• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I have one that I like to imagine as secure as fully randomised passwords. It’s four words but, because I’m a cool pwnz0r, the second and last word are written in leetspeak. The phrase is super easy for me to remember and the leetspeak portion has become muscle memory by now. But I only use it for my password manager. For everything else it depends if there’s a good chance I’ll need to login via my phone (no pw manager there). If yes, I use one of my couple rather-safe passwords. If no, I’ll let KeePass2 go to town with a random one.

    Oh and I’m subscribed to the haveibeenpwned leakletter, so i know as soon as possible when definitely to change my password.






  • Better ground transportation could be a big game changer. At the moment I could either fly to London for a couple hundred quid at a convenient time of day within 4-5 hours door-to-door, or I could spend a substantially higher amount on a train ride that takes three times as long and requires me to change trains at least twice in the middle of the night.

    This is such an annoyance, not just from an environmental point of view. Even here in Germany, where we really do have a pretty great train network (mind you, the network is great, not necessarily the “adhering to time schedules”-part), it’s sometimes cheaper and faster to fly from city to city than to ride the literal Inter City Express trains, whose sole purpose it is to quickly connect far-away mid-to-large cities.


  • I can see how most people would be turned off by having yet another website have their email address (even if it’s honestly just for sending them the newsletter), but, at the risk of sounding like an advertising agent, there are solutions to that.

    rambling that might sound a bit too much like advertising, feel free to skip

    You can set up more or less complicated rules so that mails from imanewsletter@newsman.gg are automatically put into a folder that you created for newsletters. But that still leaves you open to them using a different address like marketing@newsman.gg to sneak past that filter. Also, if (more like “when”, honestly) their database gets leaked, you’re going to receive a lot of spam mails from less reputable people. Or you create different email addresses for different websites and auto-forward those mails to your main account, maybe?

    Alternatively, and that’s the service I’ve been enjoying for the past months, you can use the mail service Port87. To be frank, it’s still a bit buggy at times and it doesn’t seem to work for every sender (for some encoding reasons, as far as I understood, DHL delivery mails just don’t get loaded properly), but the idea is that you have built-in the ability to create sub-adresses and you only give out those sub-adresses to sign up for things. So my main address might be crowbro@port87.com, but I would sign up as crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. From what they know, my “real” adress is simply crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. Even if that database gets leaked and I suddenly receive mails from “my bank” about needing to refresh my credit details, I would immediately see that it’s in crowbro-newsletter@port87.com instead of crowbro-mybank@port87.com and this likely is a phishing attempt. I’m gonna end this here, because I really don’t want to seem like I’m just trying to advertise the stuff I use.


    On the general topic: I feel for anyone who is trying to get into journalism and stuff like voice acting right now. Any article that reads a little weird and too stiff (same with voice-over in YouTube videos), I almost immediately scoff off (is that a word?) as being AI-generated and not worth my time. I wouldn’t be surprised if, doing this, I already skipped one or two pieces of media that were actually from humans but those humans were still novices in their field.






  • Like @Pea666@feddit.nl , I’m unfamiliar with the boardgame but from what i see and read in the rulebook, it seems very fun.

    I am a bit confused about game-ending scenarios because I did read that a set of cards determines the objective (for each player?), to increase the replayability. But it also states that you can win either by destroying the entire fleet or by having the highest score (hostile ships destroyed) after six rounds with no victor. If it is the case, that you have objectives but you can also win by having more points after six rounds, I’d just get rid of the “win after sox rounds with highest points” clause. If there are no set objectives, I would sit down with your son and come up with interesting and fun objectives that, upon completion, declare the winner instead of this “technically you can win by killing one ship and running away for five more turns”, because that does sound like a boring base rule.


  • Thanks, your obvious question prompted me to take another look at that issue. My first thought was “Yes, but it’s not quite there because…actually, why?” Since I couldn’t come to a good answer anymore (because by now the AFD really seems just as bad as the NPD always was), I did some digging through the constitution-equivalent, the Grundgesetz.

    1. Art. 20 specifies that Germany is a democratic and social state and clause 4 states that any German citizen has the right to resistance/opposition against anyone who seeks to abolish that order/construct, if other means do not work out (it’s not specified what kind of “resistance”, so armed resistance is also on the table, especially with the wording “if other means do not work out”)
    2. Art. 21 states that political parties can be formed freely and that their inner structure must equate democratic base values. It also says that political parties which (in their stated goals or their behaviour) seek to disrupt or disable the free, democratic foundational order, or endanger the German Federal Republic, not only are illegal but also may not receive governmental funding.
    3. Art. 26 states that actions which seek (and are able) to disrupt the peaceful coexistence of the countries (internationally speaking), especially the preparation of an offensive war, are illegal.

    So, why is the AFD still not banned? I read through two or three news articles and it seems to boil down to a couple good arguments:

    1. Currently the AFD has been given the classification of right-wing extremist, which could possibly threaten the democratic order. This allows the German intelligence agencies to insert so called Vertrauenspersonen (basically spies), whose function it is to gather as much evidence as possible and needed to support a ban of the AFD.
    2. Evidence may only be gathered before, not during, a trial procedure. So unless you are absolutely confident that you have more than enough (or at the very least exactly enough) evidence, you shouldn’t initiate a ban-trial.
    3. If a ban-trial fails, it could give the AFD additional support because “if the government, despite using literal spies, couldn’t find evidence to ban us, we can’t be that bad!”
    4. Those ban-trials can take multiple years to go through. During that time, the AFD could gain the support of impressionable, but not yet swayed, people by claiming “Omg, we told you! They are trying to ban us for speaking the truth! Please, help us against the oppressors!” (if you’ve seen the scene in Revenge of the Sith, where Mace Windu wants to kill Palpatine then and there, because he’s too dangerous and Palpatine goes “See, Anakin? I told you, the Jedi are evil!”, its basically that scenario)

    I would be so happy to be rid of the AFD, but unfortunately it seems to not be a quick process :c



  • I have only had two AirBnB experiences in the past years (one of which was just a week ago). Maybe it’s just different in Germany or I got lucky, but our AirBnB hosts were always available (and actual locals instead of unknown house moguls) for questions, offered very decent apartments (especially for the price) and were at most half as expensive as the cheapest hotel in the same area (not even gonna mention the fact that getting a hotel with two dogs is hard to impossible anyway).

    Yes, there was the sudden cleaning fee of 20€ and the stupid AirBnB fee but it only bumped it up from around 60€ per night to around 80€.


  • Reading the entire article, it seems that they still want to tread very carefully with this whole AI ordeal. Valve isn’t just opening the floodgates, as the title would make it seem.

    While yes, a healthy dose of skepticism is good to have, I think if I had to trust someone to navigate AI in gaming in the gamers’ favour, I would pick Valve. Or maybe I’m overestimating Gabe’s involvement in the happenings of the legal department’s section that is currently responsible for AI stuff.

    EDIT: Shame on me, @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone , I think I had already seen the PMG video about the Steam Marketplace and its lootboxes and the gambling sites. But because I neither play these titles nor participate in the marketplace, I forgot that these serious issues exist. And the documentary concerning actually working at Valve rocked my stance back and forth. On one hand, I love the concept, but there are big problems here as well.

    Once more, a genuine thank you for pointing me at these two video documentaries, even if I had already seen one of them.