t3rmit3

@t3rmit3@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France seeks to ban social media for children under 15⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You can.

  You just don’t want to either a) put in the legwork to do so, or b) be the ‘bad guy’ to your kids for doing it, so instead you just want the government to do it for you.

  What’s stopping you from setting up pihole and blocking social media sites at home, or turning on parental controls on their phones and blocking the sites and apps?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chirp chirp chirp little chicken - interfacing Ace Combat 7 for some sweet telemetry for my VF-1 inspired home cockpit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is dope as shit. I love both Ace Combat (Shattered Skies especially! Woooo!) and Macross, this is such a cool simpit.

  Absolutely badass!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittifinancial Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s very well written and ‘easy to read’. I’ve seen his posts a couple of times on HackerNews, but I don’t think I ever read a long form blog post of his before. This was really good (even if I think a little naive).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittifinancial Crisis⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Capitalism gonna Capitalism.

  We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth.

  This could have been written about the War on Terror.

  I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

  I’m not sure why he thinks morality is a factor in market movement. You’ll not find the stock market negatively reacting to money being spent on genocide in the Middle East or murders in the Caribbean, or to Palantir expanding into a mass-surveillance apparatus either.

  Analysts that do not sing the same tune as everybody else are marginalized, mocked and aggressively policed… By not being skeptical or critical you are going to lead regular people into the jaws of another collapse.

  Yes, market collapses are actually loved by large wealth holders, because unless the entire currency itself collapses, the people with the most currency are the ones best-positioned to benefit from the collapse. Investors will ride the economy off a cliff so they can salvage the scrap at the bottom. Sam Altman literally opined about ‘redefining’ the social contract when AI collapses the economy in his White House presser.

  Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in.

  Because major news, analysis firms, and banks are all owned by the oligarchy, and no one is being punished for using that power to manipulate the market. They know that if they’re a big firm and they say, “this stock is amazing!” it will go up, and since they own that stock, they get richer.

  When it happens, I promise I won’t be too insufferable, but I will be calling for accountability for anybody who boosted AI 2027, who sat in front of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei and refused to ask real questions, and for anyone who collected anything resembling “detailed notes” about me or any other AI skeptic.

  It’s sad to me that Ed lived through 2008 and still thinks there will be accountability in this system. At some point you have to accept that the purpose of a system is what the system does. Our system cyclically collapses, economically, in order to enrich billionaires. It happened during the DotCom bubble, it happened in 2008, and it happened during COVID, and that’s just in my short lifespan.

  I realize I’m pearl-clutching over the amoral status of capitalism and the stock market

  I really don’t think you are. You haven’t even begun to reach the bare minimum level of disdain and disgust-inducing realism one should have about capitalism, nevermind anything being remotely close to pearl-clutching.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT could prioritize sponsored content as part of ad strategy — sponsored content could allegedly be given preferential treatment in LLM’s responses, OpenAI to use chat data to deliver highly personalized results⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who is not anti-tool just because big companies and capitalism are misusing said tool (that’s a ‘big companies’ and ‘capitalism’ issue that applies to far more than LLMs), this seems like a non-starter for any business use of the platform.

  Enterprise tools definitely have an expectation of 1) not having ads placed in them, and 2) not having their users tracked for third-party data sale, not because they love their employees, but because they’re scared one could infer proprietary business information via user metadata correlation. No company wants their new product to be “blown” early because their devs’ internet activity was aggregated and the product inferred, or worse to have a competitor get the jump on them because of it. Most companies begrudgingly accept use of e.g. Google, but corporate policies will absolutely limit the kind of information you can put in a Google search. ChatGPT is just by its nature much more likely to end up getting proprietary data put in (because it’s a ‘conversation’).

  The “promise” that OpenAI will only use said data to target ads is laughable, even if OpenAI believes it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the FPS vibe shift: At the end of 2025, it's clear that casual shooters are back in a big way.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess for me I’d feel like I’ve read about all these cool events in HD2, and they’re gone and done and I can’t replay them, because they were live events only.

  Compare that to something like Mabinogi (which is still an MMO, but doesn’t follow the same live-service philosophy), where you can start as a first-time player today, and still play through every campaign/ storyline since its ~2003 release (and there are a LOT of them).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the FPS vibe shift: At the end of 2025, it's clear that casual shooters are back in a big way.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Using ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ in the traditional gatekeep-y, “filthy casuals” way that e.g. Dark Souls players often do, isn’t really what the article is talking about.

