ancaps: “muh NAP”

ancoms: “please get away from our commune, thank you”

Overwatch has a lot of the same sci-fi elements, but I don’t think cyberpunk would be an accurate way to describe it. In a way, it’s a patchwork of a bunch of different stuff; for example, you might say Sombra is cyberpunk. But I don’t think it generalizes well.

One of the main things in cyberpunk (and in a lot of punk genres) is economic inequality and the flaws of capitalism. In Overwatch, large corporations are part of the setting (and so is poverty, I would guess), but that’s all they are — background set pieces.

is that… the beatles?

wait, the steam browser is chromium? no way

fucking Azure

hey look it’s me

I don’t like it

When choosing a linux distribution, or a desktop environment, or anything really, go with the most popular, “basic” choice. Because when you have questions and need to search them, the more popular stuff is 99.9% guaranteed to have the answer to your question on some stackoverflow thread, or the arch linux wiki (which is pretty much just “the linux wiki” at this point).

Also, asking AI for help (chatgpt, phind, etc) is surprisingly helpful.

Apple does collect a whole bunch of data from its devices’ users. Pretty much everything you do on it, actually. All of the “turn of data collection” stuff they’ve been advertising only affects third-party data collection — not their own.

I think most of the games I’ve liked lately are roguelites:

• Bullets Per Minute
• Crypt of the Necrodancer
• Plate-Up
• Unrailed
• Noita
• Risk of Rain 2

Except for BPM and Noita, I’d recommend all of these as excellent coop games too. Here are some summary descriptions:

Bullets Per Minute:

• first-person shooter dungeon crawler
• awesome rock soundtrack with a steady beat
• you have to shoot and reload to the beat

Crypt of the Necrodancer:

• top-down 2d dungeon crawler
• awesome electronic soundtrack with a steady beat
• you have to attack and move to the beat

Plate-Up:

• top-down 2d restaurant simulator
• episodic gameplay where you try to make it through each day by serving all the customers
• if any customer waits too long, you lose
• inevitably gets crazy and chaotic, perfect for a group looking for a hectic and fun coop game
• devs are based, epic mod support

Unrailed:

• top-down 2d rail-building game
• you start with a train on some rails, with the train always moving forwards
• the goal is to continuously place rails in front of the train, otherwise you lose
• similarly to Plate-Up, incredibly chaotic energy, very fun

Noita:

• sidescrolling dungeon crawler
• you mainly fight enemies using wands and spells
• wands on their own are effectively just a bunch of empty slots; you decide which spells go in them, and in which order
• this may or may not eventually result in game-breaking shenanigans (or suicidal shenanigans, or both)
• there are a lot of secrets. like the entire game is a meta-narrative about discovering secrets. question everything.
• you will die. a lot. half the time to your own wacky spells. this is the way.

Risk of Rain 2:

• 3rd-person shooter (some characters are primarily melee, but whatever lol)
• game consists of a series of stages, each of which has a bunch of enemies, a bunch of chests with items, and a boss you must defeat to progress further
• also has a decent few secrets. Not on the same scale as Noita, but still quite a few

Their proposal is that, when you visit a website using WEI, it doesn’t let you see it right away. Instead, it first asks a third party if you’re “legit”, as opposed to maybe a bot or something.

The problem is, it would be really tricky to tell if you’re “legit”, because people get very, very tricky and clever with their bots (not to mention things like content farms, which aren’t even bots, they’re real humans, just doing the same job as a bot would). So, in order to try to do their jobs at all, these kind of third parties would have to try to find out a whole bunch of stuff about you.

Now, websites already try to do that, but for now the arms race is actually on our side; the end user has more or less full control over what code a website can run on their browser (which is how extensions like u-block and privacy badger work).

But if the end user could just block data collection, the third-party is back to square one. How can they possibly verify (“attest”) that you aren’t sus, if you’re preventing all attempts at collecting data about yourself, or your device / operating system / browser / etc?

The answer is, they can’t. So, to do a proper attestation, they have to have a whole bunch of information about you. And if they can’t, they logically have no way of knowing if you’re a bot. And if that’s the case, when the third-party reports that back to the website you’re trying to visit, they’ll assume you’re a bot, and block you. Obviously.

That’s pretty much my understanding of the situation. In order to actually implement this proposal, it would require unprecedented invasive measures for data collection; and for people who try to block it, they might just end up being classified as “bots” and basically frozen out of major parts of the internet. Especially because, when you consider how people can essentially just use whatever hardware and software they want, it would be in these big companies’ interests to restrict consumer choice to only the hardware and software they deem acceptable. Basically, it’s a conflict of interest, especially because the one trying to push this on everyone is Google themselves.

Now, Google obviously denies all that. They assure us it won’t be used for invasive data collection, that people will be able to opt out without losing access to websites, that there won’t be any discrimination against anyone’s personal choice of browser/OS/device/etc.

But it’s bullshit. They’re lying. It’s that shrimple.

What they should do — what we should force all corporations to do, and governments for that matter — is to respect the fundamental human right to privacy. And in the meantime, they should stop getting in people’s way when it comes to repairing their devices at the repair shop of their own choosing, and getting in people’s way when they want to get literally any software on their device not expressly approved by Apple.

The choice isn’t “either they do what they do now, or they just let everyone collect data”. Big tech corporations like Apple, Google, and all the rest have, from a privacy perspective, been fucking us up the ass for years and years now. Apple’s entire “we care about your privacy” thing was, aside from a big PR success, pretty much just a giant middle finger to Facebook, and its other data collecting competitors. Fuck Apple, fuck Facebook, fuck Google, fuck them all.

this speaks to me on an emotional level

Except Apple devs, of course. Apple can have all the data it wants.

“wifi”
uses RSS icon

shrug

firefox and google chrome nowadays use very similar amounts of resources. However, firefox is (for now) less cringe than google chrome.

How would you say Bitwarden compares?

Well, if you host a server, you can either host it on the cloud (which costs $$$), or you can host it by yourself (if you have a spare computer that you can just use as a server). If you host it yourself, all you’re really paying is the same stuff you already pay — internet and electricity.

Hosting a server for something like mumble, matrix, or lemmy only has the costs I mentioned above.

what’s PluralKit?

tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.

what’s PluralKit?

tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.