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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Has this story ever been confirmed by Target directly? As this happened in America and her father was outraged about it, it would have been awfully convenient, to “blame” the algorithm for “discovering”, she was pregnant. It takes quite a data analyst to figure out trends before someone even knows they are pregnant. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a pattern for someone if they know they are pregnant and are just hiding it from their dad.



  • Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

    There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

    The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

    I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.


  • Are you actually downloading all the stuff from GoG locally? I hear this argument often and it is a good one in principle. Until you try to backup a large library. Before I got my Steamdeck I bought a lot from GoG as well and set up a script to backup to my NAS a few times a year. My GoG library is considerably smaller than my Steam library (~60 games vs. ~1.000 games) and it is still taking up multiple TBs on my NAS, even though I’m only backing up windows .exes. If GoG would go under suddenly, I don’t think a lot of people will have their library backed up, nor can back up their library fast and sufficiently enough to make a difference. The true utility of Steam and other online platforms may be their storage capacity.






  • Not OP, but most famous recent example: Alicia Vikander’s neck for Tomb Raider poster. Everything recent with Brad Pitt (more like “The Chin” on the poster of “Once Upon … in Hollywood”). Nobody can convince me all the actors on the Justice League (Whedon’s JL) poster to be real, these are Madame Tussaud’s figures. Ocean’s 8 had a lot of waxy posters as well. The list goes on, I noticed this trend as well.


  • I play only one game from Acti-Blizz regularly which is CoD, since most of my friends play in religiously (time for new friends?). And it is treated so badly by Activision, I hope MS fixes this. I know all the highbrow arguments against consolidation. But I don’t care for Diablo or WoW (sorry) and the one game I play can only win from MS acquisition (impossible to treat it any worse). So I personally want this to go through already.



  • If you know the basics of AWS/Azure/Cloudhosting (spin up VM, create users, login via ssh, register URL, etc.): really low (1-3) with the ansible recipe. With docker not much higher if you know the basics about docker that is.

    If cloudhosting is not your forte, but are reasonably skilled in basic linux navigation, configuration, and upkeep use a Hoster that is doing a lot for you like DigitalOcean and read their tutorials. Since you still don’t need to configure a lot the challenge rises to a 4-5 maybe.

    If you have never heard of hosting nor Linux it still isn’t the most difficult project to start learning to do these things. Setting up rises to a 6 or something. But keeping a Linux server running over an extended period of time is much harder than setting one up. Maintenance is difficult compared to a MacBook or something, so be prepared to read up on backup and restore docker containers and volumes and how to keep your instance reasonably updated without breaking your server. This would still not rise the difficulty above a 7.

    Small disclaimer: In the past I have used alts and burners on Reddit all the time. I have the best intentions to keep my instance up to date and running smoothly, but if something catastrophic would happen, due to me meddling with stuff, I’d shut it down and start from scratch. I’m not clinging for my comments I wrote drunk at 03:00 AM.