sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Gamers Bombard Visa & MasterCard With Emails and Calls Over Steam and itch.io Censorship 7 hours ago:
This is what spammers, scammer, credit collections do.
It absolutely works.
- Comment on Gamers Bombard Visa & MasterCard With Emails and Calls Over Steam and itch.io Censorship 7 hours ago:
Corporations lie blatantly all the fucking time.
They are usually more worried with ever having outwardly admitting something that they could be sued over, than they are with any kind of human to human sense of accountability or believability.
Every, single, thing they are mass releasing or designing as an official stance has gone through some kind of legal team, or a team under a legal team that follow’s guidelines from a legal team.
This is just how megacorps work.
They are not people, they are a sociopathic machine, operated by people who very much tend to be sociopaths.
- Comment on Gamers Bombard Visa & MasterCard With Emails and Calls Over Steam and itch.io Censorship 8 hours ago:
Here’s the summarized version:
Be Polite.
Act as if you only understand ‘the effects’, have a nebulous notion of ‘the cause’.
Act like you know little other than this, and insist they explain it to you like you are a five year old.
Waste as much of their time as possible, without becoming hotheaded, instead become sad-confused.
“I’m not so much angry, as I am disappointed” type of vibe / energy.
And if possible, be genuinely kind to the low level, actual people you talk to, they literally do not make the rules.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 17 hours ago:
Yep, the answer to many of these problems is I2P.
Tor was invented by the US Navy, roughly 1/3 of major entry/exit nodes are estimated to be comprimised / run as honeypots by various LE / Intel agencies, and said LE and Intel agencies also know how to, and have deanonimyed various people and groups on TOR that they really wanted to go after.
TOR ain’t it.
I2P is a lot closer to ‘it’.
- Comment on workflow 2 days ago:
Probably yes?
I do not know as much about how strict of a theocracy Egypt was in that time period, but probably fairly substantially, yes.
- Comment on workflow 2 days ago:
Free funeral expenses, rofl
- Comment on workflow 2 days ago:
I mean, I am myself an atheist, but absolutely I agree that a large number of vocal internet atheists are basically just smug assholes who get off on intellectual masturbation as a sign of moral superiority.
Perhaps ironically, I think this actually comes from them not fully deconsctructing their likely Christian extremist indoctrinated worldview enough… they still at their core have that deep seeded framework of ‘everyone who does not see things exactly my way is damned to hell!’
If you can find an atheist youtube personality or something like that, who just raised atheist/agnostic, or at least not in an extremist form of Christianity… well, they are often much less traumatized and thus much less bitter.
There are tons of religious people who… actually are generally kind and accepting, have problems with a hateful and exclusionary and enemy-driven version of their, or any other religion.
While I may not agree with their worldviews on a more… academic, intellectual level, I try always to remain as objective as I can, and realize that to varying extents, pretty much everything is a mixed bag, with pros and cons, and an absolute pro of many non hateful versions of religion is a sense of community responsibility, a collective empathy.
Its just that on the intarwebz, you are much more likely to get asocial or antisocial basically recluses.
- Comment on workflow 2 days ago:
I realize this is a joke, and it did elicit a good chuckle from me, but I have two technical sort of nit picks / factoids.
As I understand these things:
To the vast majority of Catholics, the Pope is not literally a god-king, who becomes basically a minor god oh his physical death, or just literally is onenof the greater gods made incarate… the Pope is God’s chosen representative on Earth, sort of like a more formalized version of many Old Testament prophets, who also leads God’s church.
Also… the Amish, the Mennonites… they very much do have as part of their culture, which very much revolves around religion… that you more or less are a expected to, and by this cement that you are a good person of faith and character, that you help others by participating, often regularly, in work-gangs, to stand up at least the basics of barn or house, in what is a shockingly short amount of time, and done in a very high quality manner, with less technologically advanced tools than what is normal for others.
Seriously, if you’ve never seen this, go look up something like Amish Barn Raising on youtube.
They start with basically just raw materials, assemble large parts of the framing, stand em up with just ropes, set up and join the whole thing, get the outer walls and roof on and doors on, in under a a single work day.
- Comment on workflow 2 days ago:
Depending on how exactly you draw the line on ‘slavery’… maybe? Kinda?
For the Great Pyramid, the current approximate consenus is that it was basically a corvee labor system for a large amount of the population of Egypt.
Basically, when the farmers were all in their off season, they’d be drafted for a number of months a year to aid construction as general laborers.
They were housed, fed, and paid for this, by the state/royal coffers.
They were paid in material goods like foodstuffs, as currency in the way we think of it wasn’t really a thing at the time.
