Mikina
@Mikina@programming.dev
- Comment on SOUL PARK (in early access), a themepark "at the gates of hell" management game, releases demo on Steam 8 hours ago:
What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.
It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.
And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue with thousands of downloads. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 2 months ago:
EVE is one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen and I admire it, and CCP in general, from what I’ve seen in their volunteer programs or from streams, seems like a nice workplace.
Also, Island is cool.
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 3 months ago:
How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.
We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.
How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”
I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 3 months ago:
I’d go for scandiavia, if I could choose anywhere. Or Island, working for CCP is my dream job.
- Comment on Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on Pixel phones, and it’s a train wreck 3 months ago:
I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.
I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.
So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.
His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.
So I asked him in english.
I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.
Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.
I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.
Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…
Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.
- Comment on Google makes your Pixel screenshots searchable with Recall-like AI feature 3 months ago:
I suppose that this isn’t something to worry about with GrapheneOS, right?
- Comment on After Musk's pro-Trump/Vance bender, X users report issues following Kamala Harris' accounts 3 months ago:
Isn’t that, like, illegal?
- Comment on I don't get how people can become depressed, when we live in the century of Fentanyl, easy access to alcohol and amusement arcades. 4 months ago:
I guess you are right.
- Comment on I don't get how people can become depressed, when we live in the century of Fentanyl, easy access to alcohol and amusement arcades. 4 months ago:
Its what literally changed my life. I was really socialy awkward, spend most of my lide behind a computer, and when I managed to go out to parties in a subculture scene parties I loved, I couldnt talk to anyone, had a few beers awkwardly in a corner and went home.
Then I met someone who introduced me to MDMA. That happened almost 8 years ago, and now I am an organizer of 2/3 of the same scene regular parties in our city, Im helping and DJing on a festival that happens here, and am living my best life in that regard. All thanks to that one best friend who got me something that made me talk to, and get to actually know people in the scene in the extent that I always wanted, and get comfortable enough that I no longer need to be high to interact with anyone. Since now they are friends and regulars, and not random people I wanted to talk to, but was afraid of approaching.
- Comment on Mozilla roll out first AI features in Firefox Nightly 4 months ago:
Crypto is doing kind-of ok. But what about other blockchain apps and startups, or blockchain integrations into every tech imaginable? There were so many popping up, just like there are with AI now. That is the point.
- Comment on Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined 4 months ago:
I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.
So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?
You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.
- Comment on Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining 6 months ago:
Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.
League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.
- Comment on Reddit Is Taking Over Google 6 months ago:
First thing I did after I got Kagi was to set lower priority for Reddit results. My search experience has been way better ever since.
- Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram 7 months ago:
Max Schrems, the Austrian activist lawyer whose 13-year legal crusade against Meta is what gradually removed those options
I wonder, does anyone know how would one go about acomplishing something like this? One of major websites here in Czech, and a major search engine, has started doing exactly the same thing - pay or agree. And I really don’t like that. Are there organizations you can contact, or do you have to have the resources to just sue them?
- Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram 7 months ago:
What’s really unhinged is the amount of resources invested into gaslighting Meta does. about.fb.com/news/2024/01/investing-in-privacy/
They even have a “Chief Privacy Officer”. They have brainwashed entire departments into believing that Meta actually cares about privacy, it’s so terrifying. I wonder if people working there realize that, or they have simply fell for the gaslighting.
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 8 months ago:
I did switch around a month ago due to a thread similar to this, and I have booted windows like twice since then, and im really glad I made the switch. So, yes, threads like this did help me, while also providing good starting tips.
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 8 months ago:
If you use nvidia, make sure to choose a distro that deals with their drivers by default. I havent manage to get Nvidia drivers and ingame cutscenes to work on Fedora, but after switching to Nobara all is well now. (And switching to KDE on X11, since wayland was freezing occasionally and some apps wouldnt work)
Aside from HDR, I still havent managed to get HDR working and its starting to look like it wont really be possible. And Unity. Unity simply doesnt work both in a VM and on Linux, so I annoyongly still have to dualboot.
Other than that, ive switched around two months ago, and aside from the first pains caused by me choosing Fedora instead of Nobara, everything mostly works without issues.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
I’d recommend Tyranny. Its a CRPG, where you play as an envoy of basically villains that are sweeping through the world, conquering almost everything. Most of the choices are pretty difficult, because from what I remember its usually “bad or different bad”, without it being clear what’s going to be worse. Because you’re an envoy for a dictator with the power to literally wipe an entire continent with a single sentence, you can’t just go " fuck this, I’m gonna ignore the orders and do good", and balancing the long term and short term consequences makes every decision pretty difficult.
- Comment on When people say that apps are stealing your data, what exactly does that mean? 10 months ago:
Exactly! AdNauseam is my inspiration, unfortunately I dont use it right now because it doesnt work with my setup, due to Mullavad in combination with PiHole being too good at their job, so it cant really click on the adds even if it wanted to.
It would ideally require a solution that uses its own DNS server, so you can keep on using PiHole, and prefferably avoids living in your browser so you can keep it locked down for privacy.
- Comment on When people say that apps are stealing your data, what exactly does that mean? 10 months ago:
One of the projects I have in mind is to explore some kind of “offensive privacy”, where the focus would not be on not being trackable, but on your computer spewing random bullshit and behavior into the algorithm to confuse it, and have it learning on behavior that’s not really true, but only generated. This will enable you to kind of fight back and if done by enough users even reduce the effectivness of ML algorithms, since they would be learning bullshit. Unfortunately, the scale required to effectively affect the learning process of ML models would be enormous, so it’s not really feasible, but I think it’s still better than just “staying hidden”.
