wat. “hard to get anything to run”? It’s probably hard if you’re completely new to it, yeah, but Is that just because you don’t know how to use proton and wine? were you trying to pirate linux native versions? Were you using a gaming-oriented distro? And do you know how that distro is supposed to work?

Most Linux distributions you’ve heard of before like, this year, are probably boring, “stable long term support” (out of date) corporate-office-based and programmer-friendly distros and trying to run games on them is like trying to run Windows games on Windows Server Edition. It’s a nightmare, because it’s not intended for gaming, and everything is going to feel like a horrible hack because it is and it sucks don’t do that.

Use Gaming distros for gaming. Use Windows versions of games. Don’t overthink it, pretend you’re on Windows. Forget you’re on even Linux, this is Windows 12 Nobara Edition. Let Proton and Wine and Bottles and launchers like Heroic handle the dirty work of actually managing all that shit for you. There are a few things you will need to figure out how to translate the Windows-focused installation instructions the lazy pirate guys tell you into Linux-compatible installation instructions, because nobody is going to do that for you. It’s not hard, it just takes a little bit of experience and knowledge, which you probably don’t have yet. But once you do, you’re off to the races and everything runs fine. There might be a few hiccups here and there, but there are when you’re first setting up Windows too. Most of the time, with most stuff, it just fucking works. Source: trust me bro.

I consider the article’s criticisms of SMTP, HTTP, XMPP, etc. (and IRC which was not mentioned but falls in the same category) to be positive and desirable traits and I think it’s a shame that the article characterizes them negatively. HTTP’s job is not to prevent corporate takeover of the web and I don’t think it should be. That’s our job, as people. The protocol’s job is to remain neutral so that when corporate takeover of the web happens, HTTP is still there, open to everybody, providing an offramp to escape it, because it’s neutral. It doesn’t belong to the corporations. It belongs to everybody. They can try to take it over if they wish, embrace and extend, but they can’t extinguish a fire that’s smoldering underground no matter how hard they try. It will always be there, ready to flare up at a moment’s notice. The original is always still there ready for us to revert to using it at any time.

And many of us already have. Fuck Google, fuck Cloudflare, fuck AWS, they’ll never take the web from us.

You might be underestimating how much damage a .22 round to can do to something, especially when that something is probably at least like 60% lithium ion battery by volume. Yeah, .22s are small by bullet standards and have low stopping power, but they’re still lethal.

That said, if you’ve got a 308 handy, that’ll work reliably too. You won’t be silencing it, but feel free to blow a hole clean through one of these machines and enjoy the fireworks when its battery lights off.

There are plenty of tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was tarded. She’s a pilot president now.

If it’s legally not considered copy-pasting their monsters, why do you feel like you can assert that it is plagiarism? I suppose that’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it, but I also think people have a right to call you out on it for saying it as if it’s a fact when it is not actually a recognized fact. Plenty of people would dispute that, including myself, and certainly Pocketpair would, and evidence suggests the courts probably would’ve agreed with them hence it wasn’t even worth pursuing legally.

I know I can probably find this specific link if I go hunting for it, but I’m wondering if anyone knows of a community/tracker/source where these sort of videos and torrents tend to get posted. I’m curious about lots of political data dumps and leaks, particularly Epstein related stuff, and even conspiracy stuff sometimes, even though I’m not super into conspiracies sometimes it’s interesting, and goddamn does Youtube get tiresome for that sort of content with its ‘unaliving’ and bleeping out ‘s**cide’ and all the tedious censorship. The post mentions the data hoarder subreddit, which I’ve lurked around before but a) reddit sucks and b) I’m wondering if there are alternatives.

