Christian

My train of thought after seeing this:

1. I wonder if at this point an adversary ever deliberately starts arguments for intel.

2. Man, what if fake documents get leaked to throw off my imagined adversary.

3. Imagine the internal reaction from the org putting out the fake leak when someone replies to call them out on their bullshit by posting the authentic documents.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

Yeah, I think someone deciding they don’t want to take a review seriously if it’s by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you’re poor and paying for games, you can’t get something new every day so you’d often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.

I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It’s still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I’m visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone’s knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.

Yeah I don’t have an answer for the thing you’re actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don’t value free software enough to use a free operating system.

And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn’t be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don’t want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you’ve created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.

As an aside it’s my preferred player on linux, good software.

Mike Johnson says the healthcare program leads to “able-bodied young men” playing videogames instead of working

Everyone else has already pointed out the obvious point that free healthcare does not exist here, but you’ve at least gotta give it to him that this is a reasonable conclusion to draw given that “able-bodied young men” would surely be the least likely among us to get by without access to healthcare.

Which is why they said the issue was torrenting and not using too much data. It’s an unlimited plan and they would never think to put a limit on data usage. They just object to torrenting and it’s pure coincidence that they only object to that when someone is using a lot of data.

I remember reading that the most significant impact DRM has is on security research. Individuals don’t care about bypassing DRM, but an organization is not going to fund anything involving it because of the legal concern. So if a researcher wants to look into a file format behind DRM, or the DRM mechanism itself, being used as an attack vector, that’s not going to get funding.

The defense that companies will make is that they’re happy to grant exceptions in these cases, but in practice the company will make the exceptions as narrow as possible to err on the side of maintaining as much control as possible, while a research organization will want to err on the side of avoiding potential grey areas, meaning the exceptions are inevitability too restrictive to allow much of anything to come of them.

“The problem”, I explain, “is that the mods have no lives”, to conclude my essay on how using a forum introduces a risk that could potentially shave precious seconds off someone’s speedrun.

I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.

I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.

I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)

87.1tb of books is very little?? Have I just been downloading the smallest size pdf and djvu files by pure luck?

I misread that as Radeon 9700 for a second and thought I had jumped back in time twenty years.

I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four “pipelines” and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.

After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You’d read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.

I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn’t happen.

I haven’t written next week’s notes yet.

I swear even the time I finally won I successfully clawed at Scar’s face over a thousand times before I realized you just throw him off the cliff.

Same here, played it about a month ago, fun idea at its core that’s executed extremely well, very memorable. Unfortunately it’s very short, probably around ten hours for me to complete everything, but it have might gotten stale if it went on too far beyond that without significant gameplay alterations. Probably like 70-80% a puzzle game, 20-30% action. My only complaint is that I don’t really like hearing all the terrified screams, but I’m not sure those could be removed without destroying the immersion.

Different genre, but another indie game I want to mention is Eastward, which is actually something I tried playing after seeing a poster here on lemmy give glowing praise just a week or two after it came out. I think it’s the best pixel art I’ve ever seen. The dialogue and story are wonderful overall, heartwarming at times and creepy at others. The charcters have personality. Overall the appeal for me is that there’s a lot of emotion packed into every aspect of the game.

I think the gameplay is fun, but that’s not the reason the game is memorable and the main complaint people have is that there are many long stretches that are just building atmosphere with minimal gameplay. I didn’t mind that at all, but I was disappointed with how much of the story was up for inperpretation after beating it. I spent most of the game excited to see how the loose ends and parts of the story I didn’t get would be tied together, so it was a let-down when the game ended and most of those questions just weren’t answered.

Live look at Millennials’ response to Gen Z mocking their cringe memes about being better than the younger generation.

Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.

Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.

I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:

And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.

I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.

I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

It really bugs me when people don’t comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.