t3rmit3
@t3rmit3@beehaw.org
- Comment on Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad? 5 days ago:
Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.
- Comment on Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad? 5 days ago:
itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they were competing with Desura, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.
- Comment on Oh No! Now A Federal Bill Wants OS-Level Age Verification for Everyone in the USA 1 week ago:
State-level bills have heretofore only required OSes to ask a user if they are of majority age. A federal bill is likely (based on the groups backing and who proposed it) to require OSes to validate (i.e. have users prove, not just assert) their ages.
Depending on what mechanisms are mandated, and who they target punishment at, it could lock 99% of users (who are not willing or capable to use means to bypass this) into tying all their actions online to a government-run database.
It’s not enough that means to bypass it exist; the government shouldn’t be able to mandate this kind of control, and shouldn’t be propagating the expectation that this behavior and level of control is normal or acceptable.
- Comment on ChatGPT’s latest stylistic quirk is sinister, infuriating – and absolutely everywhere 1 week ago:
“Power isn’t given, it’s taken.” - Malcolm xAI
This is something I see my partner’s high school students having to deal with now: the suspicion that competence or intelligence must indicate AI use. It feels like when dumb film writers or directors make non-MC character unbelievably dumb to make the MC look smart (cough BBC Sherlock cough), but applied to real life.
- Comment on Stop Killing Games throw weight behind California bill that would force companies to either keep games working independently after server shutdowns or issue refunds 1 week ago:
I think the assumption is that buy-to-play MMOs tend to be less microservice-based or ‘cloud native’ than subscription ones, such that they are more likely to already feature a monolithic server application. They’re probably thinking games like ARK: SE, and DayZ, rather than Guild Wars. In reality, some sub-based MMOs have monolithic servers (e.g. Mabinogi), and some buy-to-own MMOs have distributed architectures.
This was probably also an easier sell to politicians, by saying, “hey, they said they sold the whole game for that price, so why can they not deliver the whole game, server included?” With a subscription, it becomes harder from a business ‘rights’ perspective to argue that a player who paid for e.g. 1 month of a subscription immediately before the game is retired should be allowed to then own and operate the full game indefinitely, and then becomes a sort of, “how long paying the sub is long enough to ‘own’ the game?” debate. This is especially important because it could impact a lot of non-game software as well, so politicians are much more likely to quash this out of fear of backlash. So they may just be picking their battles.
- Comment on "The $60 Billion Gaming Scam Nobody Talks About" by mrixrt 2 weeks ago:
I wasn’t meaning to direct that towards you, but rather at the content itself. I appreciate you posting it.
- Comment on "The $60 Billion Gaming Scam Nobody Talks About" by mrixrt 2 weeks ago:
Tango was literally a Microsoft studio. They don’t have a platform tax on their own games.
Do these people think the mass layoffs in the broader IT sector are just a coincidence?
This is literally a paid “investigation” by a rival payment processor.
- Comment on Which wired earbuds do you recommend? 2 weeks ago:
I have the KZ ZS10 Pros, and they stay in my ear great. The KZ earplugs come with different connectors, and I got the standard 2-pin ones so I could choose the wires I want (I like braided cables).
- Comment on The cognitive dark forest 3 weeks ago:
Damages for what? They’re not making money if it’s free. It’s fine if it’s copied, the only time there would be damages is if they’d lost money.
Contributing in the open is the principle.
- Comment on Endgame for the Open Web 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, the protocols that corporations and governments rely on were (mostly) not their own creations, and they cannot feasibly change the underlying TCP/IP stack itself, which has quite a lot of ‘grey space’ baked into it in terms of controlling traffic. Even China, whose government could much more realistically create another alternative model with a totally different protocols (a la DTNs) and mandate domestic equipment use them (enabling them to block the current suite of protocols), just haven’t even bothered attempting that route because of how huge a lift it would be.
The biggest danger is probably national boundary isolation, which countries have moved further and further towards. This is not actually all that rare, and countries have a lot more ability to control cross-border network traffic than people probably realize (most people probably envision something akin to The Great Firewall, but that is explicitly about still facilitating north/south traffic at-scale).
