AnyOldName3
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
- Comment on Video games often have crouch and crawl for stealth but not the much more commonly used tiptoeing 2 days ago:
Most FPS games have holding shift bound to sprinting, which makes movement much louder.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 1 week ago:
I don’t think anyone who ever texted like that is still under 25 anymore. It rapidly dropped off around 2010 as smartphones with full keyboards became widespread, and not using full words was a signal that you hadn’t got one yet. That was fifteen years ago, so to still be under 25, you’d have had to be texting people while aged under ten, and people didn’t give preteens phones back then.
- Comment on snail lyfe 1 week ago:
It’s 2025. Even snails are renting their homes these days.
- Comment on Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago. 1 week ago:
The scary dystopian part is the ability to work out that the account belonged to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade rather than just that they could see what had been posted. The Internet Archive doesn’t let you ask it what someone’s Digg username was.
- Comment on Data Centers Turn to Aviation Engines for Power Solutions 1 week ago:
Lower emissions, and natural gas is cheaper than diesel. Also, the lead time is much shorter, as there aren’t many manufacturers of large diesel generators that could keep up with AI datacentre demand, whereas there are lots of airliner turbofans being retired that could be refurbished to become these generators.
- Comment on 4chan faces UK ban after refusing to pay ‘stupid’ fine 2 weeks ago:
America’s first amendment doesn’t grant a total right to free speech. Conspiracy to commit murder is just speech, but is very much illegal, and so is copyright infringement.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
If you saw a fruit stand and it had a sign saying you were allowed to try one grape without committing to buy a bunch, and the owner noticed you were doing anything with grapes other than buying them or trying one, they’d be allowed to ban you from their stand or if they really wanted to be a dick about it, take you to small claims court to recover the cost of any stolen grapes. If the local police wanted to be dicks about it rather than just not show up over something so petty, they could treat it like any other kind of low-value shoplifting and arrest you. The owner letting you have a free evaluation grape doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with grapes, whether or not you invent loopholes like claiming you’re a different customer if you walk away from the grapes and come back again or that it’s fine as long as you ony take one grape from each bunch or that it should be fine as long as you pretend you’re evaluating the grapes even though it’s obvious that you were never going to actually buy grapes. They are not your grapes until you’ve paid for them, and while they’re not your grapes, what the shopkeeper says is allowed is what’s allowed, and it’s up to their sole discretion whether you’re taking the piss and need to stop.
If you ask a random person off the street or on social media, they might well agree with you that making a link publicly available means it’s legal to download the linked thing, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. If you read the text of the DMCA (or equivalent in another country), ask a lawyer, or read a summery in plain English of the DMCA written by a lawyer, it’s really clear that, barring some very specific exceptions, you have no rights to do anything with anything unless either you’re the copyright holder, you’ve been granted a licence to do specific things by the copyright holder, or you’ve bought a copy from the copyright holder and have implicit rights to do things with the copy you’ve bought (which is why, typically, software is sold as a licence, not a copy, as that stops you getting your implicit First Sale Doctrine rights). A lawyer would tell you that Microsoft haven’t granted you, as someone who is not evaluating whether to deploy Windows 11 IoT LTSC for a specific project, permission to download the ISO, so you don’t have permission to download the ISO.
The fact that you mention DMCA takedown requests here shows a serious misconception about what the DMCA is and how it works, because they’re a very specific and minor part of the DMCA that has no relevance to normal people. Takedown requests are a mechanism between copyright holders and online service providers when the service provider is hosting infringing content on behalf of someone else, without necessarily knowing that it’s infringing, and the DMCA introduced them because previously your ISP and any websites you visited were also liable for any crimes you comitted using their services. The person downloading the Windows ISO isn’t an online service provider, so the consequences for them wouldn’t be a takedown request. There are much more exciting consequences for normal people, like unlimited fines and jail sentences.
The fact that the DMCA is so broadly overreaching and draconian that it’s impossible to enforce, and that therefore you don’t need to worry about only breaking the law a little bit as no one’s going to care doesn’t mean that what it says isn’t the law. Plenty of people who’ve ended up in trouble for something else have ended up prosecuted for various copyright offences that were easier to make stick than whatever painted a target on their back in the first place.
