wizardbeard

@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers Trained an AI on Flawed Code and It Became a Psychopath⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I used to have that up at my desk when I did tech support.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Terms of Service (ToS) are regularly not upheld in court, and their terms are worded so poorly that as written, it would not be a difficult case to defeat.

The Firefox specific terms for the precompiled binary link to a more general terms page meant to be additional parts, but the additional parts they link to specify that the additional terms only apply to use of Mozilla “services” (sync, vpn, etc). The concerning shit on the ToS lies in the terms for their services.

It’s a clear contradiction of scope, and unfortunately not Firefox’s first fuckup of this kind. So far, with a multi decade history, none of these contradictions have been used to fuck over their users.

They already have separate terms for use of the source code. Those are what making forks, and what compiling the source yourself, fall under. They do not make any reference to the services ToS. Use of the source is not effected by any of this so far, on a technical (can the bad shit be removed) and on a legal (are forkers allowed to remove) level.

Hacker News has some deeper discussion about the finer points of the ToS mess.

And apparently Mozilla has clarified that the wording changes in their summary (not the actual ToS) are because California’s definition of “sale” of information includes just communicaring it to a third party as part of normal operations support. Thanks again to Hacker News discussion of Mozilla’s latest statement.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
And again. 100% open source. There is no way for any functionality (including functionalitt that does that) to exist somewhere that people making forks can’t modify/remove it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
So… entirely vibes based take. Maybe take some time to step away and come back later.

Spamming a doomerism opinion, when not backed up by anything but feelings, helps nobody. It’s an overactive immune response. The fever worse than the illness your body is trying to burn out using it.

I get that it feels like the world is going to shit, and especially when things you thought were trustworthy start doing this, it’s a blow. But this shit (repeated as fucking much as you have repeared it) makes the community, and people who need a non-corporate controlled browser, weaker and more vulnerable.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas Needs Equivalent of 30 Reactors to Meet Data Center Power Demand⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
What? I’ve grown up around people in the nuclear industry, and nothing I’ve ever learned about the function “wastes” water.

Some rambling on how I understand water to be used by reactors
You’ve got some amount of water in the “dirty loop” exposed to the fissile material, and in the spent fuel storage tanks. Contaminated water is stuck for that use, but that isn’t “spending” the water. The water stays contained in those systems. They don’t magically delete water volume and need to be refilled. Outside of that you have your clean loop, which is bog standard “use heat to make steam, steam move turbine, moving turbine make electiricity, steam cools back to water”. Again, there’s no part of that which somehow makes the water not exist, or not be usable for other purposes.

Not saying you’re wrong. Renewables are absolutely preferable, and Texas is prime real estate to maximize their effectiveness. I’m just hung up on the “waste water building reactors” part.

Guessing it was some sort of research about the building process maybe, that I’ve just missed?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
What? Some proof here please. Firefox is 100% open source. You can audit the entire code for this.

It’s not like chromium with the pre-compiled binary blob in the middle provided by google.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

I doubt implementation of terms will be optional.

You are all up and down these comments repeating this statement.

Why?

How exactly has Mozilla handled changes like this before that leads you to this conclusion? Do you have anything to back this up other than your own dogged insistence?

Surely there must be something I’m missing for you to be so adamant on this point. Please enlighten me, because to my knowledge about how all this works and has worked in the past this just seems like baseless fearmongering to me.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Why wouldn’t they be optional? Every other change like this has been before.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yes, they allow full avoidance of any potential data collection through the browser, if they remove the collection features.

Mozilla would need to change their licensing terms to prevent forks from being able to remove things like that, and forks could just use the last version of the code before the license change and just backport new features.

Also Firefox is fully open source, unlike chromium which relies on a closed source binary blob in the middle. Some chromium forks have replaced the binary blob with open source code, but the default is for chromium forks to have a nice chunk in them controlled by google that no one can deeply inveatigate what it does. Firefox does not have this issue.

