sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Player Spends $32,000 on NBA 2K25 in Just Five Months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  Or more likely, some Karen somewhere saw face cards and complained, and lawmakers/regulators didn’t bother doing any actual research.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Player Spends $32,000 on NBA 2K25 in Just Five Months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. I watch MtG Arena draft videos, and they throw hundreds with worth of resources sometimes in a single video, but they’re also making ad revenue and whatnot, so it works out. And viewer numbers are peanuts compared to more mainstream games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that’s the only way I’d consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system’s security.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AOL to discontinue dial-up internet service after 34 years⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  No American would spell fiber that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not worried about data loss. Honestly, the only feature I actually care about from sync is open tabs and recent history, since I’ll often open something on one device that I was using on another. I don’t really use bookmarks or saved passwords.

  My main concern is security. I don’t want my machines to be susceptible to malware, and with browsers being very complex, I want to make sure the dev team is very responsive in shipping security updates.

  The main reason I use IronFox on my phone is that it works with FDroid, which is important because I don’t have Google Play running on my main profile (I use GapheneOS). If the flatpak is updated within a few days of Firefox consistently, that’s good enough. But if it takes weeks or more, that’s too much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. Switching won’t be a big deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, perhaps I’ll try it out. I’ve made most of the changes they did in my config though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  From looking at the repo, it looks like it’s simply a set of patches that get applied to the Firefox source code. They don’t maintain a fork, just a set of changes just prior to building.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, mull. My bad. IronFox is the replacement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps. But a browser is something I’d prefer to just forget about and not track updates. So it’s very likely that I won’t check if it has gotten updates for a few months.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe? It’s a lot less likely for FF to disappear than LibreWolf.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It needs it to accomplish its goals. Whether its goals are worth accomplishing is a separate discussion entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI is not bad for the environment in comparison with many other regular activities.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  1 Bitcoin transaction = 645kg of CO2

  I think it’s interesting that this very much depends on the coin. This article compares Bitcoin to Monero, and here are the figures (per transaction per year):

  • Bitcoin - ~95 TWh per year
  • Monero - ~1.5 TWh per year

  So Monero is ~63x more efficient than Bitcoin at transactions, and that’s with all the overhead Monero bakes in to its transactions to maintain privacy (each transaction generates a bunch of fake transactions to mislead snoops, and it’s notoriously ASIC/GPU inefficient).

  I’m guessing the same is true for different AI models, some models will be a lot more wasteful than others in their training and queries.

  I agree, the opposition to LLMs is misplaced. There are legitimate reasons to dislike it, and there are certainly policy changes we should make, but attacking it for energy use in the weakest way to oppose it. If LLMs ran on 100% green energy, would you still oppose them? Probably, so figure out why you oppose it and attack LLMs over that, and perhaps policy can alleviate the worst of those concerns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's Stop Chat Control⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Really? You must have a very rosy memory of what GeoCities sites looked like…

  This looks like a regular static site generator theme.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Player Spends $32,000 on NBA 2K25 in Just Five Months⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. Sometimes larger studios make a good game, but most of the games I play are from indies or smaller AA studios.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but what about in 2 years from now?

  I used IronFox for a couple years and it suddenly stopped getting updates, and it took me a few months to realize and switch to something else. I don’t want that to happen again.

  I like the idea of librewolf, especially that it’s just a patch set on top of Firefox, but someone needs to maintain that patch set. This would be fine for simpler software, but browsers are complex and I just worry that updates will stall out with little warning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And anti-cheat needs a lot of access (e.g. read app memory) and sees a lot of churn to evolve with cheat engines. More churn means less thorough testing, which means higher likelihood of an exploit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It needs to be a mix. Have your clientside anti-cheat look for obvious attack vectors, have your seeks serverside anti-cheat look for suspicious play, and let users report others. Then have humans review suspected cheaters and make the final call.

  But that’s expensive, and off-the-shelf anti-cheat gives them someone else to blame.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  My reasons:

  • I don’t want a YouTube account, that just makes it easier for Google to track me
  • premium costs too much relative to how much I use it (Nebula is more reasonable, which I do pay for)
  • I can support my favorite creators in other ways (merch, patreon, etc)

  I don’t pirate my other media. I buy movies and TV shows and rip them to my media server, I buy lots of video games both physical and digital, and I buy books if my library doesnt have it or I want to keep it on my shelf. I’m not against paying for things, I’m against my privacy being violated.

  I watch a few hours of content a week, and I’d be happy cutting down a bit. I don’t follow any of the big names, rarely listen to music, and really only watch videos from a handful of channels, most of which are a waste of time anyway. If Google blocked my ad blocker, I’d be fine just not watching YouTube anymore.

