Maven
@Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Volt Recharge - Official Announcement Trailer 4 months ago:
This is from a couple months back. Still excited, though.
- Comment on Proton Mail provided user data that led to an arrest in Spain 6 months ago:
He got got because the user used an Apple ID that was linekd to their real identity, which is one of the things Proton is obligated to provide in cases like this.
Proton says all the time, they are obligated to comply with the letter of the law, so do not store anything identifiable anywhere they’re legally required to provide it. They tell you exactly what not to do, to avoid this precise case.
- Comment on What's stopping you from using Ecosia? Your searches could plant trees! 6 months ago:
Because they need me to generate ad revenue to fund those trees, and I’d rather not be advertised to.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip 6 months ago:
No, I understood that, I did read the article. I’m lambasting the fact that in an article about “brain chip gone wrong”, burying the “but human seems to be unharmed” at the end of an article is indicative of a set of priorities wildly different from my own.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip 6 months ago:
The point is that this is the opening paragraph about something going wrong in human brain surgery, and the first thing they tell us is “don’t worry, the data’s fine”, rather than anything about the human.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch Is Removing Integration for X, Formerly Twitter 6 months ago:
“Better” is such a strong word. It’s a kludge where you have to connect your phone and switch to a virtual wifi and then you can send up to ten photos at a snail’s pace. I kept using twitter because it’s such an annoying process.
- Comment on Why do passports need to be signed to be valid? 6 months ago:
I personally have a signature stamp. I imagine that would work for anyone who has literally any range of motion, down to “can hold a stamp in their teeth and tilt their head a few degrees to press it against a document”.
For people who don’t have even that, I think a notary is allowed to sign on your behalf, if they can be provided documentation of your disability, but that will vary by country of course.
- Comment on Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears 8 months ago:
Before I quit, it was a pretty open secret that r/worldnews was a shithole, and the place to get news was r/anime_titties
I don’t know if they’ve gone under too by now, though
- Comment on To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ? 8 months ago:
Some of the smartest people I know are some of the dumbest people I know.
A historian who falls in with one MLM after another. A senior engineer who doesn’t trust doctors because homopathy is the only real medicine. A dentist who thinks the moon landing was fake. A doctor who warns people off “seed oils” and onto a “paleolithic, mostly-meat diet”.
Ime, people can get “too smart” for their own good, and start to believe they’re qualified to speak even outside their own specialties. The smartest thing you can do is recognize where you’re qualified, and where you’re an idiot, and in the places you’re an idiot, stay quiet and listen.
- Comment on Google Pulls the Plug: The End of Third-Party Cookies and What it Means | TWiT.TV 9 months ago:
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content, although personally in many cases I prefer to pay a subscription to support content rather than being subjected to ads.
On the other hand, not everyone can afford a subscription, so offering a both ad-supported and paid-for options is ideal, imo. Well, at least as ideal as it gets in a “grind your hustle or you’ll starve” economy.
- Comment on Oopsi Woopsi 9 months ago:
There are people in PR thread explaining it’s a reference to this screenshot. Which is fake, for the record.
- Comment on Tesla recalling another 2.2 million vehicles for warning lights that are too small. 9 months ago:
What is this, the fourth “recall” in the last year that’s literally just an automatic OTA update?
- Comment on Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click 9 months ago:
I’ve been with all three major Canadian ISPs and it’s the same everywhere. Like clockwork, once a year you call them. You could say “I’m looking to cancel” but at this point they all know why you’re calling, don’t waste anyone’s time, just ask “hey could you please transfer me to Retention” and they’ll be glad not to have go through the song and dance. Retention picks up, immediately offers you a deal, you reject it, they offer you a better deal, job done. Literally the only relatively easy thing they let you do at this point.
- Comment on Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click 9 months ago:
Dunno, sounds hard… what if we just don’t let em cancel?
- Comment on Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click 9 months ago:
The article says, people might accidentally cancel their whole package when they only mean to cancel a single item, or they might cancel a single item and not realize it loses them a bundle discount.
- Comment on Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click 9 months ago:
The point is that it’s extremely common practice to call your ISP and tell them you’re cancelling so they’ll send you to Retentions and you can get a few more months at “50% off” (a reasonable price). This would be included in those “3/4 people stay”, but those were never actually going to cancel anyway, they only say they are so they don’t have to pay the insanely inflated sticker price.
- Comment on Why is Google allowed to remove purchases from our Play Store accounts without telling us? 10 months ago:
I don’t know about you guys, but I share my digital games all the time. Steam and Switch have pretty decent share setups.
