AHemlocksLie
@AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I dunno, I feel like we could pretty cost effectively fill his stomach if we used pennies.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.
I’m prepared to contribute a whole lot of pennies to the cause.
- Comment on Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme 2 weeks ago:
I’m not really familiar with those tactics, so I’m open to being convinced if you can provide some examples. I suppose you could argue that forcing its use for their games isn’t great, but I don’t see that as exceedingly terrible even if it’s not great.
- Comment on Fallout: London hasn't developed into a Fallout 4-esque hub of new quest and expansion mods so far, and its lead has theories why 2 weeks ago:
Sure, and I didn’t mean that FO4 is terrible or has no staying power. I haven’t played it, so I can’t judge. I just meant that player count isn’t necessarily a good metric for whether it will develop a thriving modding community.
- Comment on Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think Steam got where it is by trying to monopolize, though. They just have a long history of genuinely trying to not suck, and nobody else is willing to try at all, so they just… Win by default. It’s basically a meme now that Valve just has to do nothing and win these days.
- Comment on Fallout: London hasn't developed into a Fallout 4-esque hub of new quest and expansion mods so far, and its lead has theories why 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think that’s really the best metric. Call of Duty from 2022 has 30k current players and 39k peak 24 hours. steamcharts.com/app/1938090
I think a whole lot of people would agree that CoD games are not great and are generally mass produced, mass appeal crap. But they sure do rack up the sales and players. Just having a large player base does not necessarily mean a game is genuinely good with cultural staying power.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes and no. The receiver does need to somehow communicate the destination to the sender, I believe typically through an invoice of some sort. Been a long time since I kept up, so the details are getting hazy. Anyway, there are only two times that lightning network usage requires a publicly visible blockchain transaction: when you want to put coins on the lightning network and when you want to take them back off to the blockchain. You open a channel with a node basically saying “I’ll put X amount in this channel in if you’ll put in Y amount (one of them can be zero, i.e. send or receive only), and here’s a signed transaction you can publish on the blockchain to get your money back at any time.” Any time you make a transaction over the lightning network, you rewrite that cashout transaction so the balance shifts by however much you’re sending plus any fees you agree to pay, but you do it in such a way that you only really give them the signed transaction if they prove they’re gonna pass on what you want to send to the next node, and this process repeats with every node in the chain until everyone agrees to move the money.
All that to say there’s really no record of any transaction ever happening outside of however your balance changes between putting it on the network and taking it back off. There’s no record of who sent what, how many transactions it took, what path any transaction took to get there, nothing at all except initial and final balance. Now, this does mean that if the money is withdrawn, there’s evidence you’ve been paid, but not for what, by who, by how many people, over how many transactions, or a anything else but the final total amount from all transactions. If they just spent everything they received back over the lightning network, there’s effectively no real evidence that any real transactions ever occurred.
Of course, this hypothetical nonprofit is almost certainly going to be paying a company that wants US dollars. They’ll probably have to cash out in a highly traceable way, and actually buying the ICE data will require a highly traceable bank transfer or other conventional payment method. In that sense, you’re right, the nonprofit gets left exposed. But they could completely mask who sent money.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
The receiver ends up hanging a bit in the wind.
Actually, the way the payments are structured, no money moves AT ALL if ANYONE in the chain tries to back out. It maintains the trustless nature of crypto. I don’t recall the specifics of how it’s done, though.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
That’s a good point, they’d definitely just subpoena your bank records. If crypto is used properly, it can be nigh impossible to trace, though. Bitcoin isn’t very private at all on the blockchain, but if you send over lightning network, my understanding is that it becomes effectively impossible to track, unless your adversary controls enough lightning network nodes to track the payment as it bounces between nodes. They wouldn’t need to control the whole path, but they would need to control nodes VERY close to origin and destination, ideally the adjacent nodes, and enough of those in the middle to be reasonably sure they can accurately follow the money. The lightning network doesn’t leave a detailed ledger behind, so only way to trace a payment is to be involved in its processing, which means controlling the nodes the money passes through on its way to the recipient.
Of course, that’s way too obscure and unknown for the vast majority of people, so I don’t see a nonprofit succeeding that way these days. Maybe if crypto actually does get mainstream, but that’s still a pretty big if.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
Are nonprofits required to track who they receive donations from? I could be wrong, but I don’t think they are. They have to have financial records, but I don’t think that means maintaining a donor list.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
If they want to target more technologically capable users, they’ll just hard code the IP addresses so it doesn’t need DNS and make any IP changes in routine updates.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 3 weeks ago:
I bet a nonprofit would have a reasonable chance of raising the funds to buy the data and publicly publish it.