Despite it not being a problem for normal people, if you’re a big company with enough money to be worth going after, minor things like getting a Windows ISO from the wrong link can cause trouble. Generally, companies have learned that it’s bad for business to sue their customers, but it’s still worth their while to add on extra fees and charges for breaches of contract as long as they’re not so big that the customer bothers disputing them. To avoid these problems, large companies have compliance departments, and they’ll absolutely discipline employees for doing things like downloading things from the wrong link that wouldn’t matter at all for a home user.
I’m still replying because you keep responding with misconceptions and general nonsense and asserting that it’s factual. That’s enough of a reason on its own when the topic’s something as objective as what the law as written is. It should be obvious from the number of times I’ve said that the law is dumb, draconian and overreaching that I’m in favour of it changing, and that would require more people to know that the law is dumb and makes things illegal that no one would expect to be legal. However, a lot of your last few posts has basically been that if anyone makes any of their property freely available to certain people under certain conditions, in the eyes of the law, it’s okay for anyone else to take it, too, which is obviously bogus in any society with the concept of property. The rest seems to be that somehow, all the lawyers working for the multibillion dollar intellectual property holders that lobbied for world governments to implement current copyright law managed not to notice obvious and easily-exploitable loopholes, and then the lawyers working at those companies today left links up that make the loopholes exploitable, which is a really naive viewpoint. In battles against millions of dollars worth of legal advice, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
Copyright law is written as if magically duplicating the fruit is the same thing as stealing it. In a discussion about what the law is rather than what it should be in a sensible society, the analogy is fine. As Microsoft is the copyright holder, you only have the right to do anything with their files that they have deigned to grant you, and anything else is legally piracy. In the case of this specific link, they’ve granted the public the right to use it for evaluation purposes, but they’ve not granted any other rights, so it is legal to use the link to download the file for evaluation purposes, and illegal to use it for anything else.
If you want a slightly different analogy, it’s a little like how if Disney put on a free screening of the latest Marvel film for disabled children at a cinema, and didn’t check at the door, an able bodied adult could wander in, past signs saying that the screening was for disabled children only, and watch the film for free, but the fact that they could physically gain access doesn’t mean they had any legal right to be there. They could be ejected from the cinema and/or sued for the cost of a ticket and any legal costs. You do not have a legal right to click link on Microsoft’s website next to some text saying that it’s for evaluation purposes only unless you’re clicking it for evaluation purposes only. Just because you’ve made it to the link, it doesn’t mean you can ignore the text saying who is and isn’t allowed to click it.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
It’s freely available for evaluation purposes (from that link - it’s freely available for other purposes from other links, too, and so are other editions of Windows), but that doesn’t mean you’re legally allowed to use those public links however you want. If the copyright holder says they’re for evaluation purposes only, then if you know you aren’t intending to pay even if you like it, then you’re not evaluating whether or not the download link is public, so it still counts as piracy. It’s still stealing to take produce from a roadside stall with an honesty box if you don’t pay even though the produce was just sitting out in the open.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
No, they’re illegal several times over as you’ve got to pirate the thing in the first place to end up in a situation where you need one, and then they’re inherently a DRM circumvention device, which are illegal to possess, and then using them circumvents DRM, which is illegal to do. The upside is that you’re unlikely to be caught.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
Legally, it isn’t. The DMCA (and compatible laws in non-US countries, which those countries have to have or they’re not allowed a trade deal, and not having a trade deal with the US is devastating for an economy) doesn’t require copyright holders to do anything to defend their copyright. It does make it illegal to do (nearly) anything with copyrighted media that you don’t have explicit permission to do from the copyright holder (there are some exceptions, but people generally think they go further than they really do). It also makes it illegal to do (nearly) anything to circumvent DRM, even if you have a legal right to use the thing that the DRM is protecting, no matter how crappy the DRM is and how easily it can be bypassed.
You’re allowed to think that the law is stupid (it’s the DMCA - everyone who looks at it and isn’t a multibillion dollar publishing company thinks it’s stupid), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not the law, and for legal terms like piracy, you can’t just substitute your own definition based on what should be legal if it conflicts with the definition that says what really is legal.
The reason why non-crap DRM exists when there’s no legal reason to make it not crap is the same reason why DRM exists at all when there’s no legal reason to have DRM at all when piracy of DRM-free stuff is already a crime. It’s that publishers think that the more of a hassle it is to pirate things, the more likely people are to buy things legally. Technically, a shareholder could sue a company for using crap DRM that failed to protect their IP, but the company has a decent defence by saying that they felt that intrusive DRM would hurt their reputation with legitimate customers, so not using strong DRM is not grounds to say a company’s been negligent and liable for any losses they make due to piracy.
