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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Sure, they could block based on your VPN provider, but they’re probably also using Deep Packet Inspection .

    The ELI5 verson: It’s possible to just “watch” your traffic and notice that it’s not the “normal” https traffic (which is the most common traffic) . This can be done by finger printing the request itself or just watching the amount of traffic. For example if you “visit” a website, but upload and download 3 megabytes of data and it takes 15 minutes to send/receive that data… well, that looks suspicious… and depending on the country, you may have some people knocking on your door.




  • The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

    Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it’s noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).

    If you have 4 comments:

    1. Has 100 upvotes (in total)
    2. Another has 100 downvote (in total)
    3. Another has 50 upvotes and 50 downvote (100 in total with a 0 sum)
    4. The last was a new comment with 0 votes.

    It’s obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.

    Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there’s a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)

    Reddit has a “sort by controversial” algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it’s hidden in the “what’s hot" - I haven’t looked at the code).

    It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I’m sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.


  • Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.

    This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.

    I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.

    I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.


  • Since you asked:

    1. The bot provides little “value” vs the noise it creates.

    I don’t need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it’s a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this “threshold for scamminess” would be very subjective.

    1. This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point (“value” vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I’d read.

    Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I’ve done and I’m much happier with my Lemmy experience.







  • Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

    Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

    With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

    This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

    You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.


  • Before we start to pat ourselves on the back: How does the number of murders in the U. S. compare to the rest of the world? This is really the only meaningful metric, otherwise it’s like a chain smoker congratulating themselves from dropping from 3 packs a day to 2.

    
    *"... there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." *
    
    *edit*: The link I posted referred to a high murder rate for U.S. Virgin Islands (not contential U.S.).  So, it's not relevant to the conversation. Thanks for calling me out on it. 
    




  • Thanks for the write-up and I too bought it before it was delisted (ie: paid < $7.00 for the deluxe edition)… and tbh, I felt I still paid too much.

    As you mentioned that campaigns are simple, but I was surprised (and amazingly board ) by how simple the campaigns were. (disclaimer : I did only play for about 2 hours before I got board and never came back). I was hoping for some sort of brawler type game, but the enemies are few but often respawn. I was hoping for something like Shadows of War, but was greatly disappointed. The campaigns were disconnected from each other and the objectives are simply: defeat this enemy, then destroy these targets… there is no real flexible or room for thought, outside of the prepared script you need to follow until the campaign ends.

    … and the controls, I found, are quite janky. I was iron man and I found that the movement never really “flowed” into each other, there was always a delay between animation… I really didn’t find it fun. It wasn’t a brawler, it really was a Pay-to-Win platform… even with all the pay gates removed.

    People often mention that Guardians of the Galaxy is better… and it is on my wish list, but I’m really suspicious (I hope they improved the controls).