NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on "Cancel ChatGPT" movement goes mainstream after OpenAI closes deal with U.S. Department of War — as Anthropic refuses to surveil American citizens 13 hours ago:
Like with ANY kind of science (and, like it or not, that is what “AI” research and products are), the money comes from governments. Real Genius is one of my all time favorite movies (and has influenced my life WAY more than it should) but… anyone with an advanced STEM degree can tell you that the reality is you 100% know where your money is coming from. And you are either a naive moron or you figure out why the US (or UK or FR or RU or CN or…) government is so interested in your work to rapidly generate connections between social media posts and your buddy’s really efficient graph search algorithm and…
I am all for shitting on openai/chatgpt for immediately bending over backwards for the us government. Let’s not pretend anthropic/claude are paragons of virtues and privacy.
- Comment on Four years after the last one, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2's enhanced editions have a new patch out in Steam beta 3 days ago:
Finally, dynamic language support should make it easier from here on out for Beamdog to add new translations to the games without the need for a full patch “on most store fronts”. Instead, the developers anticipate being able to drop in new languages “on an ad hoc basis”. Speaking of, patch 2.7 adds community-made Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, and Ukrainian translations to Baldur’s Gate 2, plus Hungarian and Japanese ones to Icewind Dale.
THIS worries me a lot. Either the language packs become DLC (good) or they are going to be streamed from somewhere and the game lasts as long as the content server does.
Still, awesome. People shit on the Beamdog releases because “I can just run this with these forty mods and hacked binaries and a syncthing server and…”. But they are incredibly competent remasters/ports.
Just a shame Icewind Dale 2 is still in the “forever lost” state source wise. The Twins were actually a really fun set of antagonists.
- Comment on Firefox 148.0 arrives with AI controls 4 days ago:
I mean… people using Firefox are doing it because of all the shit Google is shoving down chromium. Firefox has a LOT of room to fuck up before that is going to impact that demographic.
- Comment on Microsoft's throne room rejigging has seen Sarah Bond take the bullet for marketing strategy which was "failing internally", report claims 4 days ago:
Nah nah nah nah. THIS hit piece where apparently EVERYONE hated her and she is singlehandedly the cause of all the world’s problems is legit. Obviously.
Don’t get me wrong. She and Spencer are grade A assholes and should rest in piss for all the damage they did to the games industry and all the jobs that have been destroyed. But holy fuck is it depressing how quick The Internet is to leap on “Yeah. Absolutely everyone hated everything she did”.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 5 days ago:
Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.
But it also doesn’t change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.
Like… it doesn’t take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and…
I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn’t involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 5 days ago:
And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?
- Define “reputable VPN”? There is little to no meaningful third party auditing and mostly all we have to go on is if they are on the record for having "cooperated with law enforcement"
- The point is you need to actually understand what you are trusting who with. You want to watch AEW for cheap? Cool, whatever. You want to masturbate to porn without providing your ID? Maybe think about who is more likely to get a call from what orgs. And if you are doing something truly sensitive? That is when you need to learn a WHOLE lot more about what privacy and personal security actually are.
The point is that people just say “linus rogan had a promo code and this solves all my problems”.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 5 days ago:
Heh.
Our IT department is so incompetent that… let’s just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can’t rule out a full investigation.
Last year we had a “technical all hands” which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing “attacks” from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn’t sighed and said “how much of our staff are running VPNs?”. And then we had to explain what those are… to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.
STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn’t understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.
- Comment on Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN" 5 days ago:
From what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).
I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.
And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 1 week ago:
You don’t need to watch the whole video. Mostly it just highlights why FreeCAD is VERY capable but not a great First CAD Tool.
And Fusion 360 is the best, period. But OnShape actually might be better for a purely FDM workflow. Most of Fusion, and FreeCAD, strengths are in being able to simulate stress and strain and having ways to design a part to incorporate the cuts that a CNC/Mill would be doing. And OnShape is fully browser based for good and for bad.
- Comment on The Wolf Among Us, The Last Express and more join the GOG Preservation Program 1 week ago:
One of the games is Police Quest: SWAT 2 which is just delightful.
