Carl

Also, you should’ve already bought a house about 35 years ago. If you didn’t, that is a personal failing on your part.

It’s a hard job, but someone’s gotta do it. Those letters ain’t gonna flip themselves!

Minor nit-picky correction: She’s a jackal, not a cat. So she’s technically more like a foxgirl, instead of a catgirl.

Because Anubis is the jackal-headed Egyptian god that weighs your guilt at the end of your life. And if your guilt weighs less than a feather, you’re allowed to enter the Egyptian equivalent of heaven.

The reference being that the service is “weighing” the users, and only allowing the guilt-free ones (humans) to access heaven (the site).

Exactly. You can find an active subreddit for fucking anything. Find a new anime and want to discuss it? There’s an active sub for that. Find a cool bug and want to identify it? There’s an active sub for that. Want to ask a doctor for casual (off-the-record) medical advice? There’s an active sub for that.

But with Lemmy, the first would probably land in a more generic c/Anime, while the latter ones might struggle to find an appropriate community at all. Because even if the specific communities exist, the chances of them being active enough to get a response are low.

Exactly. Trash cans on every street corner won’t help if everyone thinks littering is okay.

Nah, the gays aren’t doing very much reading right now, due to AO3 being down.

TIL we use the phrase “dial a phone number” because old phones had a rotary dial that you had to spin to the numbers, like hands on an analog clock.

(I’m actually old enough to have used rotary phones, and my knees hurt before it rains lol)

It definitely sounds like some anti-piracy stuff. Old game devs were trolls when it came to finding creative ways to deter piracy. They knew they couldn’t prevent bootlegging, but they could certainly annoy the bootleggers.

It’s why lots of anti-piracy stuff in old games only really ramps up after a few hours of gameplay. When a pirate is trying to crack a game, they don’t want to spend hours testing to see if the crack was fully successful. The game booted, so they sent it out the door. If the devs put a big obvious “we detected that you’re playing a pirated copy” warning on the title page, the cracker would obviously know that they need to take another look at their work. By burying the anti-piracy stuff behind several hours of gameplay, it means the pirate won’t be able to reliably check each version of their crack.

Especially if the game devs do something like check for a crack at multiple points throughout the game, and record it as an invisible part of your save file. It means you can’t just load a save from right before the noticeable stuff happens. Because you probably got flagged several hours ago, so loading that old save will still flag it as a pirated copy even if your crack is working now.

Yup. Anyone expecting privacy on a federated service has been inherently misinformed about how federation works. Everything I do here is assumed to be public.

And I also assume that state agencies are running their own instances, to suck up as much data as they can. They can just federate with the big instances, and then the data gets firehosed directly to them via the built-in federation. It’s why AI scrapers on the fediverse are so frustrating. The scraper could just spin up an instance and passively collect all of the same data via federation. But instead, they just DDOS the instance owners.

Also, the users who bitch and moan about downvotes (because they can see who downvoted them) are pure comedic gold. I have seen users try to call out the specific people who downvoted them. Like they’ll edit their comment with something like “hey @{user1}, @{user2}, @{user3}, care to explain why you downvoted?” The only thing that ever accomplishes is getting them buried in even more spite-downvotes.

Yup, I’m sure China is over the moon. A lot of his decisions have basically just boiled down to “hand {soft power} directly to China.” Because the slimy sack doesn’t understand the concept of long-term planning and soft power. Hell, he doesn’t even understand quarterly business planning, because he bankrupts every business he gets his tiny mitts on.

Yes, it specifically affects the OpenSSH/Alpine/musl interaction. It’s a vulnerability in how Alpine/OpenSSH interfaces with musl, and allows anyone who can reach your SSH port to instantly log into a passwordless account by entering over 256 characters into the password field.

The vuln is nicknamed *sshole, if you want to search it. Because it only works on passwordless accounts, (meaning it has a * in the password field). And the most common use-case for passwordless accounts is because you’re using cert-based authentication instead. Thus the warnings that if you’re using cert-only SSH, you’re most likely vulnerable.

No, there was an SSH vulnerability discovered a day or two ago, which allows anyone to bypass the certificate check during authentication. So if your SSH is configured to only use a certificate, (not cert and password) then anyone can log into your shit.

Probably the same way Unity feels about their game engine being associated with awful low budget shovelware games. The game engine was popular with low budget games because you can use the engine for free… But you have to display the “Made with Unity” splash screen for a few seconds as your game boots up. And notably, you can pay a licensing fee to remove that splash screen requirement. Basically the drug dealer special: Get the newbie game devs familiar with the engine for free, then charge the publishers to use the engine that their employees all already know.

The issue (which Unity didn’t initially foresee when they wrote their licensing terms) is that all of the shovelware games used Unity for free, and all of them had the big “Made with Unity” splash. So Unity very quickly became associated with super low effort shovelware games.

Even this isn’t a foolproof solution, because you can still find them on third-party instances that federate with both yours and .ml

I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.

I fully believe that modern video games are the primary cause of murder-hobos. Video games have functionally trained modern players to only interact with the world in very specific ways. If your video game character only has three actions, and all three of them are some form of attack, you’ll inevitably end up using those attacks to interact with the world.

