MudMan

@MudMan@fedia.io

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon is bringing quote posts to the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Well, I'm still waiting for Twitter to "need a replacement". It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for Facebook or any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, including Facebook.

To be clear, I don't particularly mean too little to late for me. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

I mean too little to late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don't think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won't be because Masto added quotes. I'm fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I'm in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it'd be nice if the gross places didn't keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front... yeah, too little, too late.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who plays like that x_x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I used to be inverted until controller FPSs started to be a thing. I don't think people realize how long PC FPSs were mostly a keyboard-only thing. By the time WASD+Mouse standardized, quite late into the Quake 1 era I had hundreds of hours on Tie Fighter/X-Wing and a bunch of other first person flight games.

Hell, Descent predates Quake, and I'd argue it figured out full 3D controls way before Quake did.

Now that I'm on board this train of thought, do kids these days think Doom played with full mouseview and just distorted all over the place? Is it well known for people not born at the time that Doom was mechanically closer to a twin stick shooter than an FPS or have all the source ports erased that from history?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon is bringing quote posts to the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I've come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we're at it, while I don't particularly like the implementation of Bluesky's custom subject feeds I'm fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I'd argue I'm doing the opposite.

I was turning this stuff off when my Google and Samsung phones kept suggesting that they could do searches based on the content of my phone screen or my camera feed. It's only "normalization" in that it's... you know, actually normal and widespread. I don't think people are too alarmed now, I think they weren't alarmed enough when the first wave of "smart assistants" started doing this like a decade ago.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Shouldn't I Use A Small Gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah. You're basically buying a laptop crammed into a small box. May as well get a laptop if you need the small footprint and portability or a desktop if you need the price-to-performance.

Also, the Steam Deck thing people keep repeating is terrible advice. Even these can power their components somewhat robustly. A docked Steam Deck is still a 10W APU for no good reason. It depends on use case, in that you also get a handheld out of the deal, but if you're looking for a primary device even a laptop would be a better choice.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Right, so when you said "forced it on everyone" you meant "the feature existing at all even if it's optional".

See, I don't have a problem with the latter, that's legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.

Now, I don't like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it's worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but this isn't a Windows-specific thing, it's a pretty widespread fad.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, I'd rather not. I definitely take a number of steps to limit that. Same as I take steps to prevent that from Google on my phone or from both of them and others on my Linux devices.

What I don't do is make up stuff to be paranoid about in case the very real privacy concerns you also have to pay attention to aren't scary enough to make me feel superior online.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I'm so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don't fit their dumb little package of memes.

You know what, I hope it's not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice highway somewhere with the money.

In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There's plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I swear to Torvalds, if the amount of old ladies using Linux because their Fedi relatives installed it on their laptops is accurate we are in the middle of an major demographic crisis.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yes, that's toggleable on settings and off on default. I also remapped the copilot button back to being right click.

I mean, they're pretty useless features and I wish they had spent more time working on better stuff, but... you know, I turned it off.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
They did what, now? I have no Copilot features turned on in my PC, and I actually have a certified Copilot+ laptop.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.

We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.

WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:
Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.
```
Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.

August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.

Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.

Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.
```
That's almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU support before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling now. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they're reporting on still shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just "too many", but the original report says 8.5%.

Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. Don't be that guy. On the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.

While we're at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don't often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%.

I've said it before and I'll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other "good" versions of Windows and it's not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They'll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they're willing to pay and most legacy home users won't even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it'll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.

The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can make tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.

While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.

Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A conundrum⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, that'd work a lot better for me if I was American and not painfully aware of similar issues happening in cities where cars fold like umbrellas and are almost entirely parked underground.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A conundrum⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Yeeeeah, I was too adult in 2008 to go "you know the real problem? We check too hard for solvency when giving out mortgages".

Not that I have a silver bullet for solving a housing crisis. There probably isn't one. You need a lot more public housing as a percentage of the total pool, that much I can tell. How you fix a job market where nobody holds the same position for more than a handful of years is beyond me. You probbly need to make it much more expensive to own a house without living in it or renting it out. You definitely want to make it much more expensive for corporations to own housing.

Guessing that's harder to fit in a pithy, viralt tweet, though.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I mean... I'm trying to be snarky, but I'm finding it hard ot argue that it's bad advice.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That's so rare.

One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?

You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it'd be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.

Turns out if the discussion is "quantitatively rich" but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I'm not sure I'm as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.

Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at lest.

Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.

Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren't investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn't there.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, see, I'm not a lawyer, but I am confident enough that "committing crimes in another country remotely is safe" is absolutely terrible legal advice. Don't do that. I am confident enough in my understanding of legal issues to issue that recommendation.

I mean, I've given Rochko crap here for not thinking things through when he incorrectly suggested more decentralization would make Masto behave differently than Bluesky in this issue. I don't for a second assume he meant "because fuck it, fine me if you can, USA" or I would be giving him way more crap and closing my Masto account just in case for good measure.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
If you run a social media platform that hosts American users they actually might.

Same as the bar for whether GDPR applies to you isn't whether your server is physically in the EU, it's whether you're processing data from EU users. Or, in fact, how you're supposed to get explicit permission from EU users to host their data anywhere outside the EU in the first place.

Now, I'm not a lawyer in Mississippi, so I'm not gonna give you legal advice, but I would definitely look into it if I'm setting up a public instance. The same way I'd be looking into what compliance things I need to do to host people's data. It's one thing to set up for friends and family, but if you're hosting data from outsiders you probably need to understand what you're doing.

