[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 30 points 1 year ago

Or just use one of the many Ubuntu derivatives that don't force Snap?

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago

Stupid question: Why can't journals just mandate an actual URL link to a study on the last page, or the exact issue something was printed in? Surely both of those would be easily confirmable, and both would be easy for a scientist using "real" sources to source (since they must have access to it themselves already).

Like, it feels silly to me that high school teachers require this sort of thing, yet scientific journals do not?

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago

Might've been financed on credit - but even still, it takes a lot more than $12k for a down payment.

Assuming the median price for a home is $500k, you'd need $100k for a traditional 20% down payment. Sure, $12k is 12% of the way there... but it's nowhere near what is needed for an actual down payment.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago

This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.

You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago

It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.

I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey, how about reading the article before regurgitating your shit (wrong) opinions?

Here, I'll help.

At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Balthrop told Regina that the closest abortion provider for Ashley would be in Chicago. At first, Regina thought she and Ashley could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and Regina would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says.

So Ashley did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing.

This is what the policies you support cause. I hope you'll do some research and reconsider.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that's where Google got the idea from.

Basically, this is the way it works:

  • You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the "attester". Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can't patch the binary).

  • A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a "good" attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can't just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn't work when you get a different request.

  • The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - "this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits," etc.

  • If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can't patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

  • The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

  • The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many ("low entropy"). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that "Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.")

That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn't want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they're pushing "low-entropy" under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 29 points 1 year ago

People don't want to sell their personal data for currency.

People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don't see billionaires lining up for this.

It's exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there's the systemic problem - that there shouldn't be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn't being solved anytime soon.

But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data... that's immoral. It's immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

Why do you think you're hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

Steam Deck honestly convinced me to move my desktop over to Linux.

I'm still dual-booting, but I only go into Windows if something struggles too much over Proton (looking at you Satisfactory). I've been daily driving KDE Neon for about 2 months without issues.

Plasma is a great desktop environment, too. Usually the desktop environments were what chased me away - GNOME was slow sometimes and always felt... off, Cinnamon doesn't like multiple desktops despite claiming to, with the maintainers refusing to even acknowledge the problems, XFE is... XFE, and historically Plasma was always super crashy and bloated.

Valve's been funding the KDE guys to make Plasma better and it really shows. Plasma feels like a modern desktop that can compete with Windows directly - and honestly beats Windows with how bad Windows 11 has become. (Last time I was in Windows it took the Windows 11 Start Menu a full 20 seconds to open - but don't worry, it had time to serve me an ad for Xbox Game Pass.)

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago

I really liked /r/latestagecapitalism but I got banned for talking smack about China, and how the authoritarianism of the USSR and its child states didn't line up with the values they tried to espouse.

Permanently banned. Appeal ignored. Disappointing, but good riddance I suppose.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And this pitch to /r/linux notably leaves out this other, older pitch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

Note the line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda. The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist".

I joined Lemmy.ml in 2020 after this pitch to /r/linux... and left shortly afterward when I saw who ran it. Thankfully we have other options now (hello from Kbin!).

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They can and have, is the thing.

There's been a few subs knocked out by Reddit giving the mod roles to a greedy powermod. Some "regular" mods are becoming powermods by playing nice with the admins and requesting huge subreddits.

Reddit isn't bluffing when they say "Open up or we will make you." Some teams are reporting less than 24 hours passing between them getting the "admins are knocking on your door" message and the mod team being removed and replaced with a powermod that moderates 100 other subreddits.

It's becoming obvious that you will be opened, like it or not. If mods want to continue to protest, they need to start doing malicious compliance. Subs are looking closely at Reddit's rules and following them to the letter.

Did you know Reddit considers heavy profanity to be NSFW? So you could mark your community as NSFW and use AutoMod to ensure that every post has a curse word in the title. Then since your community is obviously NSFW Reddit can't advertise on it, because ads don't run on NSFW subs.

Other mods are avoiding this approach in fears that Reddit will just ban NSFW entirely. Those are the John Oliver subs. Reddit says "it can't be a surprise what the sub is about" but clearly there's leeway because /r/trees isn't about trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts isn't about marijuana enthusiasts. Hence "only pictures of John Oliver"; if Reddit comes after that then they'd logically be banning /r/trees, /r/anime_titties, /r/196, etc. as well.

Reddit says that it's a democracy (it isn't, admins will always be dictators), and that users should decide the direction of the subreddit. Hence posts asking the users for their input. And of course they're only listening to the demands of the users, after all...

The only way to damage Reddit is from inside Reddit. Make Reddit a miserable experience. They're following all the rules! But it's not a good place to be. Then promote communities elsewhere (also perfectly within the rules) to push people off of Reddit and onto other sites.

And they're just doing exactly what the admins asked them to do, after all.

0

It was sold as a 'conversation starter', which was certainly correct.

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EnglishMobster

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