pivot_root
@pivot_root@lemmy.world
- Comment on TikTok faces app deletions, censorship claims and glitches in days after its ownership change 2 days ago:
It’s not a
glitchbug, it’s a feature. - Comment on How the regime in Iran jams Starlink and what people could do 1 week ago:
When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.
What the people idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.
The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete falsehood.
- Comment on How the regime in Iran jams Starlink and what people could do 1 week ago:
Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,
Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.
How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?
- Comment on FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link) 1 week ago:
I agree with your overall opinion, but I jusy don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
- Comment on FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link) 1 week ago:
I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.
what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances
That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.
They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
- Comment on FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link) 1 week ago:
Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.
It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.
— slrpnk.net admin
- Comment on Majority of Americans Think Trump Military Plots Have ‘Gone Too Far’ 2 weeks ago:
Personally I am in favour of mandatory voting, with the caveat that the bottom of the ballot should have a “none of the above” option.
Doubling the voting pool using uneducated or apathetic voters turns the entire system into a game of exploiting psychological biases into creating uninformed votes.
It’s already bad, that could make it even worse.
- Comment on LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs. 2 weeks ago:
Step 1: Making personal computing unaffordable.
Step 2: Rent “personal” computing as a service.
Step 3: Boil the frog by continuously restricting what people can do with the service.
Step 4: Wait for local computing to die.
Step 5: Stop LLMs from running on rented computers.Hardware won’t last forever. Once they have full control over what people do with computers, they have full control over information.
- Comment on Leaked Windows 11 Feature Shows Copilot Moving Into File Explorer 2 weeks ago:
You would think, but it’s just going to turn out like this:
User:
I’m running out of space, can you help me clean up?AI:
Sure thing, I can help with that. You have some programs that haven’t been opened since 2017. Would you like me to delete them?User:
YesAI: OK, let me do that for you.
I apologize, but as an AI Agent, I am not allowed to delete files or uninstall programs automatically. You can remove them yourself, however. I have created the cleanup.txt file on your desktop, which you can run by renaming the file to cleanup.bat, right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”.
User:
Thank you, I did that but it only freed up a little bit of space. Can you find more?Error processing request: 0xC3E9A005.
Unable to connect to copilot agent service:
The system can not find the module “kernel32.dll” - Comment on What do I do? 2 weeks ago:
Isn’t that worse? Chocolate ain’t exactly healthy for most animals.
- Comment on RAM may be abominably expensive, but hey, at least SSD prices are also exploding 2 weeks ago:
This ad has been brought to you by GeForce Now. You’ll own nothing because we designed it that way.™
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate pornographic images of minors is just 'gatekeepers' attempting to 'censor all of their political opponents' 2 weeks ago:
No entitlement necessary.
People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.
What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-unfriendly. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were games developed by the platform owners.
What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers^1^ and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers^2^. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.
The cherry on top was Tim Sweeny acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.
Frankly, Epic Games can go fuck themselves.
^1^: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.
^2^: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate pornographic images of minors is just 'gatekeepers' attempting to 'censor all of their political opponents' 2 weeks ago:
All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.
You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.
The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.
- Comment on Without getting into current politics can someone describe to me what an authoritarian regime looks like? 2 weeks ago:
Oh boy. We’re already at 13 out of 14 on the checklist.
- Comment on Tom's Hardware now hijacks the back button. 4 weeks ago:
As a developer as well, I agree that they can get fucked. Bloated crap that wastes bandwidth and ruins first-time-to-paint on mobile devices by necessitating downloading and initializing a multi-megabyte bundle of npm packages.
As a user of the internet, I need websites to work, however. I would have disabled JavaScript entirely by now if it weren’t for the fact that doing so renders what feels like half of the entire web unusable.
- Comment on Tom's Hardware now hijacks the back button. 4 weeks ago:
Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.
Not without either breaking most SPAs (Single-Page Applications) or writing userscripts with site-specific logic.
The classic way of doing this crap was to make a placeholder page navigate to the article page. That leaves the redirect page in the history stack so when the user presses the back button, it just opens the page that navigates them forward again.
The modern way is to use the history API with
history.pushStateto add a history entry while listening for thepopStateevent to check if the user pressed the back button. Unfortunately, both of those features have a legitimate use case for enabling navigation within a SPA. - Comment on Tom's Hardware now hijacks the back button. 4 weeks ago:
Add another to your list. It also started happening to me recently.
- Comment on Microwave does not make room a flat, judge rules 4 weeks ago:
If a landlord could put an air mattress in a bathroom, they would advertise it as 1-bed 1-bath.
- Comment on It's called traditional medicine sweety, look it up 4 weeks ago:
Oh, please. Nobody needs heroin cough syrup when you could instead be drinking radium as an ailment cure-all.
- Comment on Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft 1 month ago:
I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:
Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.