It might be the end of GPL-type licenses. But, at least as far as I’ve understood it, the point of copyleft was to use copyright against itself in the first place, because copyright sucks, and at the end of the day we don’t really want copyright OR copyleft. They’re both asserting “ownership” of stuff that honestly belongs in the public domain free to all humans to use (in an ideal world, that doesn’t contain evil corporations that are considered people for some reason). We already know copyleft open source has been widely abused in proprietary software. This is not new nor surprising. We gave them the richly deserved middle finger whenever we could find out they did it before, and we hate it, but it was never “the end” of open source software because making it publicly available is precisely the defiance we are ultimately aiming for and we will always do that no matter how much they steal it and make it closed source.

People making closed source software are the enemy, and our war of freedom against them continues regardless of what tactics they use to demean our efforts while they make their closed source software. We will never let them win. They think they’ve found a new way around the GPL, that’s a shame, but so be it. The arms race will continue, but open source will not go away, because the point of it has nothing to do with meekly relying on the law to allow open source to exist, that’s just a method that has been used, with some success, and allowed a lot of people to turn it into a livelihood, and it will be a terrible shame to lose that.

Those things are not the true goal of open source though. The intention of open source, is to not let proprietary, hidden software dictate the fate of humanity and we will do it for as long as we have to. We’ll do it if we’re protected by copyleft, we’ll do it if we’re not. We’ll still do it even if they make it illegal, and we’ll call it reverse engineering, hacking, and piracy if we have to. Because the information and code that humanity relies on must be free, not owned.

It always gets dark before the dawn. This system sucks and is evil. I expect its collapse to be even more evil, but I’m looking forward to building something better.

Ironic that they have their repos hiding behind Cloudflare, then.

That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.

Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.

I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it’s essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

That’s different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can’t just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That’s required to get your next token or set of tokens.

They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.

I’ve been driving for 30 years. Do you want to guess how many times that’s happened to me?

Meanwhile, I’ve apparently been living in a totalitarian surveillance state for at least a few years now, and you know how many times that’s happened to me? I’ll give you a hint, it’s more than the number of times I’ve run over a nail causing me to drive around on low tire pressure without knowing it.

I’ll drink a cuba libre to that!

I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.

Systemd killed my father, but it’s okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.

I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.

I think it’s a fair criticism. The combat/random encounters are generally the most tedious part of any jRPG but certainly FF in particular. There are some really unique and interesting random battles or areas where the constant battling is intense and exciting rather than annoying, but they are rare.

Overall though, I think the rest of FF7 more than makes up for it. I can certainly understand not being able to get past that though, although I’m curious how far you got. The game goes through a lot of different “stages”, which is one of the things I like about it, but it means the gameplay while you’re stuck in Midgar is quite distinct from the open world, and becomes distinct again once you get access to the Golden Saucer, or the airship, or into Midgar again.

FF has been steadily turning from actual role playing games where the gameplay was once in the driver’s seat and the scenes and story add spice and flavor, to vaguely interactive “cinematic experiences” where the story being endlessly shoved down your throat is the purpose, and the gameplay is just a repetitive distraction from the real novelty which is the crazy stories and cutscenes they come up with.

Ironically FF7 itself was probably the beginning of that trend, thanks to the ability of Playstation CDs to hold so much FMV compared to the limits of ROMs at the time. They dove in headfirst and never looked back, and that came to define the franchise from that point forward. 3 Discs of FMV was pretty over-the-top for their first release on the platform, but the franchise’s addiction to relentless cinematics never waned, it only increased. And the relegation of gameplay being put in the passenger seat, then the back seat, then the trunk, then dragged behind the vehicle to its inevitable death as the art and story become the sole focus became more pronounced with each new entry in the series.

I loved FF7 (and 8, and somewhat less 9, and even 10, and 12 have some redeeming qualities) but the steady and continuous trend away from compelling gameplay towards visual spectacle is abundantly clear.

I haven’t played an FF game since 12, remakes or otherwise, and I don’t plan to. I’ve read the writing on the wall, and I see who they’re making games for, and it’s not me. Maybe it’s other people. Maybe it’s themselves, I don’t know. All I know is it’s not me. I have no interest.