Video games have basically trained players to follow a very specific set of rules: See a barrier to progression? Try your primary action (usually an attack) on it, and see what happens. If it breaks, you were correct. If you bonk, try your second action, (again, usually an attack). Then your third. Etc… By the rules of the game, if you’re meant to get past the barrier, one of your pre-determined actions will get you past it. So you as a player are taught to just throw things at the barrier and see what sticks.

And the barrier can be any number of things. An enemy to defeat, a cracked wall to smash, a door to lockpick, a grapple point to swing across, a giant spider web that will burn away when you use a fire attack, etc… All of them are just barriers to progression on the player’s trek from A to Z. And every barrier (if it is intended to be passable) will have some sort of corresponding key. It may be a literal key you need to find somewhere in the world, (like in a Zelda game, with a locked door needing a Small Key to pass), but it may also be a more symbolic “key”. A grapple point needing a grapple to pass a large gap, a chunk of ice needing a fire attack to melt, a molten pit of lava that you need an ice attack to solidify, a small gap that you need to transform/shrink to fit through, etc… But as long as you as the player have collected the correct “key” for the barrier, you can pass.

And the issue with translating that to a tabletop session is that the DM doesn’t lay out any specific corresponding key for a given barrier, (unless it’s something literal, like a vault door requiring a special magical key). It is usually left open to the player to decide how they want to approach a given situation. The DM sets up the scenario, and then leaves the players to approach it however they see fit. And when the players encounter a barrier, they fall right back into that video game mentality: Check your character sheet for potential keys, and start throwing things at the barrier to see what sticks… And almost all of the “keys” they find are some form of offensive or defensive combat ability. Because the character sheet isn’t going to list the mundane things that anybody can do. It only lists the special things that your specific character can do.

Let’s say you encounter a guard in front of a door. You check your character sheet, and see a LOT of ways to approach the situation. 95% of them are some sort of combat ability. Your character sheet often doesn’t directly list things like “walk up and politely introduce yourself”, “bribe guard”, or “attempt to intimidate the guard” as direct actions. Because those are things that any character can do without needing a special action for them. Sure, the game has ability checks set up for those kinds of options, (in D&D’s case, Persuasion to talk or bribe your way past, Intimidation to try and get the guard to back down, Deception to try and lie your way past, etc…) but they aren’t directly listed as special actions on your sheet. They’re just “soft” actions that any character can attempt.

So what happens is the player sees a barrier (a guard), looks for a corresponding key on their character sheet, (their list of special actions) and sees a lot of combat abilities that their specific character has earned. Unless you’re specifically playing as a Face character, you often don’t have any social actions listed on your character sheet. So they do the video game thing. They start picking actions to throw at the barrier, to see if they work. Because video game logic dictates that if you’re meant to pass this barrier, (the guard), you should have a key for it (your actions and abilities).

All of this means the party sees a guard, then the barbarian immediately goes “I try to hit them with my +1 battle axe.” The DM sighs, because the guard would have simply let them past if they had tried talking. The guard already had orders to let the party pass, because they’re on a mission for the duke and need to interrogate the prisoner being held here. The duke anticipated this, and alerted the local guards to expect the party. But now they’re in combat, because the barbarian already rolled his dice and celebrated his Nat 20, before the DM could even say anything in response. There were plenty of other options available, but many of them were “soft” options (like talking) that aren’t listed on your character sheet. But the barbarian has “Multi Attack” listed right at the top of their available actions, so that was the first key they tried on the barrier.

And I say video games are the primary cause of murder-hobos, because there are 100% players who are only interested in combat. If that’s the expectation going into a campaign, that’s fine. The DM and the rest of the party can plan for that accordingly. DM sets up a scenario with hostile creatures, and combat starts. The “plot” in a campaign like this is often just used to loosely tie the encounters together. And if that’s what everyone in the group is looking for, that’s great. You’ll all have a wonderful time. If you have an entire party of roll-players (as in, players who just want to roll their dice in combat) then it’s not inherently a bad thing that they’re murder-hobos. Because the DM will design the game world accordingly.

The issues arise when you have a mixed bag of some players (and the DM) wanting to roleplay and dive into a complex plot, while one or two roll-players are just finding every opportunity to make attack rolls. And those roll-players inevitably end up dragging the entire party into combat, even when the party Face could have easily talked their way through an encounter (or at least acted as a distraction long enough to set the rest of the party up for a surprise attack) instead.

Sure, but OP was asking for curated collections, and the above commenter pointed at MAM as an example. And MAM is specifically purging their curated collections, so I thought it was funny that MAM was the go-to response.

We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.

Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.

The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in {a}+{b} and returning {c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is {a}+{b} to give us the result {c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.

And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.

Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.

But I don’t need to share those credentials with anyone.

Yeah, I like BitWarden because it makes sharing passwords very easy. My wife and I have a few shared accounts, and have a family vault set up. So anything we want to share just gets transferred into the family vault, and we can both easily access it. And since it even supports TOTP, we can have those directly on the shared accounts without needing to bug each other with the “hey I’m trying to log into {x}, send me your Google Authenticator code” song and dance.

My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”

I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?

The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.