umbraroze
@umbraroze@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 18 hours ago:
Boot up my dad’s computer and play some shareware off the magazine cover disk I got months ago.
Or go to the library I guess.
- Comment on Trump social media site brought down by Iran hackers 1 day ago:
I’m happy that the news over here has to continually specify “the messaging service X”. Though I wish they would avoid potential confusion and also say “formerly known as Twitter”.
- Comment on Trump social media site brought down by Iran hackers 1 day ago:
Andrew Tate’s site was based on some OSS software that they didn’t credit (in violation of the license) and was an old version with known vulnerabilities. Which is why it got hacked.
I don’t know if Truth Social is in the same boat, but it’s possible. I think I heard it’s just Mastodon with federation turned off? Or am I thinking of some other crappy alt-right site?
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 1 day ago:
Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 6 days ago:
Oh, thank you! MO2 seems a lot more clean and simple than Vortex.
…and in related news, now that I’m redownloading everything for funsies anyway, I have graduated from trying to keep my mod lists on a website to scribbling a list down in Joplin. With links and everything. In case these mods I’m using decide to move from Nexus or something.
- Comment on Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital 6 days ago:
Ok, so what is the current alternative nice option for SkyrimSE mods?
Preferably one with a mod manager/download client. Vortex is kind of janky but it did the job. I’d prefer not to manage any of this stuff manually, like cavemen. it’s been decades you shouldn’t need to do that
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 6 days ago:
Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.
And while the law isn’t settled on the topic, it’s wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.
Sure, there’s a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It’s quite similar to the “TiVo loophole” in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 6 days ago:
Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.
My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.
- Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data 6 days ago:
The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.
Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 week ago:
Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.
Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 week ago:
Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 week ago:
Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.
Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.
This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~magic~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.
I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.
- Comment on A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? 1 week ago:
The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)
- Comment on YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads 1 week ago:
And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.
- Comment on The grass is happy to see you 1 week ago:
Ooh, don’t make me link to That One CGP Grey/Kurtzgesagt Thing. Well I might as well do it. Existential Crisis One! Existential Crisis Two!
- Comment on The grass is happy to see you 1 week ago:
True, the plant as a whole doesn’t die.
But this particular slice of grass on the microscope slide?
Dead.
- Comment on The grass is happy to see you 1 week ago:
Of course this gets a lot more grim when you realise the grass had to be sliced to put under the microscope.
So they sliced a smiling organism and captured the expression at the moment of death.
I know I’m supposed to be strong, but I’m shedding tears. 😢
- Comment on IT’S THE FEDS! 3 weeks ago:
There definitely have been a case where the police, observing things with thermal cameras from a helicopter (for it is in the US where this tale happened), observed some house with a highly suspicious heat signature. …Some dude’s crypto mining operation.
Well, that was definitely indirectly drug related.
- Comment on Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry 3 weeks ago:
The AI industry doesn’t want to abolish or reform copyright law, they just want an exception so that they can keep appropriating shit. On the contrary, they’re pretty mad that AI stuff isn’t covered by more copyright.
AI bros are not on the side of open culture.
- Comment on This graph but with fediverse apps? 3 weeks ago:
Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.
I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.
- Comment on This graph but with fediverse apps? 3 weeks ago:
Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy
- Comment on Amazonian tribe that received Starlink satellite internet sues The New York Times, TMZ, and Yahoo for $180M over defamation and more, claiming a viral 2024 NYT story smeared members as porn addicts. 4 weeks ago:
Site that lets you build a contact info page, such as a list of links to various social media pages (some even not operated by Meta). As I recall it was originally made because Instagram only lets you have one link on your profile. Incidentally, Instagram doesn’t like them very much and has banned it before.
- Comment on Techno feudalism, here we come 4 weeks ago:
I’ve found them useful for very broad level stuff (e.g. asking “I’m trying to do X in programming language Y, are there any libraries for that and can you give me an example”). Copilot has been good at giving me broad guesses at why my stuff isn’t working.