  $14 is too much, I think $5 is about as much as I’d be willing to pay, or $1/channel. Give me that and I’ll consider signing up, despite my misgivings about Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t watch enough YouTube to make premium worth it. If they had a lower tier with a cap on ad-free watch time, I probably would pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m more worried about the updates not happening in a timely fashion. Is it just a passion project by a handful of devs, or is there some kind of funding?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, they certainly have some similarities and I’ll have to play with them to see if either will work for me. Nostr seems closer to Mastodon and not really what I’m after. Aether could work, though I’m not really a fan of ephemeral posts, and I’m worried about Democratic mods in an era of bots. But maybe both are close enough to what I want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And the unfortunate part is that crypto and LLMs are cool tech, but the bros completely ruin them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology?⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  limit federation to a single-signon and private messages.

  But then you completely lose content when someone disables their account, and most people don’t want to host anyway.

  My approach is a P2P service that’s similar to that, but instead of storing your stuff, you store some amount of other peoples’ stuff, such that there are multiple copies of any piece of content distributed randomly across the globe.

  However, moderation gets tricky here. I think a transitive trust system can work well. Basically, Alice trusts Bob to some degree, Bob trusts Carol to some degree, so Alice trusts Carol to some lesser degree. If content falls below some trust level, Alice doesn’t see it or store it. Bob and Carol don’t even need to be people, there can be bots to detect things like CSAM and other illegal content.

  The net result is that everyone’s experience is tailored to them, which hopefully makes things like shilling, trolling, and astroturfing less prevalent for those who curate their trust network more effectively. And this curation doesn’t need to be manual, it can be automatic based on how you react to content. In other words, everyone is a moderator, and you trust people who moderate similarly to you.

  The intent here is to solve a bunch of different problems:

  • prevent content from disappearing
  • eliminate power hungry mods
  • reduce cost of operation - this only requires a handful of servers to help connect nodes
  • limit effectiveness of bad actors

  There are certainly issues, such as:

  • bad actors can use the network to share illegal content (everyone else just won’t see it)
  • hard to bootstrap - what does the new user experience look like?
  • what does an account mean without a central server? This is a similar problem as simplex has.
  • what’s the killer feature to attract regular people vs the criminals?

  And some interesting side effects:

  • since it’s P2P, you can sneaker net it behind firewalls (e.g. China) to facilitate global free speech
  • everyone’s device can add resources to the network, so the barrier to self-hosting is zero
  • interesting options for localizing data - communities for a region will be super responsive for people in that region because there are more interested nodes; could maybe find new communities by local popularity

  Given the downsides, I’m not completely convinced it’s worth it, hence the hesitation. But anything that requires users to have a publicly facing server is DOA, so this seems like the most approachable option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  No, because there’s not a reasonable way for them to compete. You can’t really have multiple police forces, and they’ll be motivated to generate profit instead of protect the people.

  You can have multiple electrical suppliers. You can have a coal plant, solar and wind, and nuclear all competing for customers so they’re motivated to make their electricity more appealing. If you pair that with things like carbon taxes, people will choose the more efficient option, and you can mix and match large and small suppliers. You need a central authority to manage the infrastructure, but you can reasonably have diversity in generation.

  Just think if the average person could sell their excess solar generation (possible in some areas), their EV as battery capacity at night, etc, more people would want to generate renewable power. If you have that type of check against larger players, they’ll have to keep their prices competitive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, and this has been my chief concern since I came to Lemmy 2-3 years ago and read the implementation details. And it’s not something that can be patched in easily or I’d work on it, it’s a fundamental design choice.

  I began working on a distributed alternative, but quickly ran into issues in the design phase that Plebbit is currently running into: moderation is a tough nut to crack. I have ideas on how to mostly solve it, but between a full-time job and young kids, it just hasn’t been a priority.

  I hope someone with more time than me can tackle it, especially since I’m not 100% confident in my own solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are in you're top 3 favourite games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  So Silksong is going to be a trilogy? Rock on!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I really don’t get the “everything stores a copy of everything” model. It should instead work like a cache, where the OG instance is the source of truth, and instances just keep a cache of that data. Instances should be able to refresh data, or have no cache at all.

  I get the desire to not lose data, but that comes with a huge storage cost. If we want redundancy, we should have dedicated caches instead of everything having a copy.

  But hey, the Fediverse exists and I’m too lazy to build something better, so here I am.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games Where Nothing Happens (SPOILERS for various game plots)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, technically (old game with recent remake):

  ::: spoiler Link’s Awakening :::

  Everything happens in a dream, and when you finish, the MC wakes up. I’m sure there are plenty of others with that format.

  But I think that’s a copout, so here are a few where either the world resets or plot progression is basically “good job, do it again”:

  ::: spoiler

  • Slay the Spire - yeah, there’s a separate ending if get to Act 4, but no real closure; many roguelikes/deck builders count here
  • Minecraft - you slay the end dragon, but that doesn’t really change anything

  I would say Dwarf Fortress, but when you replay in a world, the world’s stats remain. :::

  And the cop-outs:

  • most city builders (and tycoon games, etc) - cities generally don’t interact and there’s no end goal
  • "board" games - Civ, EU4, etc, there’s no plot beyond what you create as you go
  • games like Smash Brothers, Tetris, etc
  • Mount and Blade and other sandbox-y games
  • many puzzle games