Mozilla can’t hide any potential data collection in Firefox due to the full open source nature (unlike chrome forks). They also can’t stop fork devs from stripping out any data collection functions. And as of today, they have not introduced any data collection that is not supremely anonymized, and they have not introduced any data collection that cannot be opted out of through the browser settings (and about:config).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Under the end of the readme, the section labelled releases.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Hi, I’m ~~Nicole~~ wizardbeard! I’m a ~~proud~~ aromatic ~~Polish~~ Abyssal ~~girl~~ tube sock with googly eyes from ~~Toronto~~ the space between your walls (~~29 y/o~~ 50 ft)

I’m currently taking the ~~pre-health sciences program at George Brown College~~ socks from your dryer hoping to ~~get into the medical field~~ find a broodmother for the spawn that will form the ranks of my holy army someday!

You can’t add me on Friendica. *It’s far too late for that. Far far too late to do anything to stop this.

Your socks may be returned to you but they may never be the same.*
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IFTAS is In a Funding Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
To summarize my comment on your post of this article on lemmy.ml:

Literally who?

How in the absolute fuck does any group not involved in hosting the largest fediverse instances even begin to justify looking for $1.3 Million in funding?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
- Some fucking line breaks would considerably help your point be easier to read. Right now it comes across as a crazy screed.
- You’re complaining to a void that doesn’t want to hear you or care, and this is definitively not the right community to post this in. There are various rant, off my chest, and unpopular opinion communities. This is a stretch for a community meant for meta discussion about your specific instance.
- Lemmy was never meant to be free speech specifically, or accepting of all opinions. Just more open than Reddit, and with the ability for people to host their own spaces if their opinions were being suppressed by other instances. There was no goal for every instance to be open to every point of view. Lemmy’s lead dev, Dessalines, is a transphobic “hard tankie” marxist leninist, who runs the Marxist Leninist instance lemmy.ml.
- You will find this kind of “suppression”/“bullying”/“negative responses to out-group ideas and thinking” everywhere online. Especially in spaces set up like Lemmy/Reddit/HackerNews etc with voting effecting content visibility. It is inherent to the design. Even on sites without this format, like 4chan, you still see this sort of behavior. Best get used to it.
- Also, from personal experience, just block communities and users that are assholes. The Fediverse has a low enough count of daily active users that blocking actually makes a difference in the content and viewpoints you encounter.
- Lastly, there are right wing lemmy instances. They tend to be filled with actual nazis and pedophiles, which is why no instances will federate with them.
Spoiler: I agree that calling Jan 6 an attempted coup is a stretch. The most heavily armed group in the US tried to overthrow the government and there was minimal firearm based violence?

That said, none of the chucklefucks that broke into buildings deserve any sort of pardon. They broke the law fair and simple. Feelings of righteousness don’t change that. Only coordinated legal and political effort does.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not unreasonable to ask for a NSFW tag so I don’t casually scroll into an image with the business end of a pocket pussy on my feed.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Feel vindicated about loops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

My morality and logic is just different.

Holy shit you cannot be real. I just choked on my water.

Man you are like the postershild of that meme about playing chess with a pigeon. Knock over the board, shit on everything, and strut away with every fiber of your being reinforcing the idea that you “won”.

You’re more than welcome to find retroactive justification for your actions, or to shore up in your head the concept that the end result justifies your means. But that doesn’t mean “I’m just built different I guess, teehee!” like some sort of badge of honor.

From life experience, and from knowing a number of people like you over my years: If you continue with this sort of attittude towards life, and general pattern of behavior, it will come back to bite you hard someday. When it does you will likely not find many people sympathethic to you or willing to help you, due to your own behavior.

I’m fairly certain that you aren’t the type of person capable of reflecting on your behavior or the responses to it in the last thread or this one and learning to ba a better person from it, but in the rare chance:

Your own descriptions of your own actions meant to portray you as being in the right instead portray you as an impatient asshole with the emotional and psychological maturity level of a 12 year old, who also has an absurdly inflated idea of the value of themself and their actions.

There is not much worse in this world than self righteous fuckstains taking actions that were never asked for or wanted, with the motivation that they are only doing what is best for other people who never asked for their help.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Would it be too much to ask for a NSFW tag on this? Thanks.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Retro games worth picking up on Android?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Best to play the games through emulators or open source sourceports rather than paid store releases. As another comment mentions, you never know when the company that made the port will stop updating it for new OS versions.