Totally discrete ‘mini internets’ via e.g. mesh networks or directional wireless P2P bridges is totally doable, but generally not a way to avoid government scrutiny as it’s very easy to detect. If we ever get to a point where you’re not subscribing to an ISP for internet, but to ‘Disney Network’, with just their services (and add-on bundles for other services!), it’ll be in conjunction with regulatory capture to help them ‘protect’ against pirate (as in, un-controlled by government, not as in copyrights) networks.
- Comment on The cognitive dark forest 3 weeks ago:
You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.
So the safest bet again is to stay silent, or at least under the radar. Best bet is to not disrupt - succeed at all … ?
Except that ‘success’ in this interpretation seems to assume money, which the big company will beat you at obtaining. Success can just be about a FOSS version of a tool being out there for anyone who wants it, and no company is going to pay the AI costs to build tools they immediate MIT-license (and even if they do, there are then TWO new pieces of FOSS software!), so they may be able to beat you in creating a commodified product, but they aren’t and won’t and arguably intrinsically can’t beat you in bettering someone’s life by having a tool they didn’t before, for free.
We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.
This is a sad reaction to capitalism capitalism-ing. You can’t beat the profit machine by trying to make your profit in the cracks it can’t see, you beat it by giving the thing it wants to profit off of away for free.
The vibrant public ecosystem that created all the innovation and moved it around the world will decline - the forums, the blogs, the “here’s how I built this” will move to local, private spaces.
I highly doubt this. I’ve seen no such shift in any tech space around me. If anything, I actually noticed that every Con I regularly attend has mentioned in their RFP emails that they are being flooded with proposed talks, so people should submit early before they fill up. If private spaces are also growing, that’s great!
I know this is ostensibly an article about Technology, but it’s also an article about Resistance, and frankly I think a lot of people run to models of competitive resistance instead of exploring disarming or evasive resistance. You can’t beat Capitalism at commodifying something, but you can prevent Capitalism from commodifying something by removing the characteristics (like cost and scarcity and control) that make something a commodity.
Code is one of the few things that can actually be freely and un-limitedly distributed and re-distributed, which makes it uniquely resistant to commodification, but only if the person making the code is not themself trying to commodify it.
There’s a reason that Linux has only gained ground over time.
- Comment on ‘The era of invincibility is over’: the week big tech was brought to heel 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think that’s what the parents or kids want, but I do think that’ll be what happens, yes.
- Comment on Metaverse inventor Neal Stephenson says VR goggles are dead 3 weeks ago:
It’s funny because literally in Snow Crash there are guys who wear giant head-mounted camera/ antenna/ hacking rigs, that the MC says are weirdos for doing it. The Metaverse in Snow Crash is a ‘full dive’ thing you basically plug into like the Matrix, not a headset. How they went and reversed those roles, and tried to market tiny screens strapped to your head as a Metaverse, is beyond me.
The absolute hubristic ignorance of tech bros, man…
- Comment on Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says 3 weeks ago:
LLMs don’t ‘scheme’, ‘plot’, or ‘deceive’, they just string together words based on complex weighted graphs.
The fact that a so-called “AI Safety Institute” has to attempt to (actually) deceive people by falsely attributing intent or thought or awareness to LLMs is hilarious. As usual, it’s not the computers that are bad, it’s the people.
- Comment on From Zip To Nought: The Rise And Fall Of Iomega 4 weeks ago:
IMO the Zip disks, Jaz disks, and MiniDiscs were the last really satisfying physical media formats (UMD was also really cool, but somehow even more niche given it was PSP-specific).
There was something about them that just made you feel like a secret agent using them. Like a prop out of a James Bond movie where the villain keeps their plans.
CDs and DVDs had nothing on them.
- Comment on Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field 4 weeks ago:
The Democratic Party as an apparatus is made up in large part by a bunch of neoliberal fascist-appeasers. Progressive are still a (growing) minority in the party. Leftists are nearly non-existent in it.
