chameleon

joined 2 months ago
[–] chameleon@fedia.io 3 points 1 month ago

My dotfiles aren't distro-specific because they're symlinks into a git repo (or tarball) + a homegrown shell script to make them, and that's about the end of it.

My NixOS configuration is split between must-have CLI tools/nice-to-have CLI tools/hardware-related CLI tools/GUI tools and functions as a suitable reference for non-Nix distros, even having a few comments on what the package names are elsewhere, but installation is ultimately still manual.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's absolutely not the case that nobody was thinking about computer power use. The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point and even had an EU-US agreement, and that was sitting alongside the EU's own energy program. Getting an 80Plus-certified power supply was already common advice to anyone custom-building a PC which was by far the primary group of users doing Bitcoin mining before it had any kind of mainstream attention. And the original Bitcoin PDF includes the phrase "In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.", despite not going in-depth (it doesn't go in-depth on anything).

The late 00s weren't the late 90s where the most common OS in use did not support CPU idle without third party tooling hacking it in.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 46 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] chameleon@fedia.io 19 points 1 month ago

Eh, no. "I'm going to make things annoying for you until you give up" is literally something already happening, Titanfall and the like suffered from it hugely. "I'm going to steal your stuff and sell it" is a tale old as time, warez CDs used to be commonplace; it's generally avoided by giving people a way to buy your thing and giving people that bought the thing a way to access it. The situation where a third party profits off your game is more likely to happen if you don't release server binaries! For example, the WoW private/emulator server scene had a huge problem with people hoarding scripts, backend systems and bugfixes, which is one of the reasons hosted servers could get away with fairly extreme P2W.

And he seems to completely misunderstand what happens to IP when a studio shuts down. Whether it's bankruptcy or a planned closure, it will get sold off just like a laptop owned by the company would and the new owner of the rights can enforce on it if they think it's useful. Orphan works/"abandonware" can happen, just like they can to non-GaaS games and movies, but that's a horrible failing on part of the company.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There's been an exFAT driver in the kernel for a couple of years now (merged after Microsoft's patent pact added ExFAT), it works fine. Same driver gets used on Android for SD card support.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Pretty much every form of these scams is some kind of advance fee fraud. Two more possible avenues:

  • "Upgrade to a business account". They send you an email purporting to be from the payment provider you used saying you need to upgrade to business to receive a payment that large, and the upgrade page is a fake website run by the scammer that asks for a "refundable deposit" or the like (with a little helping of credit card fraud and of course a business account will require all kinds of personal info useful for identity theft too).
  • "But I want it as an NFT" was popular for a bit, they want you to "pre-pay the minting fee but it's ok I'll add it to your payment" and then they disappear. But they want it on a website ran by them and the moment you put the crypto in they disappear. Not sure this scam is popular nowadays because NFT screams scam to just about everyone for a lot of different reasons. But "rich guy spends $5000 on dumbass NFT" was a legitimate genre of news for a little moment.

It's all preying on someone that thinks they got an easy paycheck for work that they've already done, on a populace of artists that could really use said paycheck to pay for food and are thus willing to overlook weirdness or principles. They also tend to pick on newer and younger artists that haven't quite figured out how to run a business yet, hoping that they haven't heard of scams specifically targeted to their sector.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 12 points 1 month ago

Releasing server binaries (nobody in the context of this petition is asking for source code) is one option. Single player mode is another. Everything you'd wanna know is on https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ . Exact wording of laws and the like comes in a later phase, as with every initiative ever it will be up to the lawmaking body to make that.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

Probably an anti-piracy thing. It's pretty common in the console hacking scene for only specific versions to be vulnerable, or only have exploits released for a specific set of versions. People can get around it by looking for games released with specific updates on the disc/cart but it's a pain.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Easiest way would be to use borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 '/home/user/sdcardbackup::{now}' /dev/sdX (which I copied from the examples in the documentation). I'm not sure if Vorta has a way to activate --read-special but I suspect not; you can most likely still use it to make the repo and manage archives inside of it though.

Backing up from a command/stdin might also be relevant as an alternative, since that lets you back up more or less anything.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Browsing through the PDF, I'm getting the vibe that their way of measuring "skill" is weird. They claim to use multiple methods of measuring, they list a few obvious ones that they've found to be bad, but they don't say which ones they are using because "we are constantly iterating on our performance metrics to optimize the player experience per game-mode".

Elo-like systems tend to adjust skill based on the chance of winning current match X win/loss, but they're not (just) doing that. I wonder if they have a few weird metrics that look good on paper/in the lab but don't feel good in play.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Elixir, or Gleam/pure Erlang/some other Erlang VM language. I think Erlang is extremely cool and I've enjoyed the little time I spent with Elixir. I also have absolutely no use case to make proper use of it.

[–] chameleon@fedia.io 52 points 1 month ago

Requiring agreement to some unspecified ever-changing terms of service in order to use the product you just bought, especially when use of such products is required in the modern world. Google and Apple in particular are more or less able to trivially deny any non-technical person access to smartphones and many things associated with them like access to mobile banking. Microsoft is heading that way with Windows requiring MS accounts, too, though they're not completely there yet.

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