And yes, they absolutely did have divisions of labor, they had basically nobility or psuedo nobilility people who could largely read and write as trained architects and engineers and mathematicians and record keepers and accountants, and had a whole slew of the craftsmen / stone mason class below them.
So… it is forced labor, you couldn’t really opt out, but you would be compensated.
Egypt did have roughly chattel slaves at the time, they probably participated as well, but they are estimated to be 10% of the total population of Egypt at the time.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 3 days ago:
No, that is not how that would work.
It is, actually, allow me to explain:
Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.
The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.
They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.
If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.
Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.
Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.
No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.
Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 3 days ago:
So yeah, being mad at Valve makes this whole petition stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.
But also…
If MC and Visa won’t budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system fod adult only games…
MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.
This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 3 days ago:
They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.
If you didn’t know, PayPal technically isn’t a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank… which is an actual bank.
If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive…
Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:
MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.
So, they’d have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.
… Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.
…
Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.
I am… uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.
…
Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 3 days ago:
Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago…
They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward…
They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.
Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.
They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.
Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system… but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for…
Well, then basically no one does that.
Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.
Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.
And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.
Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.
Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading… people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 4 days ago:
Hooray two tiered legal system, huzzah!
/s/s/s
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 4 days ago:
I mean…
Looking at mic_check’s figures…
Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.
We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman picking a Rep instead of a Dem.
Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man…
Just pick a random, single, never married dude.
Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.
…
We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?
Where people like, talk, get to know each other?
Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?
Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or… talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them…?
Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush… when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.
Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 4 days ago:
Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.
…
Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.
To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.
Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.
Tea isn’t a dating app, it is… I guess you could call it … dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?
A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).
But it doesn’t actually directly link to
It is named ‘tea’, as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.
Literally this is their own marketing:
It is literally just a replacement for Facebook ‘Are we dating the same guy’ groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.
…
So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.
I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.
…
Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.
Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of… is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don’t mention untill they’ve been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they’re committed when they’ve in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?
These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.
Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking…
But its not like this doesn’t happen to men.
I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.
But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn’t look like they’ve fucked with this page.
IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1
About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact. Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists…
About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I’d be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, ‘shut up and deal with it’, whatever you want to call it.
…
Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:
Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.
I agree that it wouldn’t represent the average man, but we’ve got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who’ve been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.
Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.
But I don’t think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.
Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.
…
Also, uh:
You say that,
The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.
But what I am seeing is:
To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.
fastcompany.com/…/everything-to-know-about-tea-th…
The rest of that quote is that the picture is ‘verified by the Tea team’, but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.
Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver’s liscense… basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is… so uncommon I cannot think of an example.
So…taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who’s already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 4 days ago:
Wow that was fast.
I did not even know this app existed untill about 8 hours ago.
Already comprimised.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 6 days ago:
Peter Thiel was also a major, early investor in the project.
That’s another ‘this one thing should let you know this is radioactive.’
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 6 days ago:
Interesting. I haven’t watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he’s made.
As you seem to be an actual serious person who generally values their time:
Probably don’t bother lol, unless you want to just watch multiple hours of youtubers going through his … literal decades long history of hyping himself up, lying or manipulating the context of what he says and does.
I can best summarize it all as: He is a malignant narcissit sociopath, akin to a cult leader in terms of how charismatically skilled he is and how intricate his fabrications are.
Specifically as it refers to his coding abilities, now, a number of other coders on youtube have done exhaustive breakdowns of his sloppy code, and also shown that he often acts like a seasoned expert in specific technical concepts that he is at best only vaguely familiar with at the level of a sky high overview.
- Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed 6 days ago:
No pun intended:
Well fuck.
They literally did just do this, almost tagged everything NSFW/Adult no longer appears in itch.io’s search, I just made a new account and specifically checked the ‘show nsfw stuff’ setting and… yep.
Currently I am only seeing like uh… 3 games.
There used to be 100s, probably more like 1000s.
They have not taken down the actual urls for actual games, but you have to know them directly.
Kotaku seems to have an actually decent overview, very recent:
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 6 days ago:
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
Yep, absolutely.
The uh, funniest one that sticks in my memory was the hack of basically an early build of GTA 6.
Somebody social engineered their way into someone at Rockstar who had some level of admin acces, I think via fake / intercepted and reformed 2FA auths to the target’s phone, along with some spear phishing.
Then, they were proficient enough to exploit thier way throughout the intranet… but not smart enough to cover all their tracks.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines.
You would think this, but everywhere I have worked in the industry… most people cannot infact read between the lines.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground.
Impressive!
I’ve been to some, never spoken though… also, not DEFCON though.
