pivot_root
@pivot_root@lemmy.world
- Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes 15 hours ago:
Remember, kids: if communism is evil and communism is “taking your hard-earned money away and giving it to people who refuse to work,” then it’s your duty to demand the government stops those communist bailouts given to corporations that can’t support themselves.
- Comment on SBA #54 20 hours ago:
They put out an engine that offers unoptimized shortcuts for traditional development techniques, replacing LODs with Nanite and introducing Lumen as a low-effort way to produce “realistic” lighting.
Both of those fall short of acceptable performance and visual stability quality during real-time rendering, but who cares about that when they make development faster and do a good enough job make for prerendered trailers? /s
- Comment on LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy 1 week ago:
Me too. I thought I was safe as a Ottoman Empire expatriate living in Arrakis! I don’t want LLMs to connect this account to my pseudonymous mommy blog where I write about my three children who might exist but could be delusions of my untreated schizophrenia.
- Comment on An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification 1 week ago:
No, it is bad.
Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.
Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.
If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?
If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not using a banking app.
This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.
- Comment on Don't forget to wash up! 2 weeks ago:
I can’t remember if I was wearing it before, but I’m not wearing it now. It’s probably fine. I think. Maybe.
- Comment on EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko 2 weeks ago:
Why days worth of farming? To help give the player a sense of “pride and accomplishment” of course.
- Comment on Colorado proposing Bill to move age verification to Operating System rather than web site 2 weeks ago:
It wouldn’t even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the “easier” and “more secure” system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can’t use important websites without a commercial operating system.
It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.
- Comment on Chrome extensions spying on 37M users' browsing data 4 weeks ago:
Using a reskinned Google Chrome protects you from malicious Chrome extensions how, exactly?
- Comment on Chrome extensions spying on 37M users' browsing data 4 weeks ago:
He also created JavaScript, IIRC.
Big no thanks.
- Comment on Remedy's new CEO is a former sports betting guy and EA executive who aims to 'scale Remedy in a way that builds lasting value' 4 weeks ago:
"Art isn’t about artistic expression. Billions of people make paintings and most of them go unseen. Museums, on the other hand… They don’t make paintings, they make experiences. For a nominal entry fee, consumers have access to an evolving and ever-changing catalog of content.
This is the future we envision here at Remedy. High quality games that build upon themselves, creating an experience that grows with the player. For that reason, we’re announcing that the Alan Wake series will no longer be individual games, but instead a live-service experience with episodic content."
- also that guy probably
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 4 weeks ago:
For localization, would -kun work? It wouldn’t be a correct translation, but the idea is that the average citizen is conditioned into having that of closeness and familiarity with Big Brother might make for an interesting take on it.
- Comment on VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files 5 weeks ago:
Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.
- Comment on How many BS hoops do I have to jump through everyday 5 weeks ago:
Is it? Or is it just a way to record which employees need mandatory cybersecurity “training” that tells them to use a 28 character password with at least one number, one upper case letter, one special character, no strings of 3 or more repeated characters, no strings of 3 or more incremental letters or numbers, and no strings of more than 5 of the same character class?
- Comment on TikTok faces app deletions, censorship claims and glitches in days after its ownership change 1 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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’ 1 month 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. 1 month 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 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month 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' 1 month 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' 1 month 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? 1 month ago:
Oh boy. We’re already at 13 out of 14 on the checklist.
- Comment on Tom's Hardware now hijacks the back button. 2 months 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. 2 months 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. 2 months ago:
Add another to your list. It also started happening to me recently.