Mechanize
@Mechanize@feddit.it
- Comment on Prison Architect 2 Has Been Delayed Indefinitely, Pre-Orders Are Being Refunded 3 months ago:
The (IMHO) important bits:
TLDR:
Our continuous internal reviews and beta test groups have highlighted areas that we need to focus on more, mainly performance and content
From the FAQ:
Is the game canceled?
No, the game is not canceled.What happens to pre-orders?
All pre-orders will be refunded in the upcoming weeks. The option to pre-order the game will be removed and the bonus will instead be added to the base game for allIs there going to be Early Access or Beta Access to the game?
There will not be an early access or extra beta access right nowIn the blog there are the steps to how to get the refunds, I’m not copying them in case they change.
As they say, A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever ^/s?^
- Comment on WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps 9 months ago:
I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.
Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.
- Comment on WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps 9 months ago:
as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward.
That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.
Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.
Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.
Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.
- Comment on WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps 9 months ago:
“One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”
Let me translate this for you: “We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.
And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!”
Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.
“We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.
Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.
I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.
- Comment on Mental eelness 10 months ago:
- Comment on Congress Wants Tech Companies to Pay Up for AI Training Data 10 months ago:
Any foundation model is trained on a subset of common crawl.
All the data in there is, arguably, copyrighted by one individual or another. There is no equivalent open - or closed - source dataset to it.
Each single post, page, blog, site, has a copyright holder. In the last year big companies have started to change their TOS to make that they are able to use, relicense and generally sell your data hosted in their services as their own for the intent of AI training, so potentially some small parts of common crawl will be licensable in bulk - or directly obtained from the source.
This does still leave out the majority of the data directly or indirectly used today, even if you were willing to pay, because it is unfeasable to search and contract every single rights holder.
On the other side of it there have been work to use less but more heavily curated data, which could potentially generate good small, domain specific, models. But still they will not be like the ones we currently have, and the open source community will not be able to have access to the same amount and quality of data.
It’s an interesting problem that I’m personally really interested to see where it leads.
- Comment on Do any of you have that one service that just breaks constantly? I'd love to love Nextcloud, but it sure makes that difficult at times 10 months ago:
Give technitium a go, my woes diminished drastically with that.
- Comment on 11 months ago:
I have a Boox Nova Air which is still going strong after around 2 years, and honestly it’s pretty good for writing. But I heard a lot of people having problems with updates bricking the device or receiving a bad unit and having an hard time returning it, if bought directly from them. I did not have to talk with support and I avoided the updates, so I can’t say more about that. My experience is overall good with it.
I also have a Kobo Libra H2O that I think is nearing the 4 years mark, and is still going really strong. The biggest problem I had was that it asks for a kobo account during setup, thing that I really dislike. I don’t know if it is still like that.
But, generally, if you want an epub compatible reader that you can mod (NickelMenu etc) and easily side load stuff to, with a kobo libra you can’t go wrong. Even if, to be fair, I’m not up to date with the latest devices and company policies.
One note: the kindle format is pretty closed and all the stuff you buy from amazon is generally DRMed to hell, so it’s not certain that you can pass it to other readers. Just avoid amazon’s ebooks.
- Comment on Have you tried sunning you perineum? 11 months ago:
- Comment on I just sat down for breakfast with the kids 11 months ago:
You should add some mushrooms in it.
- Comment on Fallout 4 GOTY Released on GOG 1 year ago:
Finally! Not the best game ever made, but one I really enjoy nonetheless.
I can’t wait to play it again: having left my Steam library behind it’s always a struggle not being able to replay some games missing on gog.
- Comment on Fairphone 5 - release date and US support?? 1 year ago:
There’s an archived snapshot of the issue: web.archive.org/web/20220623132457/https://…/820
