chameleon

@chameleon@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  SO already was. Not even harvested as much as handed to them. Periodic data dumps and a general forced commitment to open information were a big part of the reason they won out over other sites that used to compete with them. SO most likely wouldn't have existed if Experts Exchange didn't paywall their entire site.

  As with everything else, AI companies believe their training data operates under fair use, so they will discard the CC-SA-4.0 license requirements regardless of whether this deal exists. (And if a court ever finds it's not fair use, they are so many layers of fucked that this situation won't even register.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why! | itsfoss.com⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don't think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn't matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.

  Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server's view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon's UI.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spy.pet is harvesting your Discord history with no ability to opt-out⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they'll give it a genuine shot. These stalking services pop up like weeds and every time it gets some media attention they end up with significant problems not much later. dis.cool was the last well-known entry but there's been more.

• Forgejo forks its own path forwardforgejo.org ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨4⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 24H2 to enforce hardware requirement - gHacks Tech News⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is also going to affect Linux distros, many are moving to x86-64-v2 or even v3. That comes with the same requirements this Win11 build is going to enforce.

  There's plenty of life left in some of the later hardware not on the official Win11 support list, but hardware old enough to be excluded by this build is really overdue for retirement and/or being considered retrocomputing.

• ⁨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:

  Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing's cached.

  Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify's scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn't the cheapest around to begin with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tool to manage CLI tools⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can hardcode a specific version of nixpkgs, instead of a branch. With the new Nix CLI & flakes enabled you can do something like this:

  nix run "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/b4372c4924d9182034066c823df76d6eaf1f4ec4#cowsay" "moo mooooooo"
  

  That's the commit I'm seeing for nixos-23.11 today, and it should still give you that exact version of cowsay years from now.

  Of course, the better option is to make a dev shell with flakes. Flakes come with a lockfile builtin that accomplishes the same effect, and there's no problems having different projects on different lockfiles/versions. It's a bit more work to learn, the Zero to Nix tutorials are pretty decent at teaching and come with examples though (ultimately most things are ~30 lines of boilerplate and a list of packages that you want).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A box of DevOps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Senior YAML programmer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This indie dev (Indie RPG Inkbound) is removing all microtransactions after noting that "player sentiment is trending against" them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The badness this game had at launch really can't be overstated, though. At launch, this was a paid early access always online mostly-singleplayer-with-coop game with a premium currency shop and a battle pass. And it was one of those games where the shop was the most fleshed out part.

  They've added offline mode and are now reworking the microtransactions to Steam DLC, but I'm still very skeptical of them. That launch was so blatantly over the top bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The number of people accepting email for some magic thing without in-between mechanisms is ridiculous. If it's sent in an email you should 100% consider it to be stored in plaintext in multiple places. There is incredible amount of machinery between your mail() call and the end user reading that email, on both the sending and receiving end. For example, my spam filter (rspamd) will likely store a copy of it for a while, and that's not unique to it.

  What's in the database is not really relevant. Only the worst instance of storage counts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UPDATE YOUR BROWSERS IMMEDIATELY. RCE VULNERABILITY DISCOVERED⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The current advisory is in webm (VP8 specifically). The webp one was 2 weeks ago.

  ...yeah, not a good time for web browsers lately...

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your website can now opt out of training Google's Bard and future AIs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  AGI (artificial general intelligence) is the current term for "The Concept Formerly Known As AI". Not really a new term, but it's only recently that companies decided that any algorithm can qualify as regular "AI" if they consider it good enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It was made as result of an EU settlement that only lasted about 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

  I have absolutely no idea why they figured 5 years would be good enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Humble Bundle expressing their feelings about Unity⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You haven't been able to give them nothing for over 2 years now. For this particular bundle, the minimum split for Humble is 30% and the default split is an insane 45% to Humble, 50% to the company and 5% to charity.

  Humble is unfortunately still coursing by on their old reputation of being charity-friendly, but they changed to be one of the worst players around years ago. That goodwill from back then has really been depleted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah on second thought it's maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it's one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn't care if it leaves behind some wounds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.

  And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You don't hate JIRA, you hate your manager - Derek Jarvis' Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I most definitively hate Jira (and also my manager). Jira is the only software I've had to use where 10+ second page load times are a regular everyday occurrence. On their cloud hosting, so it's not like we could do anything to fix it other than filing tickets... which we were told to simultaneously keep doing so they can track it but also stop doing because it's working as intended and we were wasting their time and abusing support.

  JQL is absolute garbage, and it doesn't even take hindsight; they took SQL but in an attempt to simplify it, they broke everything about it. Whether any particular functionality is a field or a function to run on some other field is a mystery. And if you're using Jira Service Management, it gets infinitely worse; everything is bolted on in a terrible way.

  Every interaction between their "Kanban board" and "ticket" system is confusing. They pull from the same database, except not quite, except they do. It's a representation of data, but not the same representation the data is in. If you have any kind of custom workflow setup at all - which the blog both criticizes as bad and uses as a reason to explain why Jira is the only good option (????) - it will simply never do the right thing unless they map 1 to 1.

  There are all kinds of perpetually missing features. Multiple assignees are a big one, there is simply no correct way to represent "John and Bob will spend some time together brainstorming about a new architecture" or simple things like pair programming, despite that being a fairly significant task that should somehow be accounted for in planning. You can half-ass it with custom fields or sub-tasks, but then the entire ecosystem of tooling built on the assignee field crumbles.

  Likewise, you can't assign issues to a "virtual" position of any kind, all you can do is leave them unassigned or make (and pay license costs for) a fake user. It's not possible to represent concepts like "the first available person from the Ops team" or "whoever is currently managing the security team" unless you make it into a status and leave it unassigned, which causes a massive amount of issues when multiple teams led by different managers are working on one project or someone is temporarily or permanently unavailable for whatever reason (vacation/sick/etc). Planning software that cannot deal with people being unavailable is worthless.

  Permissions are a complete mess. There's all kinds of funny interactions between admin and project permissions, and some things are in what could have obviously never been the correct spot. How it ended up with project releases being an administrative permission speaks volumes about how poorly everything is designed. Happy tenth anniversary to the cloud ticket, the original server one has another decade on it. Twenty YEARS of the most basic feature imaginable not existing when the initial implementation was patently incorrect to begin with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Encryption-breaking, password-leaking bug in many AMD CPUs could take months to fix⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  In seriousness: it's in 6.4.6, 6.1.41 and a bunch of other kernel versions released yesterday.