ilinamorato
@ilinamorato@lemmy.world
- Comment on Amazon develops methods for inserting ads onto any flat surface in an existing video 2 days ago:
I’ve been ad-free for long enough at this point that I feel physically assaulted when I see one (at a friend’s house or whatever). It’s insane that we ever thought that was ok, and it’s become worse.
At this point, adblock is a survival measure. Piracy is self-defense. The first presidential candidate who campaigns on legalizing graffiti on billboards and mandating their eventual removal gets my vote. Burn it all.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 3 days ago:
Definitely a fair point. But for the most part, being in the country that collapses is going to be worse than being in a different country.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 3 days ago:
This is just me, and I’m no expert. But I kind of think that, if you’re legitimately worried about your country’s currency collapsing, you might want to consider leaving your country. Any sort of collapse that leads to hyperinflation or the large-scale elimination of financial infrastructure is probably going to be difficult if not impossible for the average person to survive, gold or no.
That said, precious metals are a niche enough market that I can’t imagine it not being rife with predatory sellers; companies that aren’t offering scams per se—you’ll probably pay them and receive what you pay for—but companies which are counting on people not knowing anything about the market and accepting a terrible price or poor quality goods.
Again, not an expert. But my end-of-the-world investment would be in shelf-stable food, easily-stored seeds (for planting), medicine, hand tools, high-quality camping gear, books, that sort of thing. If there is a collapse, those sorts of things will be immediately useful and also tradeable.
- Comment on This Minecraft map that recreates, [Kowloon Walled City], one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design 1 week ago:
I think part of what you’re saying is why the Kowloon build can’t deliver that, though.
- Comment on This Minecraft map that recreates, [Kowloon Walled City], one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design 1 week ago:
It’s a very good summary of the article. The things the author reconsidered were pretty nuanced, and trying to describe them in a headline without making the headline even longer than it is.
Would you have liked this better?
“This Minecraft map that recreates Kowloon Walled City, one of history’s most notorious slums, made me realize that 3D level design isn’t just about the complexity or the environmental challenge, but about the internal lives of the people who live there and the way that the game implies a greater reality that exists beyond the confines of the camera’s field of view”
Because that’s too long to fit in a tweet.
- Comment on This Minecraft map that recreates, [Kowloon Walled City], one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design 1 week ago:
I read the article. It appears to deliver on the promise of the headline pretty completely. The headline also isn’t sensationalized or misrepresentative of the content. Are you just upset because it sounds a little bit like a LinkedIn status in its construction?
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 1 week ago:
Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.
It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.
- (Yes, I know that even those “good” examples are complicated. I’m just forming an example here)
- Comment on Is it completely impossible to do age verification without compromising privacy? 2 weeks ago:
That…seems so obvious, now that you say it.
- Comment on Is it completely impossible to do age verification without compromising privacy? 2 weeks ago:
That’s not about Bob trusting Grace specifically (that’s a premise of the entire operation), it’s about trusting that the letter Alice handed Bob was actually signed by Grace.
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
Well and truly noted. I was unaware until I got called out on it, so the whole experience has made me wonder how often I do that sort of thing without realizing it.
Pretty hypocritical on my part, since I’m usually on team hey-actually-read-it-before-you-comment.
- Comment on Is it completely impossible to do age verification without compromising privacy? 2 weeks ago:
That could very well work, yes; but I think that would require Bob verifying Grace’s signature, and that would require trusting that Grace didn’t make a unique signature that she only used for Alice, and making a note of who verified it.
There might be a way to verify those signatures with public keys in a way that didn’t require Bob to tell Grace that he was verifying the signature, which is still rattling around in my brain.
- Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 2 weeks ago:
Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!
- Comment on Is it completely impossible to do age verification without compromising privacy? 2 weeks ago:
I’m inclined to say no. Reducing the problem down to its most basic parts: Alice is authorized to talk to Bob, but Bob doesn’t know that. How can Alice prove it?
Bob has to assume that anyone asking to talk to him could be Mallory, who isn’t authorized to talk to him but will always answer “yes” if asked whether she is. So the authorization he gets has to be from a trusted third party; it can’t come from Alice.
Grace is a trusted third party. If Alice doesn’t care about privacy, and is okay with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob and with Bob knowing Alice’s identity, Alice can just tell Bob, “here’s proof that I’m Alice. Show this to Grace and she’ll confirm that I can be here.” This is SSO, essentially.
If Alice doesn’t want Bob to know who she is, but is ok with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob, she can ask Grace to give her a secret code, and give that code to Bob, who can check with Grace to know whether or not that code corresponds to someone who is authorized.
If Alice doesn’t want Grace to know that she’s talking to Bob, though, she runs into a problem. Because there’s no way for Grace to send Bob a message without knowing who Bob is, he can’t ask anonymously, and because there’s no way for Grace to confirm that Alice is authorized without knowing who she is, Grace will always know that Alice has asked for authentication to talk to Bob.
Adding Dave in as a trusted fourth party could solve the problem—Alice asks Dave to check with Grace, and lock his answer in a bag with a unique key that only Dave has. Then Grace could give the bag to Bob, who doesn’t need to know who Grace is to pass the bag to Dave and ask him to unlock it. But Alice would be trusting that Dave won’t keep records on which bag corresponds to which person.