ScummVM works well for playing old point and click adventure games on Android phones. More screen real estate on a tablet couldn’t hurt. Supports over 250 games. I’ve gotten tons of playtime out of it.

I regularly play turn based RPGs on my phone through Retroarch (and more recently Lemuroid which is the same core but minorly better UI).

I also use a handful of emulators and source ports with a controller mount to play more action-y games off my phone, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for with playing on a tablet.

For tablets, stuff I’m aware of but haven’t used myself: There’s android ports of OpenXcom, OpenTTD (I think), and Theme Hospital.

There’s also a pretty long list of source ports here, with the OS’s they support listed.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A post for all the comments we don't see⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Meanwhile I’m here laughing in Jerboa. No fancy auto refresh for me.

I’m probably overdue for checking out other lemmy apps.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seeking members to get Retro Torrents ready to launch!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I just feel the need to point out that there are complete nointro and redump sets on archive.org distributed in nested zip files (any modern emulator supports unzipping by one level). You can browse through the files and download them individually if you have a (free) login to archive.org. They also have torrents. I would imagine that those are what most of the “advanced” users would use instead of direct download sites like vimm’s lair etc. It might be a good idea to address that in the rentry page, because as far as I understood things, direct download sites have been dogwater for ages. I’ve been using archive.org for over a decade for ROMs, so listing benefits compared to that would be good.

Another great resource, for emulation software, is 4chan’s Emulation General Thread’s wiki.

That said, I’m still going to support this project if I can.

Archive.org’s continued existence seems to be in minor jeapordy lately. Their torrent functionality is also not 100% reliable, with some torrent contents not consistently matching the direct download content (a few individual roms being corrupt through the torrent). Plus I have never been able to get the direct download backup seed thing to actually work.

It would be good and useful to have a group of seedboxes seeding the latest fullsets, and a group of people to ensure the magnet links get distributed far and wide.

On top of that, there’s a pretty big gap right now for retro PC game archival, as well as romhacks/patches and PC game compatibility patches.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I would do this for just 1.99⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Beyond the other answers stating that this isn’t real:

Teams doesn’t do one off charges for functionality like this. All functionality is managed by licensing, managed through your workplace’s Azure tenant. Don’t have the license, don’t have the feature. Need the feature? Time to work with Microsoft billing to get you a new license (or additional one) and then your IT team to have the license applied to your account.

There aren’t usually any upsells displayed to end users. In our environment we’ve only seen a rare “this functionality is not available on your license, go complain to your admin” type message, but usually it just doesn’t display unavailable options.

On top of all that, Microsoft is dumb, but not this dumb. Last thing their team of lawyers would want is for them to be involved in some sort of “involuntary pornography” case or something.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yeah, let's stop with this "don't judge people for their poiltics" bullshit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Careful citizen, it seems you’ve had a little too much to think.

More seriously, I wish you all the luck in the world with convincing people that their personal two minutes hate isn’t a good thing.

Doesn’t help that there’s a lot of people down so low that idealogical elitism and self righteousness is nearly all they have going for them. It’s a legitimate issue that there are a bunch of people who are so depressed about the state of the world that they end up defining themselves by the fact that they aren’t part of the “bad group”, so any humanization of that group robs them of something vital to them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft doesn't want you to bypass Windows 11 requirements on Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
So Microsoft doesn’t want to be responsible for any potential instability from running their new OS on unsupported old hardware. They don’t want to test functionality for a setup that is missing something they’ve listed as a requirement for Windows 11 for many years now.

Are we going to complain about them not releasing new games on the Xbox 360 anymore now?

If anyone was relying on that workaround to run Windows 11, when it has been clear from the beginning that it was an unsupported workaround, they have no one to blame but themselves.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's Never too Late⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I’m not going to try and justify the people who think it’s ok to be bigoted towards white males. It’s not ok. I’m also not going to pull the “those people don’t exist” bullshit, because it’s bullshit.

