millie
@millie@beehaw.org
- Comment on Catalyst 2 days ago:
You can wash your clothes, yes, but I’d still expect Mr Catalyst to have more than one outfit. Though to be fair maybe his closet is just full of the same plaid shirts.
- Comment on Catalyst 4 days ago:
Only the reactants ever change their clothes, and reactant 1 only changes after leaving the catalyst.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 5 days ago:
Nah, inability to produce the actual image is the point. All the “artist” did was type in a box, so that’s all the purchaser gets.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 5 days ago:
It would be kind of funny to offer AI schlock for sale and then give the buyer a framed copy of the prompt instead of the print itself
- Comment on Marvel Rivals Version 20250214 Patch Notes - Steam News (February 12, 2025) 6 days ago:
So… No one should ever give any feedback on what kinds of thread anyone else posts? Not sure I agree with that.
- Comment on Marvel Rivals Version 20250214 Patch Notes - Steam News (February 12, 2025) 6 days ago:
Because it’s populating my feed?
- Comment on Marvel Rivals Version 20250214 Patch Notes - Steam News (February 12, 2025) 6 days ago:
Agreed.
This is actually why I stopped using Startrek.website, though. One of their mods posts constant updates about STO. Honestly, I’m pretty sure he’s employed by STO.
- Comment on Marvel Rivals Version 20250214 Patch Notes - Steam News (February 12, 2025) 6 days ago:
To be fair, it is kind of odd to post patch notes. All sorts of games get new patches all the time. If people start making a habit of posting every set of patch notes for the games that they play, it’d very quickly become a substantial portion of the posts here.
Personally, if people were regularly spamming patch notes I’d probably eventually either block the community or block the poster.
- Comment on PeerTube, the YouTube Alternative has released version 7: complete UI overhaul based on User Experience Studies and Accessilibilty priorization (for impaired people) 1 week ago:
I would also like to know this. I’d rather not start making content only to realize I picked an instance with insufficient resources or that’s just going to disappear in a couple of months.
- Comment on CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google 1 week ago:
It is incredibly obvious that CAPTCHAs are at the very least a way of exploiting distributed labor to train AI.
- Comment on Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek 2 weeks ago:
This guy heard people talking about China being more repressive than the US and took it as a challenge.
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 weeks ago:
Your estimation of what constitutes “objective reality” is in fact the opinion that you’re being asked about.
- Comment on How to Be Bad at YouTube 3 weeks ago:
Nebula is a decent way to be bad at youtube. They don’t have too many people on it at the moment, but there are some decent ones. And at least they get a cut.
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 3 weeks ago:
I definitely agree that there are problems with some FOSS enthusiasts, but I don’t think it’s constructive to paint FOSS and FOSS enthusiasts as a whole based on their actions. To me, responding to problems involving diminishing the visibility of Linux and FOSS with “but why don’t you care about x” isn’t particularly constructive, and does little more than drive a wedge between people who think FOSS is a priority (but not their only priority) and people who place FOSS as a lower priority but who are otherwise natural allies.
In particular, the casting of open source devs focusing on what their own creative impulses drive them to make as ‘authoritarian’ is itself an attempt at authoritarian imposition. To take one’s own time out of one’s own day to code something is an act of creativity. FOSS is, by nature, less inclined to operate on a top-down model than corporate software development.
What you’re asking for isn’t a less hierarchical structure, it’s a more hierarchical structure. As it stands, open source devs create what they feel is best and you are, as they say, absolutely welcome to fork it. There’s nothing authoritarian about that. They’ve put their time in to create what they see the need for, and you literally are able to either go code additions you want to see yourself, roll back to earlier versions, or even hire someone to make it for you. You are not free to demand that they create what you want to see.
That isn’t them holding an authoritarian model over end-users, that’s them graciously handing out their hard work, their mental energy, indeed even their spoons, to the rest of us. The only authoritarian part of the conversation between end users making demands of developers and developers focusing on what they choose to spend their time on is the attempted authoritarian demands of end-users.
This is work that they literally give out for free. Not just the end product, but the source. If there’s a feature you want, you literally are welcome to add it. That is not the case with closed-source software. In fact, if you attempt to modify closed-source software and redistribute it, there’s a significant chance that you’ll end up with a lawsuit or at least a DMCA take-down notice on your hands.
Stallman is a creep. 100%. There are other creeps who code. 100%. But there are also all sorts of other people, including members of marginalized groups, who code. For some of them coding is something that helps them feel okay. For others it’s something that takes up a lot of the energy that they have. It is completely unfair to demand that they code what you want the way you want when you’re unwilling to do that yourself.
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 3 weeks ago:
I’m curious how this approach is meant to achieve solidarity. Can you elaborate on your thinking?
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 3 weeks ago:
You know, like, targeting leftist solidarity and looking for anywhere and everywhere to drive wedges. Wedge-like.
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 3 weeks ago:
Weird that you assume nobody who supports FOSS is helpful to any other leftist causes.
Kinda wedge-like.
- Comment on Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked 3 weeks ago:
I still can’t tell if this is sarcasm.
