MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on 1 day 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 4 days 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 4 days 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 6 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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? 1 week 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?
- Comment on Taco Bell Says 'No Más' to AI Drive-Thru Experiment 2 weeks ago:
I am very confused by this repot, as it seems to imply something different than what it's saying and what it's saying seems to be... nothing specific at all?
So things are not going great, but that is not stopping Taco Bell from pushing forward with its AI embrace in one way or another. The fast food staple’s parent company, Yum Brands, announced a partnership with Nvidia earlier this year with the goal of improving the technology that powers its AI operations, including the order takers.
Now I have cognitive dissonance from both the uncanny use of fastidiously grammatically correct but unnanutral Spanish in the headline AND the headline being entirely mismatched with the article.
Also, Gizmodo is still a thing? Holy shit. Would have lost money on that bet.
EDIT: Oh, it turns out the mismatched headline seems to be because the article is straight up retyping a similar piece from WSJ. WSJ's take is also light on a specific event they're reporting, beyond an executive talking about a thing, but at least they bother clarifying to what extent there is a change of policy. Turns out Gizmodo is absolutely still a thing. I had forgotten the regurgitated reporting-on-reporting stuff.
- Comment on There are people young enough to not even remember Pokémon Red/Blue who are old enough to be parents now 2 weeks ago:
I am literally cutting it off at 18, hence the security net thing.
If you're gonna go into biological limits we're looking at the end of the 3DS era. You could technically have grandparents who weren't born back in Red/Blue days, but we're trying to keep things from getting gross, we're just aiming for depressing.
- Comment on There are people young enough to not even remember Pokémon Red/Blue who are old enough to be parents now 2 weeks ago:
Look, I do feel some empathy for people stuck in less civilized parts of the planet, but I can't personally care about every self-destructive, violent culture that fails to join modern society, you know?
I do support protecting their refugees, assuming they are willing to, you know, integrate into the culture.
- Comment on There are people young enough to not even remember Pokémon Red/Blue who are old enough to be parents now 2 weeks ago:
What are you talking about?
There are parents out there young enough to not remember the remake of Red/Blue.
You can have your parents be younger than Diamond and Pearl before it starts making me think about the failure of social security nets.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
It... would be pretty horrific if that wasn't the case. Like, wake up tomorrow and my parents are teenagers? People I work with are babbling babies? There are people out there filing my taxes. I need them to not crawl back into their mother's womb. Who in this scenario may as well be a toddler. No, thanks.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 2 weeks ago:
This is true. I had been thinking my previous post was a bit too optimistic, actually. For the sake of making a point I implied that conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers didn't previously exist. They existed. There was plenty of public conflict about masking and social distancing in the 1918 flu. The AIDS panic was horrific and obviously this isn't the first time that hate discourse puts fascists in power in a major superpower, let alone in a country overall.
The real issue with the Internet isn't the flexibility of truth, it's the ease in diseminating the satisfying falsehood. With no source of authority over which truths are acceptable and what lies are shameful you end up in a worldwide radicalization engine. It's not that the old gatekeepers told you the truth, either. They still don't. But at least we all had some culture-wide baseline for acceptable narratives.
But hey, people can keep hating ont he obvious boogeyman of AI. At least it's a start of realizing what the pattern is. It's still not "the end of truth", but like I said elsewhere, if it gets people to start noticing these things we'll be better off than when social media was doing the exact same thing to us as a global society without anybody realizing.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 2 weeks ago:
It does say "check the results manually". Not that this changes anything. For the record, always double check anything any AI tells you unless you can verify the response off the top of your head. Also for the record, double check anything anybody else tells you. If you haven't seen it from more than one source, you don't know if it's true.
Hell, if the thing people learn from AI summaries is to never believe anything the see on the Internet without double checking it we'll be better off than we were before.
Also, every negative impact you assign to AI is also applicable to traditional search. I was hearing communication scholars warn people of the issues with algorithmic selection and personalized search back in the 90s. They were correct.
I am endlessly fascinated by the billions of boiling frogs that hadn't realized their perception of the world was owned by Google until Google made a noticeably change to their advertising engine. I am increasingly glad that AI is as unreliable as it is at this point.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 2 weeks ago:
No, it doesn't.
I'm so mad about people buying into the fake hype.
The death of truth was social media. Or squishy human brains on social media, I suppose. We just came from a massive argument about whether vaccines work, whether masks are useful in the middle of a repiratory virus pandemic and a bunch of Americans believed there was a pizzeria pedophilia vampire ring so much they elected a fascist turd president. Twice.
What the hell is marginally better photo doctoring going to do in that context? Who gives an actual crap?
The only real concern you should have is you now shouldn't trust phone calls that sound vaguely like someone you know from a phone number you don't recognize. And maybe if you get a video call from a celebrity standing suspiciously still don't wire them all your money.
Otherwise we're just as boned as we were five years ago.