With the advances in AI, creating a tool like that, that would simulate several random user behaviors on your IP/fingerprint, shouldn’t really be that hard.
And as an added bonus - if it clicks on adverts, it’s costing someone money. Fuck corporations.
- Comment on When people say that apps are stealing your data, what exactly does that mean? 10 months ago:
The biggest problem i have with my data being collected, analyzed and used is in the fact that it will almost certainly be used to teach a ML model about how to better manipulate with people like me - the people that are privacy conscious and are trying as much as possible to reduce their fingerprint.
That data is invaluable, and if there does exist a way how to target even people like that, which there probably does since we’re only humans after all, the ML model will eventually figure it out. And they have literally billions of people to experiment and learn on.
Now, we already know from a few leaked studies made by Facebook that they cab already pretty well manipulate people into mostly whatever they choose. Take a hypothetical situation where you get a crazy out-of-touch billionaire, who decides to buy a large social network company, and then decides “Hey, I really want this candidate to win. Tune up the algorithms!”.
And the ML models will get a clear goal, that has been already proven to just work pretty well at influencing user behavior. And any data you give them, it helps the model to fine tune into influencing people like you . Which would also be really hard to prove, because ML models are by definition black boxes that are really hard to reverse engineer, and proving that it was trained to do this is AFAIK almost impossible.
I don’t want no part in that. Thankfully, all the large social networks have CEOs that are reasonable and would never try something like that, right?
And one more thing - you may not think that data about your behavior are of interest to anyone right now. But look at China and their Social Credit. And imagine how would have I.e holocaust turned out, if the government had access to all the data, opinions and profiles of people that are being collected now.
Oh, you mentioned you sympathize with the Jews three years ago in a private message? Well, let’s hope the country you live in never ends up in a situation where that could be a huge problem for you or your family.
So, every time any site is offering a “personalized, curated list” for you (I.e the google search result, or YouTube recommended videos), assume you are potentionally being manipulated, and avoid the site altogether- because there’s no other way how to prevent it. The ML model knows that you know, and is already trying to figure out how to manipulate people that are taking care not to be. And if there is a way, it will figure it out with some success.
- Comment on Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end? 10 months ago:
Yes, because you don’t want to provide them your content for free, so they can continue building engagement on your behalf.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 10 months ago:
I’ve recently switched to Kagi and it has been an amazing experience so far. I definitely recommend that to anyone who can spare the 5-10$ a month. I like their business model, and the way I can customise results to I.e always ignore reddit posts, while still maintaining privacy because they are not in the ads business (yet?).
And the results are usually pretty on spot, while also avoiding the major ai/spam blog posts by default.
- Comment on Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO 10 months ago:
I guess it may be a combination. I use Mullvad VPN + Mullvad browser. Maybe they only show it if the can’t fingerprint you enough? I.e by a combination of IP, and your browser + extensions + tracking cookies fingerprint?
- Comment on Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO 10 months ago:
Yup, it’s a VPN. If I turn it off, it works properly even in the same browser (Mullvad). But I refuse to cave in, so if they every start checking for VPNs even in the old Reddit, or disable it altogehter (which I’m sure will be soon, since you can also use it to bypass “Log in to see NSFW content”), I’m out for good, and will finally block Reddit at my Kagi.
- Comment on Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO 10 months ago:
And every time a Reddit results show up, I’m immediately reminded why I don’t want to go there by an error telling me that I can’t use the site without logging in.
Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn’t find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.
- Comment on Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow 10 months ago:
Thank you for this, I’ve never heard about this show, watched the first pilot, and am hooked. It looks amazing!
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
The whole article felt like bullshit, and if I went to college and had to sit through listening to something like that - just random doomsaying without any proof, that doesn’t even makes sense (“we won’t need real CS engineers, but we will need prompt engineers to somehow convince the model and discover the correct prompt, since we don’t know why it’s replying as it is” - oor, maybe you can just leave out the AI step and have a real person do it.), and it’s lacking any sensible point.
Oh, right. I get it now. So that’s the point.
It happens partly through the use of platforms like Fixie, his company’s platform for easily creating AI-based applications
I would be so mad if something like this happened on my college.
- Comment on Linux has higher share than MacOS among software developers 11 months ago:
Oh, you are right, now I got your point. Sorry for that, I honestly didn’t realize that I was making such a hyperbole.
I definitely plan to switch to Godot once I’m finally done with the school-project turned indie, that we’re struggling with for the past 5 years and it’s mostly holding on sunken cost fallacy. Unfortunately, since at work we mostly work on ports for other studios, I doubt I’ll ever get to work on Godot there. But maybe at least the Unreal experience is better on Linux, never really checked that out.
- Comment on Linux has higher share than MacOS among software developers 11 months ago:
From my experience, just getting Unity to run on Linux has a plethora of issues. When I tried running our project we’ve been developing on Windows for the past few years, I couldn’t even compile it. Apparently, Unity on Linux doesn’t support some kind of media file formats we use for cutscenes. While I was trying to resolve it, Unity crashed few times.
And then there’s the hug problem with “works on my machines”. We’re targeting Windows, Windows is still major market share for gaming, and me being the lead programmer, I can’t afford not being able to build and test a build on the OS we’re targeting.
Even if the differences between build targets are minor, there’s still a posibility that something will just work differently on Linux than in does on Windows. And then you have the whole DirectX issue - IIRC, you can’t use DirectX on Linux, so we would have to develop the game for Vulkan or something else, which adds another problems to deal with for other programmers in our team, who don’t use Linux.
And then you have consoles. Do the SDKs for Sony, Switch or XDK even support running on Linux?
