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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • To each their own. For me, a good lore and dialog is what makes a good RPG stand out.

    If I want action and reflexes, I’d go play an action game. If I want strategy, I’d go for a puzzle game, or a 4X, deckbuilder, etc. But in a proper RPG what I look for is good lore, engaging story and some level of freedom that makes me feel I’m having an impact in that world. If AI can help with immersion and/or dynamic changes, I’m all for it. Of course, for that to happen they need to make sure it does stay in character and does not hallucinate something incoherent.

    If there’s an AI chatbox that actually can stay coherent and be set up as a game without feeling like you have to input too many instructions to the AI to push the narrative (I think AI Dungeon gets close) then well, you could almost consider that being an RPG already. After all, the first RPGs were all text based. So I would already consider that the first iteration of AI-based RPG game. But translating that to a live 3D environment would be the next step.



  • The article talks about how they are ok with using AI for things outside generating images, texts and so. For example, they are fine using the rudimentary AI of any typical enemy in one of their games. So I expect procedural generation that does not rely on trained bayesian network models is ok for them.

    It looks like they just seem to be concerned about the legality of it… so they might just start using it as soon as the legal situation for AI models is made safe.


  • Saying that I dont trust a homophobe is not “sharing my political opinions”

    That’s true.

    However, you did not just say that. You mentioned how he supports some homophobic politics (ie. regulation against gay marriage), which you (and I’m sure a lot of people, me included) disagree with. That’s politics.

    You also shared your opinion about why you think privacy is important for our society. That’s also politics.

    I’m not saying that what you said is wrong… I’m saying that what you said is political. Sharing political opinions is ok. It’s not like talking about politics is somehow a bad thing. At least not in this context. A lot of what surrounds the choice of a web browser like this is political.


  • You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

    Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

    In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

    I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

    Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?


  • Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh… but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).


  • In that counter argument they are essentially admitting that 99% of their content was distributed without the copyright holder’s consent.

    In the CDL lawsuit, they have admitted that of the millions of books we have digitized, they themselves have only made about 33,000 available to libraries; only about 1% of what we have done, and only under restrictive and expensive license agreements. This is, they claim, the essence of their copyright rights: the ability to restrict access to information as they see fit, to further their theoretical economic interests, without regard to libraries traditional functions and the greater public good.

    Was it fair use in the past to redistribute reprints/format-conversions of works without the copyright holders consent?

    I agree that copyright law sucks… but that’s why it needs to change so it actually serves “the greater public good”. The judiciary system is not the right place to advocate for that (they don’t make the law, just interpret it), so I don’t really think there’s much hope in them winning this. Sadly.


  • If they really think there’s no reason to hide anything, why are they prosecuting Snowden for exposing something that was hidden?

    Before having surveillance on people, they should have it on themselves.

    Imagine how many corruption cases could have been prevented if the government was publicly monitored, with live streams from all offices, like a “big brother” show set up in the white house with live recordings of all calls and communications, so the voters can judge by themselves and monitor if the person they employed as the servant for the country is doing its job.




  • This.

    I don’t understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible… I’m not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual …or in marketing stunts.

    The only individuals I’m interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I’d rather use a more private platform.

    And when I want to read a public post I’d rather it’s well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it’s curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don’t have to waste my time going through tons of content I’m not remotelly interested on.


  • It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

    What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.

    In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.

    Like, for example, there’s this function:

    function vc() {
        var a = za.navigator;
        return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
    }
    

    Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

    And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.


  • It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.


  • That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

    For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

    if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {
    
        setTimeout(function() {
            c();
            a.resolve(1)
        }, 5E3);
    
    } else {
    
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    
    }
    

    It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

    And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.


  • I expect it would be technically possible to have lemmy-like or peertube-like services built on top of the AT protocol Bluesky uses, like with ActivityPub. And I expect if/when that happens the communication across services would probably work too.

    In fact, accounts being “portable” in the AT protocol can potentially make the integration more seamless across different services, not only might the posts be seen from different services, but you might be able to directly access those different services with the same account. Imagine if you could login in lemmy with a mastodon account or vice-versa.

    Bluesky is just one of the possible services. But as long as the invites are private and you can’t host your own instance, I wouldn’t even consider it an alternative. I think it’s a bit early to judge, both its positives and its negatives.


  • I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it’s much clearer and it’s guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don’t suppot tar archives, they’ll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

    It’s also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they’ll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it’s a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

    And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.


  • In fact, it’s not unlikely that the behavioural data of people who pay to opt out of being spammed with ads will be more valuable to data brokers.

    True. This is why the AdNauseam extension doesn’t simply “hide” ads, but it goes out of its way to actually simulate clicks for ALL ads, causing algorithms to be unable to more accurately profile you and making the pay-per-click model fall on its face. If everyone did that, advertisers would have to pay for completely meaningless clicks making it no longer worth it to advertise this way.

    Though it’s still not a solution to privacy, since it still gives some insight on your tastes by allowing them to know what websites do you frequently visit.




  • You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

    Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

    In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.