mox
@mox@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
Thanks for sharing your findings. Did you try these things more than once, on different days, to make sure the triggers you think you found weren’t merely coincidences?
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
Our little instance often has federation problems. Sometimes they’re obvious, and sometimes more subtle. Sometimes it eventually catches up, but I suspect not always.
I don’t know what causes the problem, as I have no visibility into the systems, and the person (people?) running the instance don’t communicate here. I think you would have better luck investigating by signing up for shell access and asking in the bulletin board there.
For what it’s worth, my recent posts from here to lemmy.world communities seem to be getting through, as they have comments from lemmy.world users. Example 1, Example 2.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on In 2025, People Will Try Living in This Underwater Habitat 2 weeks ago:
“Oxygen.”
- Comment on What procedures do you take to save and archive your games? 2 weeks ago:
I just put the installers onto a thumbdrive.
I hope you’re powering up that thumb drive every few weeks. Flash memory will lose charge if left unpowered for too long, corrupting your data.
- Comment on The voice actor of the GMan just posted this promising cryptic HL3 rumor 2 weeks ago:
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Submitted 1 month ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Some videogame ads from the 1990s 1 month ago:
I’m guessing this PlayStation 2 advert (safe for work) is from about that time:
- Comment on For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was uninteractive and has low replayablility value. 2 months ago:
I love a well-crafted puzzle, but that’s not what most people mean when talking about game depth. You’re talking about different things.
- Comment on For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was uninteractive and has low replayablility value. 2 months ago:
Meta-comment:
To the people who come into point-of-view threads like this one and downvote other people’s comments, how about writing about your own experiences instead? It would make Lemmy a nicer place to be, and might even add something of value to the discussion.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 2 months ago:
Seems like a lot of people step away for a while only to return to it. I had hundreds of hours before taking a break, came back with new hardware, and have been playing hundreds of hours more. At this rate, it might end up overtaking Civilization as my most played game.
- Comment on For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was uninteractive and has low replayablility value. 2 months ago:
I mostly had fun, and felt the work they did to make Night City feel like a proper city, as opposed to the tiny village-sized “city” typical of open world games, really showed. (For example, the fact that people walking down the street had different ages, body types, and walking styles made it easy for me to forgive the occasional pair of NPC clones spawning next to each other.)
But yes, many of the activities/events offered by the game ended up seeming a bit pointless because their outcome was more or less predetermined.
Moreover, the RPG aspect of the game lacked depth, which seemed like a lot of wasted potential given that there were plenty of characters that could have been really interesting to get to know. Instead, the character development was nearly all Silverhand, nearly all the time, and I didn’t even have much influence over how that relationship developed.
Spoilers ahead:
What about Jackie? He was supposed to be my best friend, but I never had experiences with him to make me feel that way, and then he was gone in just a few scenes. What about Panam? She was so determined to make a difference in the lives of the people who mattered to her, yet she all but vanished once we bonded, after just a couple of missions. What about Judy?? Her personal mission-like-encounter was really promising. We supposedly fell in love and were planning to leave the city together, yet for the rest of the game, we had no interaction but “dates” consisting of the same half-dozen lines of dialogue and two or three brief animations repeated over and over again. I’m sure there are more examples, but I think I’ve made my point.
I think the biggest disappointment for me was the ending, though. And the other ending that I got by reloading and picking different options, and then the third ending, and the fourth. They all felt like such empty let-downs that I went online to read about the rest. Surely there must be some good ones, right? Right?
The only vaguely satisfying ending that I found was a secret one that (IIRC) requires very specific choices early in the game, and a very strong bond with Silverhand, and letting the game sit at a particular dialogue screen without making a choice for an extended period of time. The endings that players are actually meant to experience left me feeling empty, like all the time I had sunk into the game was for nothing after all. I guess that could be considered appropriate for a cyberpunk dystopia, but as an experience, it left me feeling cheated. I wished I had my time back.
So, as I said, I mostly had fun playing it, and it had its share of highlights, but I don’t expect to ever play it again. I hope CD Projekt Red keep much of the technical progress they made with this game (I was so happy that my character’s movement was responsive for a change!) and work more on character development in the next one.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 2 months ago:
Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.