I've also not looked into what happens if you are sharing data with a noncompliant server in a restricted territory (so someone is self hosting in Mississippi and then federating with your server elsewhere). I don't think the legislators who wrote this dumb rule know, either. They clearly haven't thought that far ahead. Common sense dictates that the outside server would be fine and it'd be the local server's problem to be compliant. I presume that's what Bluesky is counting on (i.e. that someone will set up a local instance and act as an ingest bridge for them without it having to be them). Then again, you have British legislators now claiming that all VPNs need to have age controls, so I am not taking common sense for granted when it comes to these things.f
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, Mastodon gGmbH also hosts mastodon.social, as far as I can tell. Or... I mean, at least that's the address and company info they show in mastodon.social's about page (not Mastodon, but mastodon.social, there are two separate About pages, both reference Mastodon's gGmbH's address).

The one thing I'll give you is that the statement they issued is talking about Mastodon software overall not having the technical tools to comply with the law in the first place and are explicitly refusing to comment on what mastodon.social will specifically do about it.

Which is irrelevant because, one presumes, if the answer was to build the tools to be able to comply with the age verification law they would have said that and put them into the Mastodon software, not just kept them exclusively for mastodon.social.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
That seems overengineered as hell to me. But then, having an entire LLM to do what much older voice recognition software could do better is overengineered by definition. The LLM won't validate those things because the point of it, if it has one at all in this scenario, is for it to recognize off the cuff speech and malformed orders.

Which is partly why people are finding this idea doesn't work, I suppose. Have a chatbot improvise based on what people are shouting and you get garbage inputs. Have strict requirements for voice commands and you get lots of failed attempts.

Unlike a bunch of other applications of AI chatbots this one maaaay eventually work. But then again, so may yours. Honestly, if I was going to overengineer the shit out of having a tortilla-wrapped laxative inside a car I'd have you order directly in your phone and use that license plate recognition idea to prevent you having to talk to anybody or anything in the first place.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, well, remind me not to do business with you under any circumstances.

Self hosting is cool and all, but if you think decentralized networks and services are a get out of jail free to bypass regulations applying to their centralized counterparts you shouldn't be hosting decentralized networks and services.

For one thing if you have no understanding of legal compliance I don't want you to store any of my data at all.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
No, the article is about Mastodon.social´s nonprofit following up with an official statement after not responding when approached about the original report.

Eugen himself was just shitting on Bluesky, his entire comment was that Bluesky leaving showed "why true decentralization is important". Ironically, that whole pissing match ended up hinging about how much Eugen was focusing on Bluesky rather than their protocol, too. Turns out to be a popular deflection and it turns out to not change anything practical.

You are retroactively trying to reinterpret the subject matter here to save face and I'm too tired right this minute to entertain it. We don't have to have a conversation, man, no hard feelings, but if you insist on having one here I'd appreciate if it wasn't about something else entirely.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
We are focusing on mastodon.social because you jumped on a thread about mastodon.social confirming they won't be complying with Mississippi's age verification law, which in turn is a follow up to coverage of Bluesky doing the same thing. And also because Eugen Rochko jumped into that announcement to claim that Bluesky stepping away from that territory was an example of how Fedi's wider decentralization was an advantage, even though it turned out to no be an advantage at all.

Why would we be talking about anything else? That's literally the topic. You may be looking for a different thread. If anything, the uncontrolled impulse to talk about the ways in which AP is more decentralized than AT whether that's relevant to the conversation or not is the exact communication mistake Eugene made. Which makes that weirder.

To be clear, it doesn't matter where your instance is hosted. Mastodon.social is not hosted in Mississippi, either, it's hosted in Berlin. You're still taking on a TON of potential liability if you don't comply with their age verification or block that territory from access if the law stays in the books, just like you're risking a ton of liability if you breach GDPR even if your site isn't in the EU.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It doesn't matter, though. They all have the same choice to make: comply, shut down in that territory... or be fined an insane amount.

Eugen argued... well, pretty much what you are arguing now. The question Bluesky guy posed to him is what Mastodon.social would do and how would the presence of smaller instances prevent the issue, especially for instances without the resources to comply at all in the first place.

Eugen did not respond to that, but Mastodon.social just did, and the answer is... Mastodon.social will do the same thing as Bluesky and so will every other instance.

Because of course it's pretty obvious that having a decentralized platform doesn't help with stupid regulation, because stupid regulation applies to every instance. There's no reason decentralization would bypass a blanket requirement unless the legal requirement has carved an exception for smaller platforms (and even then there's a question of what counts as a platform in that scenario).

And the thing is... I'm okay with you not having though that through, but Eugen certainly must have. Right? I mean, they had a pretty well thought out answer for Techcrunch in 24 hours, they must have given it some thought. It's an unforced communication error.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
"The bad guy" is not a thing I've thought about anybody since I was 12 years old.

I think Eugen jumped onto a common talking point among Fedi people when they try to highlight the difference between Masto and Bluesky and he didn't think it through.

Like I said, I'm surprised he messed that up. He certainly should know the impression he was giving wasn't accurate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
So in this whole embarrassing dick measuring contest Eugen was wrong and Mike Masnick was right, then. Turns out "real decentralization" or not, Masto/Fedi's structure doesn't do anything to bypass this nonsense.

This is not new. People constanty claim AP and Fedi have benefits or features for being decentralized that they absolutely do not have, but I have to admit I'm kinda shocked that Eugen will do that exact thing without any more self-awareness than the average Masto user. He should know better.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.

It's kinda depressing.

FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they're talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using "rethink".

The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of "it's a mess". "We've certainly learned a lot" has to be my favourite.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm "use NFS forfilesharing old." what's the current optimal solution for shared drives if I have like 3 linux machines in the house?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.

I'm curious, what's the issue with NFS on Windows for you?