Half of it is copaganda of the highest level as presented by one of the evilest cops to ever live (seriously…). Like… a LOT of the LAPD’s reputation for police brutality and corruption can be tiedt o him. But it was a solid, for its time, squad tactics game that I do wish more modern takes on the genre would adopt. Having a “slice the pie” button is just so nice.
But what makes SWAT 2 so good? There was the SWAT campaign where you go through a series of police calls relating to an evil terrorist cult. And there is the Terrorist campaign where you play as the cult and are taking people hostage, indoctrinating them, and otherwise attacking SWAT. And the best tactic to even out the campaign (because you are up against the poster children for militarized police over spending) is:
On the second mission you do a home invasion where you take a family hostage. Take a LOT of explosives with you. While you are leading the cops on, plant explosives on the walkway to the house. Let negotiations fizzle out and when the swat teams come to raid? Blow them the fuck up. Double tap any survivors. Wipes out the LAPD which translates to an insane amount of money to equip your crew for the rest of the missions.
Back in the day? SWAT 2 was one of those “if you know you know” games across the late stage usenet/early stage gamefaqs discussions.
I desperately need some kind of an Oral History on how the fuck that game got made.
Also, as a bonus: My dad was annoyed I was playing too much XCOM and JA2 (mostly once he figured out I used female mercs in that…). So he got me a nice manly game about how great cops are… and boy howdy did he whup my ass when he realized I was mostly playing the Terrorist side and popping cops left and right.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 1 week ago:
Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.
Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.
OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 1 week ago:
On a warm and dry day? Maybe?
But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren’t strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.
As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent… many that you print yourself.
It isn’t the same as a proper exhaust system but… ain’t nobody doing that.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 1 week ago:
You can still get an Ender 3 (essentially the end result of RepRap). Every vendor has their own.
That said? If you buy a printer in 2025 (let alone 2026) and it does not have an integrated enclosure, you are opening yourself up to a world of hurt. The price difference isn’t that much anymore and even just having a box to hold the waste heat in solves like 90% of print problems.
Bambu are, above and beyond, the best bang for your buck. They ALSO are ahead of the curve on locking things down to support only their networked slicers. Which… is a huge concern with stuff like this.
Personally? I love the Qidi printers. I have a Q1 something or another and convinced a friend to get a different model. They use a semi-open fork of Klipper so you can theoretically make something work when it is abandoned. Which is good because the various CoreXY printers are no longer all based on the same standard so part kits aren’t (easily) interchangeable. And, of course, you can use Orcaslicer or whatever else you want.
Keep in mind that is all FDM. For Resin (SLA?), the ship has already sailed and people are genuinely happy to run slicers with literal fucking ads in them. Assuming the vendor doesn’t lock them out of even that garbage.
- Comment on Oh no, Intel is moving customer support to AI 1 week ago:
Assuming you get a hold of a human:
Be nice to them. Be assertive but also be nice. That will get them to go off script if they are allowed to or escalate you if they aren’t.
If you treat them like “monkeys who aren’t allowed to go off script”? They will GLADLY repeat the same questions over and over and make your life a living hell. Because with customer support? Their metrics often benefit from you getting angry and hanging up.
- Comment on Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too 1 week ago:
Yes and no.
Let’s focus solely on pricing first. www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&… is a good resource for that (dot gov so… grain of salt). In 1998, the “retail gasoline price” was 1.072 $/gallon. That is approximately $2.11 in 2025 dollars according to a random website. But whatever metric that site is using says 3.224 $/gallon.
Because, yes, under pure microeconomics, it is all about supply and demand. But that just isn’t reality. Instead we have prices skyrocket because of economic/geopolitical turmoil… and then The Companies use that to experiment to figure out what the new price floor should be. Prices go down, but not that much.
Now let’s talk about bubbles. Two of the biggest bubbles in the past 30 or so years have been the Dot Com Bubble and The Housing Bubble. Both were quite brutal on the economy and working professionals and that is why houses are worth jack all now and nobody has a website.
Wait… That isn’t right?
Because take the dot com bubble in particular. Yes, a LOT of web based companies were deeply stupid. But the fundamental concept of “order it online” is a very good one that, ironically, benefits more rural people more than anything else. Yes, it continues to ravage brick and mortar and contributed a lot to the destruction of “Mom and Pop” stores. But also… how often do you actually need to touch a product before you buy it? Incredibly valuable when you do, but you are likely to get MUCH better data from a youtube review than from trying to feel how clicky a button is while the sales associate keeps telling you that you need a gold plated HDMI cable to go with that stereo.