- Comment on Reviewers giving high scores to poorly optimised games really grinds my gears 3 weeks ago:
Not to say this necessarily isn’t the case, but are your drivers all up to date? I don’t know how often I’ve heard people complain about shitty performance or weird artifacts in a game only to hear that the player hasn’t updated their graphics card drivers in 8 months.
- Comment on Shein, AliExpress, Temu: More than 85% of products from Chinese platforms fail to meet EU regulations regarding health and safety 4 weeks ago:
As much as I am not remotely bothered by the banning of TikTok (which seems like it may well not go through anyway), maybe we should start with banning the sites that literally funnel a bunch of heavy metals into people’s mailboxes and cause actual known physical harm both to the naive people who still buy this stuff and to their neighbors, family members, and postal workers?
- Comment on Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco. 4 weeks ago:
I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.
But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don’t think it’s just that we’re in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.
- Comment on On Friday SCOTUS Will Decide Whether TikTok Can Be Banned; We Told It The First Amendment Says No 1 month ago:
Is it actually a free speech issue, though?
It’s not as though SCOTUS is trying to rule on whether to ban short-form video or content from particular person. The allegation in regard to TikTok isn’t ‘dangerous speech’, it’s the platform’s collection of user data and the manipulation of available content via an algorithm that they claim is a tool of a hostile foreign entity. Neither of those issues constitute ‘speech’ whether related to a foreign or domestic company.
It seems to me like this is being framed as a speech issue to protect other vendors with hostile algorithms. If Google were forced to stop pushing AI and paid results to the stop of its searches, would that be a free speech issue? If Facebook were forced to put more weight on users’ choices about what shows up on their feed rather than pushing dodgy political posts and paid advertisements, would that be a speech issue?
Honestly, deciding that toxic algorithms are protected speech seems like a much more dangerous precedent to me than coming to a conclusion that a company that’s beholden to a foreign entity that may be forcing it to engage in hostile intelligence operations and soft power can be restricted.
If someone made a piece of malware that ropes your PC into a botnet and uses it to perform DDOS attacks, would banning it be a speech issue if it happens to come in the form of a blogging platform? A chat client? A music sharing service?
Just having speech on a platform doesn’t mean everything that platform does qualifies as speech and requires first amendment protections.
- Comment on The Gentrification of Video Game History 1 month ago:
I’m a little confused by this. It seems like the question here itself is Anglocentric. These games presumably are being discussed if they’re big, just, like, in the places where they’re big. Japanese games are only discussed in the US because we have typically had a ton of ports of Japanese games. We do a lot of business with Japan, and many of our console game studios and even the consoles themselves are and were Japanese.
Nintendo, Sega, Sony, even Neogeo were all Japanese consoles. Other than Xbox, it’s tough to find an American console that was relevant in the US more recently than Atari and Colecovision. We had a lot of American computer games, cabinets, and developers for Japanese consoles, sure, but it’s not really surprising that Japan is featured prominently in the minds of American gamers.
Why would games that were released to markets that don’t port games to the US or advertise here be known here or discussed?
I’d imagine that Indian gamers very much see Indian games as part of their gaming history. Same with Vietnamese gamers and Vietnamese games, etc. Presumably they’re also better known in nearby countries and other places with overlapping languages or trade deals that involve localizations of their games.
There’s definitely some bias toward particular types of games getting attention vs not, and some of that is certainly rooted in sexism, but I’m not sure Americans mostly talking about games they actually have access to is quite the scandal this article wants to frame it as.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing some ports from countries that we don’t see many games getting much attention among gamers in the US and other primarily English speaking countries.
- Comment on Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South 1 month ago:
404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.
- Comment on Happy John Mastodon day to all who celebrate! 2 months ago:
I needed that. <3
- Comment on IRIS²: the new satellite constellation aimed at ensuring communications autonomy for the EU is launched today 2 months ago:
You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.
- Comment on Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be 2 months ago:
There is a world of difference between being excluded from spaces where you’re marginalized (such as society on the whole) and creating spaces where you aren’t marginalized. Does that make sense?
- Comment on Location Data Firm Offers to Help Cops Track Targets via Doctor Visits 2 months ago:
Cool, another paywall.
I miss the old Internet.
- Comment on Itch.io was taken down by funko pop 2 months ago:
I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
- Comment on TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal 2 months ago:
Honestly? Good.
I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. TikTok isn’t being banned because of the kind of speech that’s on there, it’s being banned because it’s a predatory app created as a means of soft power by a hostile foreign nation. Does that mean we should also shut down Twitter? Yeah. Probably.
This isn’t some newspaper with dissenting opinions, is a foreign intelligence operation that simultaneously interferes with the normal operation of our democracy, puts our citizens in danger, massively inflates narcissism, and collects our user data to hand to a country that literally is actively spying on us.
Frankly, I’d be okay with tossing any similar social media with obfuscated engagement algorithms anyway. Make YouTube and Facebook bring all that shit above board while we’re at it. All this is it’s corporate regulation, and I fully support it. Fuck TikTok.