I don’t think that’s a surmountable problem. I’ll have to think about it some more.
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
Nope, you’re right. I just read the words and assumed it was one of the terrible ones.
This one is just…math.
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
You’re right. I honestly just assumed it was one of those intentionally engagement-baiting posts when I saw it and didn’t even process the problem itself.
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
In fairness, this one isn’t nearly as bad as most of the ambiguous problems that get passed around on Facebook with multiple parentheticals and such.
Your word problem is excellent.
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
Whoa, you went from 0 to 100 on rage super quick. You ok buddy?
- Comment on I dunno 2 weeks ago:
it’s
a badly
written
math
problem
Seriously, every time this comes up and everyone makes a huge deal out of it, I keep thinking, “none of the people writing these better be teachers.” You have to be more clear than this.
- Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves 2 weeks ago:
Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said.
The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you “press A to jump!” (Cool thanks, yeah, I’ve been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I’m pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you’ve never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn’t even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.
- Comment on il boohoo 2 weeks ago:
That makes sense. This was probably in the mid-00s or early 10s.
- Comment on il boohoo 2 weeks ago:
In my city, there’s a guy who owns a local gun store chain. (Or maybe owned—I dunno, he was old in the 90s, he’s probably not around anymore.) He’s locally infamous for his crazy white hair and his creepy chuckle on TV commercials where he says “I don’t wanna make any money, I just love to sell guns. Heh heh heh.”
Anyway, one day I was driving home and I saw him in the flesh. He was driving a pretty expensive convertible, with his distinctive white hair and a vanity plate with his name on it. I pulled up beside him at a stop light, and he looked like the saddest, most depressed person I’ve ever seen. Not in a personal tragedy way, just in a life sucks way.
It’s tough to feel sorry for him. He’s clearly quite rich, and he made that money selling death machines. But that look of being dead inside, on a face I only ever associated with that creepy chuckle, driving a luxury vehicle, has stuck with me.
- Comment on What's the name of this 80s song sang by a solo female singer? I only remember her saying "nothing really maaaa-tters" or "nothing truly maaaatt-ers". Has a vibe like I Feel For You by Chaka Kahn 3 weeks ago:
I assume it’s not, but are you thinking of the end of the first part of Bohemian Rhapsody?
- Comment on forbidden dots 4 weeks ago:
Amazing work.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 4 weeks ago:
Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
This. It might be financially difficult, but you know what’s harder financially? Mental breakdowns, hospital stays, divorce cases, jail time. All of those are on the table when you work that much. Quit your job if you can, take as long a vacation as you can afford, remember why you enjoy your family’s company, and then ease your way back into working—at a reasonable schedule.
It’s not a cure-all. You probably still need therapy (there are places that offer grants and assistance with counseling). But a good work-life balance makes everything else feel like something you can handle.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 5 weeks ago:
They’re offloading authentication to your email provider. It’s basically quick and cheap oauth. I think it’s because they’re trying to avoid being a vector for a data breach.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 5 weeks ago:
Most phone OSes now have a “lockdown mode” which temporarily disables biometric authentication until you use a PIN to unlock it.
- Comment on How did we go from being against fake pictures of the moon to accepting things like changing out the entire sky? 5 weeks ago:
I don’t like the sky replacement stuff and never use it, but I can imagine that it’s because a photo of the moon is a photo of the moon, while a photo with sky replacement is a photo of something else where the sky just happens to be in the background. Pretty substantial difference.
One is a touch-up. The other is just replacing my photo with a better photo.
- Comment on How did we go from being against fake pictures of the moon to accepting things like changing out the entire sky? 5 weeks ago:
The difference was before, it didn’t make the fuzzy moon a clear moon when they took a photo. It was a misleading ad for a feature the phone didn’t actually have.
No, it did. The “feature” was actually released.
- Comment on Scientists have been studying remote work for four years and have reached a very clear conclusion: “Working from home makes us thrive” 1 month ago:
There are no tools that can sufficiently replace what the office offers: interaction, chance conversation, camaraderie and socialising with the people with whom you’re trying to build The Thing.
I don’t know what kind of magical offices you’ve been working in, but my experience of offices have had none of those things. Interaction is almost exclusively sports-related. Chance conversation is basically just centered around “can you believe this guy?” Socializing actively avoids any discussion of The Thing or its building.
I’m glad you’re having a good time in the office, but none of that stuff sounds like any office I’ve ever worked in. People would walk in, put their headphones on, sit at their desk for three and a half hours, and go get lunch.
And don’t get me started on the whole “overemployment” trend, where people try to hold down two jobs by doing neither well at all. Yet another “perk” of remote work I guess.
I have a lot of trouble believing that’s something that has ever actually happened in any meaningful amount. I remember seeing a few news stories about it, but they all came from dubious sources and sounded like they were written to capture the attention and suspicion of middle managers, but were light on any real evidence. I feel like most of the ones I’ve seen were about the same random guy who got caught basically right away and fired from both jobs.