- Comment on Valves first title with a 3 in it 2 months ago:
Nah, that’s too obvious, could have just been a coincidence. This, though…
- Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water. 2 months ago:
That’s only after your mouth and esophagus. Those aren’t really geared to tolerate exposure to strong acids or bases. Even foods that aren’t acidic enough to immediately damage these regions can still contribute to tooth enamel being worn away, for example. It’s either strong enough to at least consider the impact on those, or it’s weak enough that adding lemon is a questionable move.
- Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water. 2 months ago:
True, but your body will not enjoy water that’s very alkaline, so there’s a chance it’s sufficient since lemon is pretty acidic.
Plus, if the whole point of it is to be alkaline, why directly counter that with what you add?
- Comment on US | Titan sub imploded due to engineering flaws — NTSB report 3 months ago:
One dude brought his son, and I don’t think the son was super enthusiastic, so not quite
- Comment on Someone finally made a "Sonarr for YouTube" 4 months ago:
If I remember correctly, you don’t really need Prowlarr. It’s useful if you’re using multiple *arr services, but Prowlarr manages your indexers, the place *are services look for content, and syncs them to your other *arr services so THEY can do the search. I don’t think Prowlarr itself ever looks for content automatically, only if you manually search through Prowlarr.
- Comment on If you got in a time machine 5 months ago:
If you’ve got a spare PC or one that’s always online, you can host something like Jellyfin for yourself. Make your own streaming service.
With blackjack and hookers. - Comment on As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act 5 months ago:
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.
- Comment on As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act 5 months ago:
And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.
- Comment on Financially rewarding and you will always have a job 6 months ago:
Don’t forget that loans are probably deferred through the PhD, so that’s like 4+ years of accumulated interest on top.
- Comment on Oh Kurt Gödel, you lovable logician freak. 6 months ago:
I don’t think they ever publicly stated what the flaw was. Would love to know, too.
- Comment on Let’s Encrypt Begins Supporting IP Address Certificates 6 months ago:
Maybe kinda, but it’s also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.
- Comment on Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all 6 months ago:
Yes, it did eliminate competition. They’re no longer competition once Microsoft buys them. They’re employees, possibly if a subsidiary, who contribute to Microsoft’s profits.
- Comment on Asus and Lenovo’s handhelds get price hike as Valve pauses some Steam Deck sales 7 months ago:
And on Switch, it’s forbidden typically. Which is part of why people advocate for the Steam Deck instead. From Nintendo’s perspective, this very much is a vulnerability. It’s just not leading to custom firmware or ROM dumps from what I understand, so it’s not even close to the most significant vulnerability.
- Comment on Unfortunately, this is science too. 8 months ago:
Not just valid, I’d argue important. It doesn’t make the most exciting headlines and doesn’t get funding very well, though, so it’s not done nearly as often as it should be. A big part of science is not taking things at face value and verifying that there is sufficient proof for claims.
Plus, if both results agree, it statistically tightens the probability of a coincidence. The chances of a 5% chance event happening twice in a row is 0.25%, and three times in a row is 0.0125% so repetition can make the results more certain.
- Comment on Europe’s onlyfans performers can’t get justice 8 months ago:
To be fair, this isn’t the typical bullshit “look what she was wearing, she wanted it” victim blaming. It’s like watching every single person who walks into a room get punched in the face, then walking in, getting punched in the face, and then being surprised and angry that you got punched in the face. It’s like watching people vote for Trump and then being surprised when they get fucked by his policies that he very blatantly said he would enact.
Is it right that it happened to her? Of course not. Should people have done it to her? Also of course not. Was it extremely, painfully predictable? Yeah, it unfortunately was. It may not be her fault, but… What the fuck did they think was gonna happen? They’d sell porn people actually wanted but nobody would ever ever ever save a copy because they wanted it?
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 8 months ago:
It’s a dying problem, but it’s gonna take a while to finish dying off. Linux is currently mostly used by more technically capable people, so it has historically been a lower priority compared to getting things to work at all. I think that’s changing as things get increasingly stable and usable with support for popular things like gaming. Once that base functionality is there, more and more attention will turn to polishing the UI and finding ways to hide the terminal.
- Comment on EU fines Apple $568m for deterring third-party payment methods on App Store 9 months ago:
People are down voting you like your defending them, but you’re not, and you’re right. It sounds like a lot of money, but for Apple, it’s just an adjustment to the profits they made doing this.
- Comment on 4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails. 9 months ago:
Oh god /pol/ is the hot spot now? I can only imagine the cess pit.