
  • Bluesky and enshittification
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe Reus? I enjoyed the basic premise and the first few hours, but then the game’s flaws started to become more apparent (e.g. repetitiveness, upgrade chains becoming unmemorisably complex) and put it down around 12% of full completion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also StoryGraph - it’s not federated, but ran by a tiny UK company, but seems pretty popular. I like the content warnings feature and stuff like readers rating the pacing and moods of the books, which is then displayed with graphs on the book page, but they have also introduced some AI features :/ (fortunately opt-in)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.

  But anyway, we are free to just not agree, and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cyberpunk 2077 - it still doesn’t go on steep enough sales to justify buying when I have hundreds of unplayed games on Steam. But I’m keeping an eye on its downward progress. Maybe when it reaches £10-13…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  check out this comment

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PieFed has its own share of dodgy stuff:

  • opinions of the dev are hard-coded into PieFed’s code, with overreaching content blocks and error messages deliberately lying to users
  • plus a 0/5 priority of testability, 1/5 priority of reliability and 2/5 priority of security described in their architecture document
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  instead of Piefed :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  wow, Firefox can do this natively now? I’ve been using an addon for so many years

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to study nature⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I enjoyed the first novel, then he just completely dropped the ball with the sequels 😔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was hoping the article would mention Manor Lords.

  The article is from 2020, Manor Lords was released in 2024 😅

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nova Launcher gets a new owner and... ads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  thanks for this table!

  Nova is rated as advanced customisability, and in this table Bridge Launcher is the only FLOSS launcher that has advanced customisability and is not discontinued, but based on the app page it’s basically a programming platform, not an actual launcher :c

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nova Launcher gets a new owner and... ads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for this post, I quickly turned off auto-updates 👀

  I only started using it half a year ago, but it was still the best from all the launchers I’ve tried 😔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer patches Wine to make Photoshop 2021 & 2025 run on Linux — Adobe Creative Cloud installers finally work thanks to HTML, JavaScript and XML fixes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Awesome progress, can’t wait until Illustrator, InDesign and Photosop can all run well on Linux ✨ Adobe’s lack of support is like 70% the reason why I haven’t switched to Linux yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a link to my Lemmy profile on my Reddit profile and not even shadowbanned 🤷

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This, I follow a single Reddit sub on RSS because it just doesn’t exist on Lemmy 🤷 And in general, communities for many niche topics or smaller countries are nonexistent. But the conversations are much better here, so I hang out more on Lemmy nowadays :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting, I had my 9GAG phase around 2011-12. Never really used Digg, just saw the front page a couple times, then started dabbling in Reddit in 2015, then Lemmy in 2023 with the blackout protests. (I almost said those achieved nothing, but I think that’s probably when most current Lemmy users joined, so 🤷)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, in the end I returned to occasionally wearing earrings, so I’m fine with having the holes, but good to know :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if there’s a way to figure that out… Maybe try reading the article?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not fully reversible. I had it done with the “gun” method as a young child, and I spent years without using earrings and the hole never completely closed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Made in space? Start-up brings factory in orbit one step closer to reality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Otoh according to Iain Banks’s speculation, space colonisation might be the thing that finally lets humanity toss off the chains of capitalism:

  The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

  Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

  To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

  Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.

  Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture’s existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony’s control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won… but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

  Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today in “Google Broke Email”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Google never thought to email their customers about this?? Why tf do I have to learn about this 2 months after the announcement, from social media…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨you're doing ReSeArCh rong!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, your reasoning sounds ridiculously arbitrary and elitist. Yes, reading a single wiki page won’t give the same depth of knowledge as studying the topic for years, but it’s still increased knowledge compared to what the reader had before. By your reasoning nobody learns anything before they go to university? Because in what other educational environment you would read multiple books’ worth of information about a single subject…