- Comment on Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021...'has reached end of support' warning (?!) 2 weeks ago:
Circumventing DRM by any means, whether that’s by modifying it so it doesn’t work or just clicking buttons that the DRM provider doesn’t want you to click, is legally considered piracy in most of the world. If you didn’t get the activation code from Microsoft (or someone Microsoft authorised to give it to you), it’s pirated.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 3 weeks ago:
I’m not sure I’d consider this a total upgrade - I have a Steam Controller and an 8bitdo SN30 Pro, and despite the 8bitdo one being newer and having been used much less, I wore through its original thumbstick rubber and had to replace it much sooner than the Steam Controller’s thumbstick cap, which hasn’t even worn through, it was just flaking.
Either that was a fluke, or the 8bitdo rubber isn’t as durable.
- Comment on When to use exhaust/intake fans? 3 weeks ago:
It’s worth bearing in mind that those bar charts on the Nevermore repo are showing the ratio of VOCs rather than the quantity, so make particularly nasty materials like ABS appear comparable to much safer ones like PLA. It’s not going to do you any good if you melt several kilos of PLA in a pan then take the lid off and huff the fumes, but running a single 3D printer with PLA in a large room is going to be pretty safe. The main VOCs emitted by PLA aren’t that harmful - some like acetone and acetaldehyde are produced by the human body and found in food (athough turning alcohol to acetaldehyde is what causes hangovers), methyl methacrylate is used to glue in hip replacements, and isobutanol is often a fermentation byproduct that ends up in alcoholic drinks. That doesn’t mean that PLA fumes are completely harmless, but means that it’s not worth worrying about the level of harm as running a printer in a room with the door open for a whole day is probably somewhere around the level of harm as eating cooked food or having a small beer.
- Comment on When to use exhaust/intake fans? 4 weeks ago:
Exhaust/intake fans generally aren’t too important - materials like PLA that tolerate the air in the printer being replaced have very low emissions of potentially harmful VOCs and particles, and materials like ABS that emit lots of nasty stuff want the chamber air to stay hot, so having a fan replace the hot air with cold air isn’t great.
If you do have nasty stuff in the printer chamber that you want to send out a window, then the exhaust fan is the more important one. Unless your chamber is totally sealed, an intake fan is going to increase the chamber pressure and encourage contaminated air to go out any gaps, whereas an exhaust fan makes the pressure lower inside the chamber, so encourages clean air to come in through the gaps, stopping contamination escaping. Obviously, this is only relevant if you’ve got a vent tube or filter on the extractor, as if it’s just extracting into the room, there’s no difference between it extracting the air and it leaking.
I guess maybe the use case for an intake fan is either if you’ve got a material that wants the coldest air possible, so want to swap the chamber air for outside air as quickly as you can, or if you’ve got the exhaust fan venting into a chamber where you’re filtering the air without letting it cool down much, and the intake draws from that chamber. I don’t think either of these are particularly common situations, though.
I’ve got a non-max SV08, and I just don’t have an extractor or intake fan on my enclosure, and feed the extractor fan wire to my air filter.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 4 weeks ago:
If you’re the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they’d be banned, so you’d never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn’t any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they’re banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 4 weeks ago:
Technically Temu doesn’t import anything. They’re allowed to sell toxic or otherwise dangerous goods because the customer’s the one importing them, and there are plenty of things you’re allowed to import for personal use that you wouldn’t be allowed to import for retail. The EU’s working on closing this loophole, but the UK isn’t in the EU anymore.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 4 weeks ago:
They got lots of consultants in from MindGeek who own Pornhub etc. and several age-verification services. They told the government that the consultants who were raising issues were overreacting, and the government believed them because obviously the world’s largest porn company wouldn’t encourage them to enact a law that would do bad things to the porn industry. They didn’t stop to think that the law as written means there’s now a requirement for smaller compliant porn sites to either spend more than their total revenue implementing an age-verification system or buy in one of the ones MindGeek own.
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 4 weeks ago:
Unless you’re a Ferengi or Ayn Rand, a free market shouldn’t allow agents within the market to manipulate each other, as that inhibits trades being done solely based on what gives the best value for the least currency, making the market less free. The regulation here isn’t taking away a choice you want to have as supermarkets that run BOGOF offers just set the unit price to the cost of two units, so your choice is between paying for two things and getting two things or paying for two things and only getting one. Effectively, your choice to just buy one thing at a fair price is taken away by supermarkets, and it’s dressed up to make it look like you’re getting a bargain when you pay a fair price for two things and get two things.