And… Amazon and Google essentially became the megacorps they are because of it.
Which is what we are expecting for The AI Bubble. Most of those “AI Assistants” are going to crash and burn because they are insanely expensive frontends to the same voice assistants we have had for closer to twenty years than not. Search engines may or may not stay in their current form. Generative AI is anyone’s guess (and mostly about legislature) but you can bet there will still be a cottage industry for sex pests.
But much of what is driving the data center boom… isn’t that. It is the kind of machine learning we were doing 10-20 years ago and is mostly about pattern matching. AKA “Big Data”. Companies will realize that they can’t fire their entire fraud investigation and cybersecurity teams. But they can very much only hire a fraction of their previous workforce and have them interpret/validate the “AI” results. Same with coding.
And, regardless, if there is an economy/world there is going to be social media and ecommerce and media. All of which benefit from lots of servers.
So I do disagree that this is the cheapest they will ever be again. But I also suspect we are looking at a baseline closer to late 2025 than 2023/2024.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 1 week ago:
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 1 week ago:
I assume you are a hardcore “The God of Capitalism Will Prevail” person but… that isn’t how it works.
Youtube is an insanely expensive service to operate. That is why basically every other attempt failed miserably. Google is able to offset the cost due to their datacenter requirements as well as being able to sell those targeted ads. Even for google it is highly suspected to be a loss leader.
It is like people forgot that microsoft/azure tried to make their own twitch… and it failed horribly even though it had definitively better tech.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 1 week ago:
Sorry, are you saying you want youtube to be a private site that is subscription only?
Because, if you think this is a gotcha, you probably won’t have a good time. And the site itself would die as creators would have no market to really target.
- Comment on YouTube adds new hurdles for ad blockers, and there's currently no way around it 1 week ago:
Sounds like updating firefox and/or ublock will get past most of it.
Personally? I am not as opposed to google making life harder for people who want to run an adblocker, considering that is the site’s revenue (specifically the targeted ads based on user data). But I actually pay for youtube premium and have been having to refresh every video between clicking and watching it and that is just fucking stupid.
Although, it also means that shorts no longer autoplay. So when I actually want to watch a short that a channel I like put up, I only see THAT short rather than however many others before I click away.
- Comment on Discord Alternatives, Ranked 2 weeks ago:
Tangential but figure eyes are probably on here:
Any good guides or discussions for setting up and running Matrix in a VPS? Been thinking on and off I should do that for a few months now (and lack of account migration means I either start with my own domain or forever use a generic).
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 2 weeks ago:
It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.
What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.
As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.
It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.
For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 2 weeks ago:
So… they wouldn’t be raw dogging stack overflow?
Because you can just as easily use generative AI as a component in test driven development. But the people pushing to “make coders more efficient” are looking at firing people. And they continue to not want to add the guard rails that would mean they fire 1 engineer instead of 5.
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 2 weeks ago:
It is if your software goes anywhere near infrastructure or safety.
Which is literally what musk and the oligarchs were arguing as a way to “fix” Air Traffic Control. And that is far from the first time tech charlatans have wanted to “disrupt” an industry.
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 2 weeks ago:
How much of that is the chat bot itself versus humans just being horrible at self reporting symptoms?
That is why “bedside manner” is so important. Connect the dots and ask follow up questions for clarifications or just look at a person and assume they are wrong. Obviously there are some BIG problems with that (ask any black woman, for example) but… humans are horrible at reporting symptoms.
Which gets back to how “AI” is actually an incredible tool (especially in this case when it is mostly a human language interface to a search engine) but you still need domain experts in the loop to understand what questions to ask and whether the resulting answer makes any sense at all.
Yet, instead, people do the equivalent of just raw dogging whatever the first response on stack overflow is.
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 2 weeks ago:
There are layers to this.
Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.
As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.
As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap.
And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.
This is bad.
- Comment on Games Workshop had a Warhammer FTL clone pulled from Steam over some overly Space Marine-esque shoulderpads 2 weeks ago:
I remember when RPS was THE best gaming blog out there.
Now?
