tal

@tal@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitLab discovers widespread npm supply chain attack⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The malware continuously monitors its access to GitHub (for exfiltration) and npm (for propagation). If an infected system loses access to both channels simultaneously, it triggers immediate data destruction on the compromised machine. On Windows, it attempts to delete all user files and overwrite disk sectors. On Unix systems, it uses shred to overwrite files before deletion, making recovery nearly impossible.

  shred is intended to overwrite the actual on-disk contents by overwriting data in the file prior to unlinking the files. However, shred isn’t as effective on journalled filesystems, because writing in this fashion doesn’t overwrite the contents on-disk like this. Normally, ext3, ext4, and btrfs are journalled. Most people are not running ext2, save maybe on their /boot partition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently, all YouTube Rewinds have been unlisted as of today.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what YouTube Rewinds are, but are these them?

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFnXm6cjGwU&list=PLTTASUq…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patients clogging up A&E with hiccups, sore throats and niggles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, and almost no GP has an option to book appointments in advance, and those that do often have them weeks in advance.

  I’m in the US, but you guys also have private sector GPs, and those guys have dramatically-shorter waiting times than the NHS ones, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There were still many flat surfaces in the world that did not yet have advertisements displayed on them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best vertical games on Android?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Create Art for a Book?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, if you have or can create a LoRA trained on images of the character you’re presenting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Create Art for a Book?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My limited experience is that stable characters across a number of images are a weakness today, and I wouldn’t be confident that genAI is a great way to go about it. If you want to try it, here’s what I’d go with:

  • If you can get images with consistent outlines via some other route, you can try using ControlNet to do the rest of the image.

  • If you just need slight variations on a particular image, you can use inpainting to regenerate the relevant portions (e.g. an image with a series of different expressions).

  • If you want to work from a prompt, try picking a real-life person or character as a starting point, that may help, as models have been trained on them. Best is if you can get them at once point in time (e.g. “actor in popularmovie”). If you have a character description that you’re slapping into each prompt, only describe elements that are actually visible in a given image.

  I’ve found that a consistent theme is something that is much more achievable, in that you can add “by <artist name>” to your prompt terms for any artist that the model has been trained on a number of images from. If you’re using a model that supports prompt term weighting (e.g. Stable Diffusion), you can increase the weight here to increase the strength of the effect. Flux doesn’t support prompt term weighting (though it’s really aimed at photographic images anyway). It’s possible to blend multiple artists or genres as prompt terms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.

  Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was gonna say that he might simply not have been around when Red Alert 2 came out, but

  www.whitepages.com/name/…/Pl8a1drMk8b

  40s Age Range

  So he’s gotta be born no later than 1985.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert…

  Release: NA: October 25, 2000

  So he couldn’t have been younger than 15 at the game’s release (and could have been as old as 25).

  That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won’t have been born when it was released. Can’t just assume any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What actually constitutes "mildly infuriating" content?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for adding it!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly all drivers say headlights are too bright⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’d be entirely viable, even with tall vehicles, to place headlights low on the front.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also istheservicedown.com, but it also appears to rely on CloudFlare.

  There’s isitdownrightnow.com, which appears not to use CloudFlare.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What actually constitutes "mildly infuriating" content?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  !actuallyinfuriating

  Ah, yeah, thanks, though the community name is incorrect (needs an underscore) and is missing the instance name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What actually constitutes "mildly infuriating" content?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Note that Reddit spawned /r/ActuallyInfuriating for stuff that is more severe.

  Searching on lemmyverse.net shows that we do have an /r/ActuallyInfuriating analog at !ActuallyInfuriating@lemmy.world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually think that, while it’s maybe a fun topic for idle conversation…it doesn’t have a huge impact in the way traditional console pricing.

  With a traditional console, what the console vendor chooses to do is what you get. Maybe, as with Microsoft on the Series X/Series S, you get a high and low end model. All the games are made for that hardware, and whether the platform lives and dies depends on it.

  But…that’s not really true of the Steam Machine. It’s just another PC, albeit preconfigured for Steam and HTPC-oriented. If you want to get a lower-end PC or a higher-end PC, you have the option of getting one and running the same games on it and save some money or with a bit more visual bling. The games for PCs are already more or less written to scale up and down with hardware.

  And it’s not like Valve’s platform is gonna live or die based on the Steam Machine the way a traditional console generation is, where success of a hardware console is high-stakes for the manufacturer and the players in successfully getting a game library going. I’d guess that it might help them make strategic inroads into gaming in the living room. But even if it completely bombs, Valve is gonna keep right on going selling to people to run on PCs (and the Deck) and their game library isn’t going anywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump says he will likely sue the BBC for up to $5 billion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno. In the US, I’d say it wouldn’t go anywhere, as US law heavily favors the defendant (which would be BBC here) in a defamation suit, but English law has historically been exceptionally favorable to someone suing over defamation (here, Trump) than American law is, and this has actually led to some major disagreements in the past.