I imagine cyber security conferences are similar. (mostly exist for networking)
I agree.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
Yeah, but Thor takes it to an uncommon point of basically being a conman, with his so much of his reputation built, by himself, on vastly overstated credentials.
Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 1 week ago:
He did texhnically end up in cybersecurity, but basically yeah, a role that involves almost zero actual technical skill.
He did social engineering, aka, worming his way into people’s emails and texts and social circles, sending fake ‘your account has been comprimised, send me your user name and password to fix’ type shit.
Ironically, social engineering is quite a fitting uh, subclass, for a low technical skill, high charisma narcissist to slot into.
He thought hacking and DEFCON was the coolest convention to go to, so him and some buddies… won the scavenger hunt badge, I believe thats more or less running around the Con with your network analyzer open on your phone, to find wifi/bluetooth enabled hidden scavenger hunt items, maybe with a couple extra steps.
Its literally a gimmick badge, its not really anything to do with actual pentesting, nothing like developing a totally novel exploit.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 1 week ago:
Ah, thats true, that is more accurate.
So he was … testing tools for testing games, or some kind of internal process?
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 1 week ago:
Probably not in the direct sense, given that he uh ‘used to work’ at Blizzard.
As a game tester.
By that metric, I am an ex MSFT employee, because I did that routinely as well.
(I then went on to actually work for MSFT as a database admin/dev, but you get the idea)
He’s is an extremely useful and extremely idiotic useful idiot, like uh, Tim Pool.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 1 week ago:
Put him in a ponytail, bulk him up a bit, de-age him a decade, and you’ve got a theoretical physicist with an penchant for crowbar related mayhem.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 1 week ago:
The big corporations do what they do because of consumers like you and me
Which is why they run a non stop barrage of advertisemenr campaigns to brainwash the consumer into…
Oh. Wait. No.
That would mean the corporations basically tell the consumers what to do, and they basically listen.
Well, dang, thank god it’s not like they bankroll politicians to the point of individual citizen campaign donors being largely of no effectiveness whatsoever in the vast majority of…
Wait, whats that Jamie?
That is how shit works.
takes long toke
Fuck.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 1 week ago:
Maybe not specifically this comm, but I had been sporadically arguing with people on various places on lemmy about SKG before Ross even droppes his 'SKG is probably dead, video that (re)ignited this whole thing.
A whole, whole lot of people I talked to basically had the same talking points Thor initially did, a lot of them were dedicated to various facts that were simply wrong, rhetoric that was either bipolar/hypocritical, or just ultimately nihlist (nothing can be done).
I was actually very relieved, initially, when Ross made above mentioned video, simply so I would no longer have to keep explaining all the various intricacies… Ross had addresed all this stuff before, but you’d have to watch about 2 or 3 hours of videos to truly get it, in all its detail.
The ‘SKG is probably dead’ video did a good job of doing both a broad overview, as well as going into detail with the more common, in-depth misunderstandings… which were pretty much all popularized by Thor.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
I am 100% with your well written explanation here!
Just one ‘nitpick’, that isn’t really even a nitpick because you did qualify the relevant part with ‘tend to be’:
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful that you could just eat it like an apple.
Not as sweet as most apples, but way, way more sweet than the typical mass produced tomato you’re likely to get in the US.
I’ve been to a few farmers markets where… a couple of smaller farms were growing just absolutely stellar quality tomatoes.
…
On the other hand, squash and zucchini, even the fancy ones from farmers markets?
Main difference I noticed was basically perfect ripeness, they still just taste like nothing.
(I guess I should also point out this was from 10ish years back, sadly, a lot of farmers markets now have a lot of people basically just reselling some particular, slightly higher quality but still mass produced fruits and veggies, than aren’t even local)
…
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire…
Corn.
Corn is arguably, from different domains of technical or colloquial meaning… a fruit, vegetable, and grain.
After millenia of us artifically selecting what was originally, basically a kind of grass, into something that is now so sweet, that the US uses it to make HFCS, a cane sugar substitute… and then we jam that HFCS … into bread, soda, everything.
So… ketchup… is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two… frui-getables.
- Comment on Amazon cuts hundreds of AWS cloud jobs after strategic review, says AI wasn’t the main factor 1 week ago:
They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor.
Turns out… Amazon runs AWS for businesses… and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service.
Every other business is laying people off?
Less B2B AWS demand.
Everyone is now unemployed?
Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics.
…
I’d actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions…
… That’s a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions.
If AWS and similar departments at similar companies… stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok?
Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it’ll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.
- Comment on Mmmm suppositories. 1 week ago:
Ow my brain.
