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wizardbeard

@ wizardbeard @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
8
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983
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers "illegal" in Stop Killing Games hearing: "We consider it piracy", we have lawsuits.

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  • They do.

    However there are a large number of servers that utilize plugins to strip out Microsoft's invasive chat monitoring where you can get banned from all online play for saying no no words, regardless of the rules of the actual server you're on. There's more nuance to it than that, but there are a lot of ways the Microsoft chat reporting system is being abused right now. There was even an exploit recently that allowed people to send fake chat message data back to Microsoft to get arbitrary users banned for things they never said. So Microsoft says "we're doing this thing to address concerns about online content and predators" and major servers go "Microsoft you're just making things worse".

    Additionally, there are "offline servers" that use mods to patch out all communication with Microsoft/Mojang/Minecraft systems, and various other pieces of code that attempt to enforce only paid players joining a server, ultimately allowing people to connect without having actually purchased the game.

    While this politician is full of shit, I can understand the fervor. Especially if they have a Minecraft playing kid.

    To give an example of the state of some of the most popular servers, there is one heavily customized server that allows for effectively any client-side mods to be run on it. It has one of the largest developed maps of any server ever, and effectively allows hacking. There are entire sub-sub-sub communities making mods just for this server to help streamers hide details of how the block textures are randomly rotated that could give away base locations. It's absurd.

    Anyway, someone recently did a massive coding project figuring out how they could back up the whole map as a regular user. They also did some data analytics on the map. One of the data points was amount of "5x5 obsidian pinwheels", better known as swastikas.

    Sure, it's edgy internet assholes, but it's definitely an image issue that Microsoft would love to have useful idiots like this guy paper over.

  • Storage?! In this economy!?

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  • Wish my company allowed that. Everything goes to a licensed secure destruction service that literally puts them through an industrial shredder. Awesome to watch, but wasteful as all hell.

  • Storage?! In this economy!?

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  • Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I'm going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn't as permanent as it was cracked up to be.

    There's plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.

  • It's everywhere

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  • You'll never develop your own skills in that type of communication, it's incredibly obvious when someone uses LLM output in that manner, and many people consider it incredibly rude to use it that way.

  • So that's what the headsets were for

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  • It doesn't make a bit of difference, the balls are inert

  • Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting

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  • I get that per Wikipedia, the source of these is:

    In the Spring 2003 issue of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, Laurence W. Britt, who is described as "a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator" published "Fascism Anyone?", which included a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism.

    But you have to get that a random unsourced image of white text on a black background is some real "trust me bro" Facebook shares from Grandma type shit.

    Getting tired of "it's okay when our side does it because we're right, but we'll clown on it when the bad people do it because they're wrong". Just be better.

    And while I'm complaining, the source of these is a fucking editorial by someone with no actual credentials or qualifications to declare this shit. Now it's being passed around online like it's certifiable fact because it sounds accurate.

    All of those are problems. All of those are bad. What is happening in the USA is bad. But muddying the waters by taking random bullshit like this as certified fucking fact only makes talking about shit harder, as everyone has their own set of things they think are truth, most of which have been latched on to for no reason more than "it sounds right and reinforced my beliefs".

    Grumble grumble grumble

  • “Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisis

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  • It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively "modern" titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.

  • Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says

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  • You worked places with style guides? Did... Did you have a real testing environment that wasn't prod too?

    I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn't even discussed if we wanted/needed.

    If you can't tell me how it works, you can't confirm that we actually need it, you can't tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don't exist), and you can't even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there's a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.

    Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.

  • Favorite open source game?

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  • Running my own fediverse instance for the people who need it the most

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  • Depending on the legality and safety of doing so, you may also want to look into tech for avoiding censorship and oppresive regimes.

    Things like TOR, running your own DNS server, etc.

    Edit: I didn't want to just leave this vague, so I looked up the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense guide hoping for some better specifics, but unfortunately it looks like it's mainly about making security plans, understanding your risk profile, using secure settings on your personal devices, using signal, using TOR, and selecting "the VPN that's right for you".

    Like you really have a choice of "the VPN right for you" when they shut down things to only approved in/out IPs.

    There might be useful info there, but it wasn't quite what I was hoping to point you at, sorry.

    Considering the risks involved with hosting something like this, I would probably start with research on how you could host this safely/anonymously. That would be my first priority. Can't help people if they take you out.

    Next step would be looking at piefed/Lemmy or whatever systems you're thinking about hosting and identifying what features/logs/etc you would need to disable, modify, or set up to clear themselves automatically so that you wouldn't have information worth going after in the first place.

  • Worth it

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  • I did when I was younger. Had better fine motor skills with my "primary" hand. Eventually as I started playing more PC games and using computers at school more I got tired of always having to move the mouse around and having to reconfigure keybinds for every game (where it was even possible to do so). So I adapted to right handed mouse somewhere around 14 years old.

    Beyond that, in my time in IT support, I think I encountered only three people who did left handed mice.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Pfeces, purine, and ptoilet ptissue

  • The fight against AI datacenters isn’t just about tech – it’s about democracy - Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decis…

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  • Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it's cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.

  • Microsoft Teams is getting a controversial location tracking feature that users may hate

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  • It's one of the better ones, and basic functionality is braindead, but I've definitely found some pain points.

    • My work requires us to use company branded video chat backgrounds 🤮. Whatever way my co-worker deployed them, they aren't available through the mobile app.
    • There's a feature to create unified groups (Teams groups) with membership lists hidden from non-members. It is only available through PowerShell.
    • Got users that want to use their group like a distribution list? They all have to personally choose to subscribe to incoming email. You can set the group to auto-subscribe new members, but subscribing existing members requires some basic PowerShell fuckery.
    • Sharepoint backend for file sharing. Less said about that shit the better.
    • If a user's display name updates, how it syncs to different places that display their name in Teams and how long that takes is inconsistent as all hell.
    • Better hope you never get a ticket from your legal team to pull chat history. Pain in the ass to do, horrid fucking output format.
    • No way I've found to disable the damn upsell "Get Premium" button. Granted I haven't checked in a while.

  • China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ degrees amid race to embrace AI era

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  • Paywall. What is visible indicates cuts to arts and languages degrees.

  • Microsoft Teams is getting a controversial location tracking feature that users may hate

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  • Lol, are you kidding? IT gets to experience the suck of using it, and of administrating it. For as bad as the front end of Microsoft stuff is, the back end is usually worse.

  • What do you know of something like this?

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  • Yeah, this particular "orbiting circles" thing is somewhat common in sci-fi media, even the "it lines up and stops" part.

    I think that's likely why you're getting negative responses. People look at your (neat) animation and go "oh, look generic sci-fi macguffin" but see you acting like you think it's some sort of hidden or alien knowledge then think you're a crackpot.

  • Personal Pizza Party

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  • Only 6?

  • Why Do Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Someone Named ‘Elias Thorne’?

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  • Elias Thorne, goblins and ghouls, is there somewhere all these "sticky topics" have been aggregated?

  • Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages

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  • fun fact: a few months before the big crowdstirke incident, they did the same thing to their Linux customers. I can only assume it didn't make headlines due to lower adoption rates and what I suspect was far easier remediation.