millie

@millie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Happy John Mastodon day to all who celebrate!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I needed that. <3

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IRIS²: the new satellite constellation aimed at ensuring communications autonomy for the EU is launched today⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool, another paywall.

  I miss the old Internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io was taken down by funko pop⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NHS hospitals gear up to get cyberattack systems back online • The Register⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s good to hear that soon the NHS will be capable of launching cyber attacks again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bitcoin man sues Newport council over '£600m fortune lost in tip' - BBC News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, buddy. I lost a bitcoin on an old hard drive too. That’s like, where most bitcoin are. So what?

  That’s like saying that you thought about investing in Apple in 1995 but forgot to actually call a broker. Nobody cares that someone gave you a free bitcoin when they first came out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Silent but Deadly: I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.

  The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.

  There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.

  For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.

  It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, US prosecutors argue | Business and Economy News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I would be stunned if the DoJ knows the difference between Chrome and Chromium.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this thing bite? haha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a joke about them being armed, and maybe another about them not being armed? It’s hard to tell from the tone of the article. Do these things have guns?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Really Dark Truth About Bots.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We absolutely have this problem on Lemmy too. Even on Beehaw. Hell, there’s a particularly high profile user here who posted constantly and focused squarely on spoiling potential Democrat votes who utterly disappeared the moment he was told by staff to knock it off. All other engagement dropped off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Omg this is such a helpful comment! Good job! <3

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.

  Get rid of fucking Pepe? …Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like… have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.

  People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I’m not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what’s happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There’s a pretty good argument to be made that that’s literally its purpose at this point.

  Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Large language models not fit for real-world use, scientists warn — even slight changes cause their world models to collapse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city’s website doesn’t specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn’t actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fake Or Real?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

  On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we’d be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling ‘beings’ that aren’t actually aware of anything at all.

  That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Freevee sent to Amazon graveyard⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Amazon Graveyard sounds like a subscription service for apps that have been discontinued. Not like, a service that lets you keep using them, but you just get to have defunct apps that don’t work and pay Amazon for the pleasure.

  Only $14.99 per month! One IP per subscription!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Not a Scam 😂:’ Caitlyn Jenner Is Being Sued For Memecoin Securities Fraud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t drag the rest of us into her shit. Being trans has nothing to do with why she’s a shitty person. We’re not here to beg for your approval before we get to be who we are, and we don’t need it. Pick another hill.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To appease a Steam user's demands for straight representation, Webfishing added a 'Straight' title that costs 9,999 fish bucks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Spam G in support.

  Meow meow meow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it seems like you’re just kind of asserting that it will be there. Just repeating it doesn’t make it more true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.

  An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat the same pattern more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.

  If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter is.

  You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"EU-Linux:" Petition calls for the implementation of an EU-Linux operating system in public administrations across all EU countries⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a world of difference between interconnectedness and an enforced monoculture of dependencies on a wide range of insecure repos maintained by hobbyists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"EU-Linux:" Petition calls for the implementation of an EU-Linux operating system in public administrations across all EU countries⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not, though. It’s a much wider potential for failure, as there are a great number of dependencies that are often left to individual developers to maintain. That may be a somewhat reasonable amount of risk when you’ve got multiple options for dependencies and no major target, but when the entire EU relies on single individual maintainers? That’s a massively exploitable threat vector. It would be absurd to assume no one will take advantage given what we’ve already seen.

  It would be an extremely foolish move to put the whole EU’s security on one single set of open source dependencies. Microsoft at least has a financial and legal incentive to try to prevent straight up breaches by state actors, shitty as they may be. There’s no such resource allocation or responsibility when it comes to open source repos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Considering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren’t Hamlet? I’m honestly not fully convinced that you’d necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"EU-Linux:" Petition calls for the implementation of an EU-Linux operating system in public administrations across all EU countries⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, but when’s the last time someone created a security vulnerability by sneakily taking over a Windows dependency controlled by a single developer after pressuring them into handing the keys over with a bunch of sockpuppets?