But no one of that particular flavor of asshat is here in this post or comment thread. So get out of your own head and get over yourself. For your own sake.

Complaining about misandrists and/or people racist against white people is not acceptable behavior publicly. At best it makes you look socially incompetent, and at worst it makes you look like someone who wouldn’t mind being lumped in with nazis.

On top of that, the amount of people publicly anti-“every white male ever” is pretty damn low lately. Low enough that you can generally get through life as if they don’t exist.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen any news orgs worth mentioning run anything along the lines of “Young white men need to be taught not to rape”.

If you can’t escape it, change the spaces you’re spending time online, and the people you are spending time around in real life. I haven’t heard that sort of shit to any significant amount for a very long time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Anything supposedly said by “Anonymous” as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.

There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate “outlets” for their statements… but there’s also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit “anon news outlets” and little script kiddies running around. It’s important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more “serious” factions.

Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you’re in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.

All that said, there’s convincing and considerable evidence (collected by Krebs) that members of Elon’s DOGE group have background in the actual hacking ops spaces.

No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there’s the fact that more than one of them have “serious black hat hacker” backgrounds.

Going to be one wild ride.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good morning, I choose a healthy breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Holy shit, I thought Unicyclopedia had died ages ago.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It’s a complete game. It’s in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don’t release major updates without multiple ones being added.

Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I’m sure there was more, but those were the standout things.

The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that’s only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn’t find through internal testing. Once it’s balanced and stable (maybe a year), they’ll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).

Then they’ll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.

Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn’t have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.

But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Everyone keeps labelling GabeN as the only one holding VALVe to standards, but by his own admission he’s more of the equivalent of a board member now, not deeply involved in the day to day anymore. I think the only ones that truly know his level of involvement would be people at VALVe.

What I’m getting at is that I have the same concerns about what will happen after he passes, but I don’t think he’s the only person standing in the way of VALVe going full corporate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The examples I’ve seen are a year+ with no updates. Not definitive, but I highly doubt they’re doing this for the cases you’re talking about.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It has been well iver 24 hours since this shit atarted. No reply from admkns anywhere⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I think this is an extreme reaction to (as far as I’m aware) the first instance of a serious issue with the sdf lemmy instance.

Another poster has brought up that the admins are possibly busy with taking over another pubnix system at the moment. That’s quite a big project.

Lemmy is still a niche thing, run by a small group of volunteers. It is not anywhere close to reddit or other sites in terms of resiliency against admin life events. As far as I’m aware, Lemmy is not a primary thing for the sdf group, but instead just one of many projects amd servers they run. As a sysadmin, these things tend to be cattle more than pets.

Also, I hate to say it, but a single user posting hateful shit is not a true emergency. Even if it has been 48 hours. From a purely sysadmin perspective, it would need to be heinously illegal content being posted or an actual infrastructure failure to reach emergency level in my eyes at least.

Unless I’m missing something, the sysadmins have been reached out to through their admin accounts on this lemmy instance, and the membership@ email address. There has also (according to this thread) been one single person who posted in the IRC asking for an emergency method to contact the admins, and that only happened after this thread was posted.

Has anyone tried contact through the instance mastodon account? Looks like there was activity there a few hours ago.

Has anyone checked the whois records for the webmaster email listed and tried that?

All of that said, this does highlight a major issue on this instance that needs resolution: there needs to be enough active lemmy instance admins that an issue like this cannot sit with no acknowledgement for anywhere even close to 48 hours, and it should probably be someone separate from the sysadmin(s) since they seem to have a schedule busy with other things.

There also needs to be a clear list of contacts, contact methods, and escalation chain procedures.

Until then, 48 hours is not some absurd amount of time with no response for a place as small as the sdf lemmy instance. Hell, at least in the east coast US right now there is a nasty nasty Flu variant going around that is laying some people out for well over a week. I’ve heard of some people still having symptoms 3 weeks in.

I’m not trying to say that the asshole isn’t a problem, just that in the context I think that calling for defederation after 48 hours with no ack is silly.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Makes your jaw drop in amazement⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Looks to me like a downspout that carries the “water” under the concrete and probably lets out somewhere else.