But you have to be very careful with any code they spit out. And they sometimes suggest some really stupid stuff. (Don’t know how to set up a C/C++ build environment for some library on Windows? Don’t worry, the AI is even more confused than you are.)
- Comment on User Experience Study on BookWyrm – Looking for Your Feedback 4 weeks ago:
What do you like most about BookWyrm? Which features do you use most frequently?
Been using BookWyrm for a few months. I add books to my shelves and track reading progress, mostly.
I loved it when I realised that it just lets me add all random books and edit data from the get-go. The service may not have all of the books I have, but I can just add them.
Are there any features or interactions that you find frustrating or unintuitive? What features do you think are missing or could be improved?
BookWyrm absolutely needs far better abilities to split/merge/consolidate author and book information and do more of the Librarian Stuff. The current system of “you can bring in data and stuff just sits there on its own” is nice if you want to manage a personal library and track individual book progress, but a well-maintained book database is an entirely different beast, and pretty much mandatory for enabling more social stuff.
Also, the ability to import book information from sources is nice, but could use some more integration to a whole lot of other places. I really loved LibraryThing’s integration to bazillion different library services.
One minor quibble I have about BookWyrm is that there’s still the notion of “shelves” and that one book can be on one shelf and different editions of one book don’t count. This is good for casual use - “oh yeah I read this one” - but it’s not enough for true book nerdery. I may have a physical, ebook and audiobook edition of one work in multiple languages and the UI doesn’t show me that yes, I own/have borrowed these exact editions and I have reading activity on this and that and that one.
On that note, yeah, should also have some kind of labeling system for individual editions, along the lines of “I own a copy of this and I’ve stored this in the closet” vs “Borrowed this off the library” vs “I had this one, before the drama queen of an author removed it from Kindle”.
How do you feel about the interface (design, readability, navigation)?
It was a little bit confusing at first, but once I got over the initial weirdness I realised it wasn’t that much harder to use than, say, Goodreads. I don’t really have much complaints at this point. It’s good at what it does.
Do you mainly use BookWyrm on a mobile device or on a computer? And why?
Book nerdery is a big girl thing so I use computer for this. The mobile UI is adequate but could use a dedicated app.
Do you also use other platforms (e.g., Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing)? If yes, what makes you prefer one over the other?
I used LibraryThing long ago, and Goodreads more recently, both with librarian privileges (i.e. ability to edit data, which BookWyrm gives you from the get-go). I think Goodreads is pretty good at what it does, but it did have some mild jank, and of course, I always got the impression that I was doing unpaid labour for Bezos. So I think I’ll go with BookWyrm in the long run, thanks.
- Comment on negative rizz 4 weeks ago:
I wanted one!
…In Forza Horizon.
Real life, not so much. There’s a bus stop right by the street
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 4 weeks ago:
Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 4 weeks ago:
It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.
- Comment on Speak American 4 weeks ago:
At this point point, people who speak English as second language usually go “awww, how cute, the native speakers really think this is the biggest controversy of English orthography.”
(Instead of, you know, everything.)
- Comment on GeoGuessr Map Makers Make Most Popular Maps Unplayable In Protest Of Saudi-Backed Esports World Cup 4 weeks ago:
Farming Simulator has an esport. Microsoft Excel has an esport. At this point it’d be weird if Geoguessr didn’t have an esport.
- Comment on $80 for Borderlands 4 too costly? Randy Pitchford says, "If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen" 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, Randy, I find a way to make it happen, it’s called Xbox sale. That’s how I bought Borderlands 3. Which I haven’t played yet. And don’t get me wrong, Randy, Borderlands 2 is one of the most fun games I’ve played, I’m definitely a real fan! I’m definitely a video game enthusiast, I have a ginormous backlog on both Xbox and Steam.