- Comment on Microsoft Edge Pushes an "All in One Browser" Message on Chrome’s Download Page 1 month ago:
Oh, no. I’m saying Microsoft owning your operating system and using it to push their browser as a default browser is a monopolistic practice, whereas using Chrome by is just reinforcing an existing monopoly. The same goes for Mac and Safari.
Neither browser is good, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish a corporation for their active attempts to subvert competition in a bid to establish their own monopoly in place of the current one.
- Comment on AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans 1 month ago:
But that takes skill and effort. Instead, just follow up the LLM prompt with, “and this doesn’t contain any vulnerabilities?” and submit the code while it’s still generating a response. If it finds one, log a ticket and deal with it next sprint. /s
- Comment on Microsoft Edge Pushes an "All in One Browser" Message on Chrome’s Download Page 1 month ago:
If you have to pick between two monopolistic corporations, using both of them but giving each a little less of your data and attention is a way to mitigate the risks and damage.
If Microsoft can harvest data on how I use my computer, I can at least make it a bit harder for them to harvest my browsing habits too by not giving them browser telemetry too.
- Comment on Microsoft Edge Pushes an "All in One Browser" Message on Chrome’s Download Page 1 month ago:
There’s plenty:
- Not supporting monopolistic practices.
- User preferences.
- Diversifying your software so you don’t get trapped in an ecosystem.
- Not having Copilot stuffed down your throat.
- User preferences.
- Making it possible to rip Edge out of Windows for the purpose of debloating.
- Comment on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux 1 month ago:
That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
- “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”
Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.
Even though DisplayPort is objectively better than HDMI, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t good. It will come across to consumers as an unnecessary, arbitrary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.
They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.
- Comment on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux 1 month ago:
As long as the manufacturers are competing against each other, that’s never going to happen.
The “gamer” consumer demographic has some of the most whiny, entitled vocal minorities. They’re going to endlessly complain about the next generation of console needing a special cable/dongle to connect to their TV, one of the manufacturers are going to fold, and then the other one is going to walk back the lack of HDMI because they don’t want to lose sales to their competitor.
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 1 month ago:
Musk’s strategy is to constantly build hype and gain investments by promising something will be “ready by next year”, even if it’s nowhere close to ready. And then, when those investors start pressuring him about timelines, he pushes a half-baked, low-quality dumpster fire out the door.
It’s hard to fuck up worse than that. And to Newell’s credit, he’s run Valve in the exact opposite way that Musk runs his companies: waiting until they have a working product before saying anything.
- Comment on The richest people in the world are morally bankrupt 1 month ago:
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars.
Everybody else already covered his role in Tesla, so let’s look at something else that demonstrates his concern for the environment and his fellow species:
He has a datacenter in Memphis running 35 “temporary” methane generators to power Grok, the self-described “Mecha Hitler” AI. All but a dozen of them are being used without permits for permanent generators, and none of them have air pollution filtration systems installed. Oh, and it’s near a low-income community that was already plagued by air pollution.
- Comment on SteamOS tested on dedicated GPUs: No, it’s not always faster than Windows 1 month ago:
Unsurprising. Drivers are better than they used to be, but some of them (Nvidia) have a long way to go in terms of optimization.
More importantly, however, is the complete lack of info the article provides about their testing methodology.
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They said they tested on SteamOS—ok, but it’s not officially available on non-handheld devices. How did they install it? Did they actually use HoloISO?
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How did they run the games? Directly through an embedded gamescope session like the Steam Deck, or through KDE Plasma, which has a compositor that can’t be disabled on Wayland. Or, did they take the double hit and run gamescope as a window within Plasma?
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Speaking of Wayland, did they use Wayland or X? They have different performance characteristics, and it’s not negligible.
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How many runs did they do? One-and-done, then record what the game said the average FPS was?
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Did they pre-run the scenes to ensure the assets were cached from the disk and the shader caches were available?
And the way they present the results are also bad:
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The graph the FPS achieved by each platform, but they have absolutely no detail about the 1% or 0.1% lows—and at a sufficiently-high average FPS, these are what make the games feel slow and stuttery.
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What about frametime graphs and frame pacing information? If Linux can achieve more consistent pacing at 85% of the average FPS, it would still be a better experience than having the same frame being presented repeatedly because the game missed the vblank window.
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They didn’t try multiple resolutions to identify where the bottlenecks are occuring in each game. If a game is CPU bottlenecked by their hardware choices, it’s not a good comparison of GPU performance. Likewise, if it’s GPU bottlenecked, it’s not a good comparison for CPU performance.
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- Comment on Linux usage hits an all-time high in Steam Hardware Survey—and AMD processors continue their march against Intel 1 month ago:
They make entire SOCs. None of them are x86 because of the duopoly that Intel and AMD have thanks to their cross-licensing agreement, but they still have functional CPUs with a common ISA.