A parenthood licence is a really common trope in dystopian fiction because it’s fundamentally the most authoritarian thing a state could do short of mind control. If you don’t trust a government to decide whether or not there should be BOGOF offers on crisps, you absolutely shouldn’t trust them to decide who gets to have children. For most of the twentieth century, the British government was actively trying to suppress minority political opinions like it being acceptable for people to be homosexual or anti-pollution. If they’d been deciding what the requirements were to get a parenthood licence, they’d absolutely have made people agree to teach their children that it wasn’t okay to be gay etc…
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 4 weeks ago:
Unless you want to do something dystopian like requiring a parenthood licence before people are allowed to have children and then force them to keep it renewed by attending regular parenthood classes, you can’t force people to receive education on how to be better parents. The state doesn’t have many levers to pull that don’t involve taking people’s children away. Making harmful products less appealing by preventing retailers promoting them is a much better balance of good effect against oppression. The kind of deal being restricted here is something supermarkets do because it manipulates people into buying things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s not like every time you see a BOGOF sale in a shop it’s because they’re overstocked and are trying to clear things before they go past their sell-by date. If that’s not happening, then the only rational reason for supermarkets to have these deals is to manipulate their customers, and it’s not oppressive for a government to prevent multi-billion pound companies from manipulating its citizens.
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 4 weeks ago:
You can have loyalty cards from as many shops as you want, so it’s not inherently anti-competitive. They’re not even particularly meant to encourage loyalty, they’re a way to track what individuals buy over multiple trips and then deliver targeted advertising. The non-loyalty-card prices are high to ensure that customers are incentivised to sign away their data.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 4 weeks ago:
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
- Comment on Which Core XY printer? 5 weeks ago:
I got it from here. I don’t think anyone else makes one for the SV08.
- Comment on Or the common cold! 1 month ago:
The money spent on the Apollo program wasn’t all packed into a suitcase and taken to the moon, it was spent and reinjected into the economy. In particular, some of it went to the wages of some of the most highly-skilled, best-paying jobs that women and black people could get in the fifties and sixties, and that did a lot of good directly, before we even get onto indirect effects like inspiring generations of people to pursue a career in STEM subjects or developing technologies that would be used elsewhere.
- Comment on Which Core XY printer? 1 month ago:
It’s also been on a few really good sales on AliExpress over the past few months, and it’s taken a lot of self-control not to buy myself an entirely unnecessary second SV08 given how impressed I’ve been with mine and the sales taking a third off the cost of the printer.
That said, I have replaced the bed on mine with a graphite one because the stock one’s pretty thin and can warp. Particularly annoyingly, after being hot for about 40 minutes, it’d ping from being warped in one direction to being warped in the other direction, so prints either had to be finished before that or wait until after before they started. It’s not strictly necessary, but it was worth upgrading the bed when there was a price cut to save myself some annoyance and let me fit bed fans so printing ABS was less warp-prone.
- Comment on Intel says Arc GPUs will live on after Nvidia deal 1 month ago:
AMD’s GPUs were much faster than Intel’s, and making GPUs for this kind of application was something AMD already did. Nvidia didn’t, so would have to design a whole chip from scratch, and didn’t really have a power efficiency advantage (in recent generations where AMD’s desktop cards have run hot, it’s because they’ve been clocked high to keep up with Nvidia’s cards, but the same architecture runs cool when clocked lower for mobile applications, e.g. Vega was notoriously inefficient on the desktop due to being delayed two years and having to compete with a different generation than it was designed to, but was great in laptop APUs). Intel would also have gained experience with chiplets and packaging a fast GPU with a CPU. It let everyone involved make more money than doing it any other way.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 month ago:
You not mentioning LLMs doesn’t mean the post you were replying to wasn’t talking about LLM-based AGI. If someone responds to an article about the obvious improbability of LLM-based AGI with a comment about the obviously make-believe genie, the only obviously make-believe genie they could be referring to is the one from the article. If they’re referring to something outside the article, there’s nothing more to suggest it’s non-LLM-based AGI than there is Robin Williams’ character from Aladdin.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 month ago:
AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn’t mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it’s LLMs that investors have bet on. It’s been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren’t getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It’s pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that’s what the article’s discussing.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 2 months ago:
As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 2 months ago:
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that’s left outside will release all it’s carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn’t always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that’s where a significant fraction of all coal came from.