- Comment on If Trump and Biden both died today, what would happen? 10 months ago:
If Trump and Biden died today, the FBI would see this thread and you’d have some difficult questions to answer.
- Comment on ChatGPT bombs test on diagnosing kids’ medical cases with 83% error rate | It was bad at recognizing relationships and needs selective training, researchers say. 10 months ago:
the internet is full of ai generated text now, which is poison to training models. But it’s good at pretending.
This misconception shows up again and again. It’s wishful thinking from people who want to think AI researchers are idiots and AIs are going to kill themselves.
These models aren’t trained on “the internet”. They don’t just thoughtlessly rip everything that’s ever been posted every time they want to make an updated bot. The vast bulk of training data was scraped years ago, predating the current tide of generative muck, and additions are carefully curated to avoid the exact thing you’re talking about. A scrape of the 2018 internet is plenty, and will remain so for years and years.
- Comment on Tom Morello - A Metalhead's Guide to 'Star Trek' 10 months ago:
Project harder
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 10 months ago:
Alt Gr is something else. Non-english keyboards use it all day every day for typing their charactersets.
It could probably replace the right OS key, though.
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 10 months ago:
I pressed it like, 20 minutes ago? It’s a pretty normal part of a lot of coding workflow, not to mention browsing, accessing context menu keyboard shortcuts without having to move your hand to the mouse for one buttonpress.
- Comment on Japanese disaster prevention X account can’t post anymore after hitting API limit - The issue has arisen after major Tsunami warnings have been issued in areas of Japan following a strong earthquake 10 months ago:
Oh, I didn’t realize. I am in Canada, I turned them off a few months ago after my third amber alert this year for someone at the far end of the province (how likely am I to be able to help someone a 30 hour drive away???) and haven’t gotten one since, but it must just be coincidence. That’s annoying.
- Comment on Japanese disaster prevention X account can’t post anymore after hitting API limit - The issue has arisen after major Tsunami warnings have been issued in areas of Japan following a strong earthquake 10 months ago:
Again, they are IMPOSSIBLE to turn off through general device settings
I don’t know about your phone, but at least in mine, they can in fact be turned off in general device settings. There’s a “Wireless emergency alerts” section in the options, under which you can individually toggle Extreme Alerts, Severe Alerts, Amber Alerts, and Tests
- Comment on Downfall (Steam Standalone) was Breached. Please read. 10 months ago:
This is a free fan extension to Slay the Spire. You can’t buy it, and buying the base game won’t support these devs.
- Comment on [Steam] Which lesser known games have you bought or are planning to buy in this sale? 10 months ago:
For less than $5 CAD, I picked up Maiden & Spell, an excessively cute sidescrolling shooter a la R-Type, except it’s a levelless boss rush with Story and Versus modes. It’s got a very Touhou aesthetic (i.e. rather than spaceships or dragons or something, everyone is cute girls).
Story mode is basically a Touhou boss rush, where your character fights 4 monster girls and 2 out of the other 3 human girls, with no level in-between, it’s just bosses. There’s a threadbare but acceptable story linking them, with each playable character giving a different perspective on the same story, and then there being an epilogue chapter and a bonus extra boss. Story mode has 4 difficulties, the easiest of which is called Cute Mode and is basically unloseable, so even if you’ve never played a game like this, you can give it a go.
Versus mode is basically a 1v1 fighting game. You and one friend each pick one of the 8 girls and do bullet hells at each other until you see who wins. It’s not complex, but it is kind of tactically deep.
The same author is currently working on a sequel, Rabbit & Steel, a very similar game except rather than a versus battler, it’s a coop roguelike inspired by MMO raid mechanics. A sneak-peek demo with online multiplayer is available, and it’s really fun!
- Comment on China announced new laws to limit microtransactions, affecting major corporations like Tencent. 10 months ago:
A clock whizzing backwards at 60 RPM is right 86,400 times a day!
- Comment on Spotify doesn't make profit from music streaming, despite having over 400M monthly active users, because it pays two-thirds of all its revenue to the rights holders. 11 months ago:
Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?
For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.
Let’s go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it’s barely a difference.
Let’s say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won’t pay that, but let’s just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would’ve made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that’s literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.
Spotify can’t solve the problem.
The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.
Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop’d be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They’re a fucking joke.
The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.
- Comment on This was inevitable. 11 months ago:
Twix aren’t conjoined… Are you thinking of kitkats?
- Comment on 3rd december, got a vintage comunicator with neat prints in my advent callender today 11 months ago:
This is adorable
I’ve only known tiny vintage communicator for 5 minutes, but if anything happened to him, I’d torpedo the planet