It’s different to most other games by not being goal-oriented, except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.
I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate hostile settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.
It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One play mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.
One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse.
- Comment on Citron is yet one more Switch emulator appearing online 2 months ago:
tl;dr: It’s a Yuzu fork.
- Comment on We're Back! 2 months ago:
In that case, I think you’ll appreciate the voice cast in this new adaptation.
- Comment on We're Back! 2 months ago:
I ended up watching some new anime. Ranma ½ (2024) is kind of bonkers, in a fun way.
SDF is a quirky instance, isn’t it? It might go down once in a while, but at least to me, it feels more like a community system than some of the bigger instances. I love that it hasn’t made Cloudflare an observer and gatekeeper of everything we read and write on Lemmy.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
You can’t know with certainty on Signal that the client and the server are actually keeping your messages encrypted at rest, you have to trust them.
This is untrue. By design, messages are never decrypted on the server when end-to-end encryption is in use. They would have to break the encryption first, because they don’t have the keys.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
Some advantages are listed in this /c/Technology comment:
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
Room membership and various other room state events are not currently end-to-end encrypted, which means a nosy admin on a participating homeserver could peek at them. (They’re still not visible on the wire, though, nor on homeservers that don’t host members of the room.)
I don’t know if Signal is actually much better, since I haven’t looked at their protocol. They hyped their Sealed Sender feature as a solution to things like this, but it can’t really protect from nosy server admins who are able to alter the code, and they fundamentally cannot hide network-level meta-data like who is talking with whom. There’s a brief and pretty accessible description of why in the video accompanying this paper.
I don’t have a list of Matrix events that are typically unencrypted. You could read the spec to find them, if you were motivated enough to slog through it, but be warned that network protocol specs tend to be long and boring. :) Unfortunately, the few easy-to-digest blog posts about it that I’ve encountered have been both alarmist and inaccurate on important points (one widely circulated one was so bad that the author even retracted it), so not very useful for getting an objective view of the issue.
However, the maintainers have publicly acknowledged the issue as something they want to fix, both in online forums and in bug reports like this one:
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
Could someone smarter than me explain Matrix to me?
It’s a real-time messaging platform. The most common use case for it is text chat, both in groups (like Discord or IRC) and person-to-person (like mobile phone text/SMS). It has other features as well, like voice chat, video conference, and screen sharing, although much of that is newer and only just beginning to get support in clients.
- What would be the utility for someone, who cares about privacy and currently uses Signal and email for communication?
Compared to Signal:
- Matrix doesn’t require a phone number, or even an email address (although some public homeservers want an email address as a recovery option in case you forget your password).
- Matrix has a variety of clients, so finding an app that fits your needs is likely to be easier.
- Matrix clients typically don’t require Google services at all; neither to get the software nor to receive notifications.
- Matrix cannot be monitored at any single location, so it’s more resistant to meta-data tracking at the network level.
- Matrix cannot be shut down by any single organization, so it’s more resistant to censorship and denial-of-service attacks. If a homeserver is ever forced offline, only the accounts on that homeserver go away; all your other contacts remain intact.
- Matrix (last time I checked) had better support for using multiple devices on the same account.
- Matrix homeservers can be self-hosted by anyone, and still participate in the global network.
- Signal’s encryption covers more meta-data at the application level than Matrix currently does. This might be important if you’re a whistleblower or journalist whose safety depends on hiding your contacts from well-positioned adversaries, for example.
Compared to email:
- Matrix has end-to-end encryption, with forward secrecy, built in.
- Matrix is geared for instant messaging.
- Matrix supports features that people have come to expect from modern chat platforms, like reaction emoji and message editing.
- What advantage would it give me over other services?
We already covered Signal, and there are too many other services to compare every difference in all of them, but here are some common advantages:
- Matrix is a completely open protocol, developed through a public and open process, with open-source servers and client apps. This is important to people who care about privacy because it can be scrutinized by anyone to verify that it operates as it claims to, and can be improved by anyone with a good idea and motivation to participate.