- Comment on OpenClaw Emperors 4 weeks ago:
Very cool way to conceptually structure agents.
- Comment on Windows 11 is finally getting a movable taskbar 4 weeks ago:
The shitty vibe-coded desktop environment/ window manager I made over the past month has a movable taskbar.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 5 weeks ago:
Gambling systems always play into human psychology, and are always not in your favor.
So is poker not gambling? Mahjong? When it’s 4 people playing together (not at a casino, for instance), how can it always be you who has worse odds? That’s of course rhetorical; you actual have equal odds, barring cheating or simple skill differences.
And once you make “playing a game that you are likely to lose” as the litmus test for what is gambling, why would you play any competitive games? Half of a competitive bracket has to lose more than they won, by definition.
You are conflating gambling as it happens within controlled, predatory, capitalist institutions, with Gambling as a concept. Gambling is not immoral or harmful intrinsically, but gambling institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to gambling, are. Institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to alcohol or cigarettes or hoarding or whatever, also are. But it doesn’t make alcohol as a chemical compound itself, immoral.
- Comment on here's a challenge in the tech sphere: implementing nudges toward healthy phone usage. 5 weeks ago:
It does, but being Google they pulled the more granular controls like screen time settings into a dedicated app: Google Family Link
- Comment on here's a challenge in the tech sphere: implementing nudges toward healthy phone usage. 5 weeks ago:
Parental controls usually only require a password to unlock or bypass, so if you’re worried you’ll just unlock it yourself you may want to ask a trusted friend/ family/ partner to set the password for you.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 5 weeks ago:
How so?
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 1 month ago:
I mean gambling in general, not just loot boxes or TCGs.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 1 month ago:
Frankly, I don’t mind. I don’t love being accused of posting in bad faith and berated just because you forgot what you originally posted. Cheers.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 1 month ago:
Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.
The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.
Too many people mistake their objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 1 month ago:
MVV app is super convenient, but I could still use the kiosks without too much added delay. MVVswipe is like 30 seconds to “check out” a ticket, MVV kiosk machine is like 90 seconds. The biggest inconvenience is having to find a kiosk outside of a train station.
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 1 month ago:
Holy hell it’s been a while since I heard that name… I remember putting Cyanogen on my PSP back in the day.
- Comment on ‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push 1 month ago:
*laughing as Atlassian dies*
“I guess I was the…”
*puts on sunglasses*
“jeer-a all along.”
- Comment on ‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push 1 month ago:
Somehow a multibillion dollar company can’t compete with an ancient quad core server shoved in a coat closet when it comes to page load times.
To be fair, it’s nearly impossible for remote sites to beat on-prem page load times, given the added per-component transit times over the internet.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 1 month ago:
That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.
So what do you think there were doing, exactly?
Let’s break their comment down, and then you can point out the part that is “extremist”.
14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers.
This is 100% accurate, especially in the age of Mirai-like IoT botnets. 14k is pretty small nowadays. Variants of Mirai (e.g. Midori and Aisuru) had 300,000+ devices.
Asus is not known for backbone routing
Correct, this is a pretty low-danger botnet due to being low-power consumer devices, even if it’s difficult to clean.
so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet,
Less fair, because it is still news, and Ars is a tech news site.
or is this article intended to serve another interest?
The part I assume you take issue with, but it’s also a completely fair question (and is in fact precisely “telling people to question the purpose and bias of news”). The article made the deliberate choice to name-drop BitTorrent and IPFS, despite them not being related other than them also using DHTs. I understand the writer may not have been intending to draw a “malware <-> bittorrent” association in the readers’ minds… or they may have. It’s sort of like saying, “the killer drove an Audi, much like Nico Hulkenberg”. That’s why you have to critically question news.
what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about
The point is that you immediately jumped to calling them an “extremist” for what seems a pretty innocuous (if not particularly useful) comment. We generally assume good-faith around here, and calling people “extremist” for questioning an Ars article doesn’t seem like that to me.
