i’m lizard 🦎

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • 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.)


  • If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

    Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.


  • Unfortunately, it’s definitively an instance of intentional design. This whole consent dialog thing became a booming “consent management platform” industry. Many of them advertise better acceptance rates than the competition, or used to but have removed those claims in more recent times now that the big GDPR boom is over.

    This particular dialog is TrustArc, who are infamous. At one point they defended it with a “well, we gotta retry if it fails to make sure your preference is expected, and we can’t know if your adblocker is causing it to fail or if it’s just a fluke”, which is one of those things where they say something that’s not totally wrong but you know they’re lying through their teeth.




  • Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They’ve kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it’s still there in the background and it’s still the main reward system for node operators.

    There’s some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they’ve made sure one node leaving doesn’t cause data loss, but I’d still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that’s not gonna get your data back.


  • It’s difficult because you have a 50/50 of having a manager that doesn’t respect mistakes and will immediately get you fired for it (to the best of their abilities), versus one that considers such a mistake to be very expensive training.

    I simply can’t blame people for self-defense. I interned at a ‘non-profit’ where there had apparently been a revolving door of employees being fired for making entirely reasonable mistakes and looking back at it a dozen years later, it’s no surprise that nobody was getting anything done in that environment.










  • Even if the source is kept decently preserved, the build environments are usually not. If they still have a machine in the exact state it was in at the time the game was finished, it might be as easy as Project -> Build, but… they almost certainly don’t. So that likely has to be rebuilt from scratch, and you’d be very lucky to find any kind of documentation on how things worked.

    Game studios tend to have it particularly bad because of how much binary-only engines/middleware (standalone bits like Havok physics/Bink video/etc) they used, how often the game’s data and code builds were mixed together in some way and how in some cases the project is designed to build things like console releases at the same time. If you lost the install files for your physics engine, you’re probably straight up screwed.

    By the time you’ve figured all of that out, you can be easily hundreds of hours in, with tons of weird little issues that might require different people to solve. Some examples: you might end up needing to build it in Windows XP because no other OS runs all of the software used during the build, any sysadmin is NOT going to be happy installing WinXP on their network so the machine has to stay offline, getting code onto that machine might be a pain due to how Perforce or whatever is used by them, even things taken for granted like a particular version of the DirectX 9 SDK might be hard to find, etc. Sometimes licensing/activation of tools used in the build process is an impossible to solve problem because it needs some DRM dongle or activation server that no longer exists and the software was never publicly available, so there is no crack.


  • If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.

    But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. “Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it” absolutely deserves to be on that list.


  • “If we don’t let the oppressors roam freely, they might try to oppress you” is not something I expected to read from the EFF today. But well, here we are.

    It has been standard internet behavior that if a platform does not have the proper response to abuse complaints, you move up a layer higher until you find someone that is receptive to it. This has been standard operating procedure for more or less for the entirety of the current millennium, and this article has done absolutely zero work to provide a good reason it should be anything otherwise, other than bringing up generic “free speech” stuff.

    You should not get a path out of that process because one layer immediately above the problematic entity is actively choosing to disregard abuse complaints. You simply move up to the next step. And this process simply must keep existing, as doing anything otherwise is to allow people to pull off all kinds of bad things; scams, spam, illegal activity and far more.

    And if you abolish the non-legal form of that process? Well, there’s still a legal process - and as soon as someone that wants to censor minorities gets control over the legal process, they will simply change the rules in their favor, as has happened countless times in the past.



  • As pointed out, the DNS issue was fixed, and the other point made about Python wheels has also been addressed; quite a good chunk of packages on PyPi have had a musl wheel added in the past 6 months or so, including numpy & scipy. I’m also not certain if the Go part is true; probably somewhere around half of the Go apps I’m running as a container are running or were built on an Alpine base.