- Matrix has multiple clients for every major platform: desktop, mobile, and web.
- Matrix handles groups of practically any size (including just one or two people).
- Matrix messages can be delivered even when you’re offline, no matter for how long, and they persist until you’re online again.
- Is Matrix anything good already, or is it something with potential that’s still fully in development?
Until recently: Ever since cross-signing and encryption-by-default arrived a couple years ago, it has been somewhere between “still rough” and “pretty good”, depending on one’s needs and habits. I have been using it with friends and small groups for about five years, and although encrypted chats have sometimes been temperamental, they have worked pretty well most of the time. When frustrating glitches have turned up, we sorted them out and continued to use it. This has been worthwhile because Matrix offers a combination of features that is important to us and doesn’t exist anywhere else. I haven’t recommended it to extended family members yet, because not everyone cares as much about privacy or has the patience for troubleshooting in order to get it. However…
Recently: The frequency of glitches has dropped dramatically. Most of the encryption errors have disappeared, and the remaining ones look likely to be solved by the “Invisible Encryption” measures in Matrix 2.0. Likewise with things like set-up and sign-in lag.
If you’re considering whether it’s time to try it, I suggest waiting until Matrix 2.0 features are officially implemented in the clients and servers you want to use, which should be pretty soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could confidently recommend it to family members in the coming year.
- How tech savvy does one need to be to use Matrix?
If you just want to chat, not very. Even one or two of my friends who can barely use email got up and running pretty quickly with a little guidance. Someone who can get started using Lemmy by themselves can probably handle it without guidance.
If you want to host your own server, moderately tech savvy.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
You shouldn’t crap on people being honest about the problems that have existed,
I haven’t “crapped on” anyone. I just pointed out that a comment, which was an absolute declaration in present tense, is misleading, poorly informed, and needlessly quarrelsome. Because it is. And the author then tried to justify it by putting words (“always”) in someone else’s mouth. None of that is honest. It was arguing in bad faith, and it’s important to call that sort of thing out, because letting it go is how misinformation spreads.
If they had instead just presented their view as historical experience to help inform about track record, I wouldn’t have taken issue with it.
Too much in the open source community is people saying this is great!
Perhaps, although that’s common around proprietary software as well.
Great is subjective. Matrix has struggled with some problems that rightly frustrated people, but it also has accomplished some things that no other messaging platform has. By that measure, it is a great project. And the announcement we’re all discussing here demonstrates that it is getting better. Just as barkingspiders said.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
rolling their own crypto
No, it uses well-known, well-proven, standard crypto.
It also uses double-ratchet key management, much like what Signal does.
The reference server is a bit heavy if you’re federating with large public rooms, but lighter alternative servers are available.
- Comment on AMD's Weak Q4 Guidance Leads To 7% Share Price Drop In Aftermarket Trading. 2 months ago:
I sometimes report such posts when I think of it.
I don’t think corporate news satisfies Rule 2 just because the corporation happens to do something with technology. (Practically every corporation does things with technology, after all.) I expect posts here to be about the technology itself.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
So you were aware that this announcement includes fixes for the encryption issues, yet you decided to post a comment complaining about them anyway, ignoring the point of this post and giving readers the false impression that the issues are unaddressed.
And you did it just to contradict someone who has found the project useful.
That’s not helpful to anyone. Quite the opposite, I’d say.
- Comment on AMD's Weak Q4 Guidance Leads To 7% Share Price Drop In Aftermarket Trading. 2 months ago:
This is /c/technology, not /c/stocks.
- Comment on Matrix 2.0 Is Here! 2 months ago:
Looks like someone didn’t read the article. See part 4: Invisible Encryption.
- Comment on Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate physical game collections online 2 months ago:
The argument against it is founded on copyright.
We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.
Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.
What’s left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
It’s worth noting that publishers, and especially the “rightsholder groups” that they hire, are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can’t think of any reason why they should have continued control after they’ve stopped publishing them.
- Submitted 2 months ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 1 comment