According to the developers, Games Workshop’s inquisitors were particularly irked by the design of some shoulderpads in one of the featured trailers, referred to in correspondence as “oversized convex shoulder pads with a metallic rim”. Find a screen of the armour at stake in the vicinity of this paragraph. Tundra insist that those convex shoulderpads are all their own work, but say they’ve removed the trailer anyway to avoid disruption.
Shitty editing or AI slop? You decide.
As for the topic at hand: People were quick to glaze GW over their stance on not using generative AI. But that is part of a much bigger effort (including renaming the Imperial Guard and making all Space Marines “Primaris”) to lock down their copyrights and trademarks. Which “makes sense” considering Blizzard’s claim to fame is ripping them off mercilessly (which makes how many modern fluff characters are blatant ripoffs of their *craft counterparts even funnier).
And Void War? Has not been subtle about their influences. I hear it is a really solid FTL though.
- Comment on JSAUX announce a charging-friendly Steam Deck travel case 3 weeks ago:
You know linux is going mainstream when the site everyone links to is running copy for shit like this. Yay?
- Comment on A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously! 3 weeks ago:
I mean, it is the fundamental problem of art/science/knowledge.
It costs money to create. That money often comes from either the wealthy or the state.The wealthy CAN be good but means you are catering to a specific audience and the problems can range from “We aren’t going to talk about the BDS movement because our fans like xboxes” to “We aren’t going to talk about the multiple wars and genocides facebook have supported because zuckface pays for our electricity”.
As for the state? Under a just government, that is awesome. Moving on.
As for us individually? Probably the biggest thing we, as individuals, can do is to actually permit-list websites that we like/trust on the adblocker. Ads are a genuinely awesome way to generate “passive” income which goes a long way towards keeping said lights on.
But also? If you have the cash, consider actually subscribing to news/media outlets you like. Get a newspaper subscription. Look at the independent media outlets and pay for a month or three every so often. Because the broader the subscriber/patron base, the less temptation/need there is to cater to the whales.
- Comment on A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously! 3 weeks ago:
The former Vice crew (404, Remap, probably others) have talked about this in their various podcasts and blog posts and so forth:
My take is that there are two big, but linked, problems:
The first is… there is a reason all these news media outlets are shuttering. People don’t want to read. They also don’t want to watch a documentary that isn’t over-dramatized trash. And any form of monetization model mostly just antagonizes the audience who were never going to consume it in the first place but will GLADLY derail every single discussion to say how much they hate a paywall. So you become VERY dependent on your hardcore subscribers and that is an incredibly dangerous tightrope to walk. Do you prioritize your coverage based off what your patrons (because that is what they are) would want? Do you NOT cover something because it might make subscriptions go down? What do you drink when you realize you are literally the person who fired you a year back?
And the other is that legal representation costs a lot of money. Last Week Tonight have covered SLAPP Suits a few times over the years but that is also the reality of it. Any form of investigative journalism pretty much guarantees you are getting, at the very least, a C&D. If not a full blown lawsuit. A good lawyer can make the vast majority go away but… a good lawyer costs money.
The former Vice crew were pretty much all in a special case. 404 came out of Motherboard which was pretty much one of the most trusted and respected “tech” news sites out there. Aftermath has some of the Motherboard crew and but also is basically a who’s who of games media as a whole (arguably everyone who was keeping Kotaku alive). And Remap is mostly the people who were at Waypoint until Vice realized they were still getting paid and that audience is one of the most rabid and faithful out there when it comes to subscribing to content we love.
Whereas most outlets actively try to prevent people from getting enough popularity/notoriety that they could get their own funding for a new start. Like… think about who the big names in traditional news are? MAYBE you remember whatsherface’s name from PBS? But it is almost entirely going to be the anchors/commentators like Anderson Cooper because they are the ones you see night after night and they are the ones who present the stories written by the “normal” journalists. And zero shade to Mr Cooper, but that is very much intentional. Because if some third party wanted to pay him to spin up a new outlet? That’s great, but they ALSO need to hire like three or four more journalists to have anything for him to say.
As opposed to a Jason Schreier who, with sufficient lawyers and a contracted editor, can be more or less a one person show.
- Comment on FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled 3 weeks ago:
…
Yes, the reason multiple people accused you of being gullible is because they are bots.