  At one point, there were so many people trying to engage in venue shopping trying to find ways to sue over US works from the UK’s legal jurisdiction that the US passed a law saying that it wouldn’t recognize defamation lawsuits from courts that didn’t extend at least as much protection as the First Amendment did precisely for this reason, which was an exceptional situation.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law

  English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright. In the United States, the 2010 SPEECH Act makes foreign libel judgements unenforceable and unrecognisable by U.S. courts if they don’t comply with U.S. protections for freedom of speech and due process, which was made largely in response to the English laws.[3]

  There were some revisions made to English law in response as well, so the situation has changed somewhat, but I don’t know to the degree:

  The Defamation Act 2013 substantially changed English defamation law in recognition of these concerns, by narrowing the criteria for a successful claim, mandating evidence of actual or probable harm, and enhancing the scope of existing defences for website operators, public interest, and privileged publications. The 2013 law applies to causes of action occurring after its commencement on 1 January 2014.[4]

  kagis

  This article says that he probably can’t, just because he’s waited too long to do so:

  newsweek.com/why-donald-trump-bbc-defamation-clai…

  Mark Stephens CBE, a leading international media lawyer at Howard Kennedy LLP based in London, said that under British law, any attempt to sue in the United Kingdom is already out of time. “In the UK, his defamation claim is out of time. He had until midnight on October 27, 2025, to file, after which he can’t sue—it’s time-barred,” he said.

  Britain’s one-year statute of limitations for libel cases would therefore prevent a domestic filing.

  reads further

  Oh, wait. He’s threatening to sue in Florida. Yeah, I don’t think that that’d succeed.

  Trump’s lawyers have indicated that the case would be brought in Florida, where he resides.

  In Florida, the statute of limitations for defamation (libel or slander) is two years from the date of first publication.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_defamation_law

  In 1964, however, the court issued an opinion in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) dramatically changing the nature of libel law in the United States. In that case, the court determined that public officials could win a suit for libel only if they could demonstrate “actual malice” on the part of reporters or publishers. In that case, “actual malice” was defined as “knowledge that the information was false” or that it was published “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not”. This decision was later extended to cover “public figures”, although the standard is still considerably lower in the case of private individuals.

  Trump would qualify as a public figure, so it’s really hard for him to win defamation suits.

  The Newsweek article I linked to also says that because the content in question wasn’t intentionally displayed in Florida, Florida courts probably wouldn’t have jurisdiction in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Spiral-Obsessed AI 'Cult' Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

  The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and occasionally “hello” and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

  Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Spiral-Obsessed AI 'Cult' Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

  Well, they don’t have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn’t have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

  You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

  Not much space to do anything akin to thinking. Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You could probably put a 400 Wh powerbank in a backpack (search for “power station” on Amazon).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  depending on their sales expectations they could legit make this a loss leader.

  I don’t think they will. The problem is that the hardware is open.

  Closed-system console vendors can sell at a loss because if you’ve bought the console and don’t buy games from them for it, you’re going to have limited use of it. It’s maybe an expensive Blu-Ray player or something. Not a sensible purchase. You’re gonna buy games for it.

  So they can just crank up the price of games and make their return over time from games.

  But if the Steam Machine is sold at a loss to undercut mini-PCs, then people will also buy it to use it as a regular mini-PC, and Valve doesn’t make a return from them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, gotcha, so it’s middleman overhead. Thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

  Thanks, but I don’t think that it’ll do it for me. I’ve tried similar packages before, and the problem is that I also want the ability to input a bunch of Unicode characters and use keys in terminal emulators and so forth. I’ve considered doing a soft keyboard myself, even, but I just can’t work up the will to go develop for Android with Google slowly closing some stuff. I think that my long-run trajectory is to move what I can to a Linux laptop and hope that GNU/Linux phones eventually become a practical alternative to Android.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on thr Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.

  pcgamer.com/…/steam-frame-specs-availability/

  The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.

  I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen other people request SteamOS-as-a-general-OS on here too, which also surprised me.

  I’m thinking that it’s one of two things:

  • People just want something that they’re sure is easy to use.

  • People want an HTPC-oriented configuration.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have it off on my phone at the moment because my soft keyboard is enaging in shennanigans, and I will say that I didn’t appreciate how many errors that I make on tiny phone keyboards that it fixes until now. I mean, damned if you do, damned if don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The steam machine sounds intriguing but there is already a big market for mini PCs and I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box. I’m most skeptical about this one

  You might not be the target audience. I’m comfortable building an HTPC and putting an OS and all on it and configuring it, but the benefit of a console is that someone just gets an all-in-one setup. Well, and that game developers are specifically testing against.

  Like, if it weren’t a barrier, you’d probably just have everyone using PCs instead of consoles in their living room.