  CoD and other battlepass-ridden live-service games don’t actually require high skill levels, they require high time investment. Destiny 2 stopped being a casual game in this sense once they started removing content, because it now places demands on the players’ time, rather than allowing players to engage with it casually/ at their leisure. I don’t play Fortnite, which is why I asked whether they have time-limited events, and I don’t particularly care about where it falls versus others, I just tend to see most live-service games as inherently less casual due to this.

  My ‘hardcore’ game for many many years was Eve Online, and let me tell you, there’s nothing casual about leaving work early or setting alarms for 4am and coordinating with several hundred people around the globe to all be online when a POS timer is finishing. It’s a hardcore game, but it’s not about twitch-aiming or dodge-timing gameplay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the FPS vibe shift: At the end of 2025, it's clear that casual shooters are back in a big way.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have to play it all the time in order to not miss out on tons of content (i.e. events)? Because that doesn’t feel ‘casual’ to me. My trough between games I cycle through is years, not months, so hearing that in the time I was gone there’s been n missed major events or ‘storylines’ definitely seems pretty hostile to a casual engagement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the FPS vibe shift: At the end of 2025, it's clear that casual shooters are back in a big way.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  ARC Raiders is definitely of the “life-consuming live-service” multiplayer games in my view, same as Helldivers 2. Basically anything that is live-service, since it demands you play continually or otherwise miss out on timed events.

  I hope multiplayer non-live service games are the sort of casual FPS that is making a comeback, a la Space Marine 2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know where the author got their information, but they name Minis as one company doing this, and it’s absolutely not the case. I just checked to be sure, and the 2026 minis have the same 5-button, one touchscreen setup as the 2025s. My 2020 mini has 15+ physical buttons and toggles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually think it was. The 2026 mini is the same as the 2025 mini in having almost no physical buttons, and a giant touchscreen, yet they call minis out by name. Completely incorrect, but got published.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Man, I’ve been a staunch defender of Mozilla for a long time, but they’re making it clearer and clearer that they just want to be Chrome. I think it’s time to start hunting for another, again.

  Maybe I’ll give PaleMoon another go! I was surprised to see Maxthon and Midori were still alive, but they seem a little shady now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Age Verification Is Coming For the Internet. We Built You a Resource Hub to Fight Back.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true, but EFF needs to speak using terms people are used to seeing in order to reach as many people as possible. They always discuss the de-anonymization aspect of these laws, just not usually in the headline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Attempt To Escape From Pain Creates More Pain⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I refuse to call anything ‘indie’ that is not in fact “independent” of a publisher. We already A, AA, and AAA to denote budgets. Rebranding ‘indie’ to mean ‘A’ or ‘AA’ games from third-party studios is drinking the publisher kool-aid. Sony especially pushed this angle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SPhotonix 5D memory crystal: cold storage lasts 14B years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I literally burned some DVDs last week…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve tried. SO many times. It’s just so damn clunky. I ended up using Krita (also FOSS) instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why our instance has no downvote mechanism!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare is down [Dec 5]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From the blog post:

  We made an unrelated change that caused a similar, longer availability incident two weeks ago on November 18, 2025. In both cases, a deployment to help mitigate a security issue for our customers propagated to our entire network and led to errors for nearly all of our customer base.

  It seems that the method they have of specifically propagating new security configurations to their servers is not a gradual or group-based rollout, it pushes certain changes to all servers at once, so uncaught bugs end up hitting everything instead of just some initial test group.

  In particular, the projects outlined below should help contain the impact of these kinds of changes:

  Enhanced Rollouts & Versioning: Similar to how we slowly deploy software with strict health validation, data used for rapid threat response and general configuration needs to have the same safety and blast mitigation features. This includes health validation and quick rollback capabilities among other things.

  “Fail-Open” Error Handling: As part of the resilience effort, we are replacing the incorrectly applied hard-fail logic across all critical Cloudflare data-plane components. If a configuration file is corrupt or out-of-range (e.g., exceeding feature caps), the system will log the error and default to a known-good state or pass traffic without scoring, rather than dropping requests. Some services will likely give the customer the option to fail open or closed in certain scenarios. This will include drift-prevention capabilities to ensure this is enforced continuously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An unsettling indie game about horses keeps getting banned from stores⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Valve has hundreds if not thousands of highly and expressly pornographic games on its platform, so I don’t think this can be chalked up to the Collective Shout folks’ spectre somehow looming over Valve. As another commenter pointed out, according to the devs’ own timeline, Valve’s rejection happened prior to the recent successful Collective Should payment-processor targeting.

  I suspect that EGS and Humble probably halted sale at the last minute due to the added press naming them as distributors prior to launch, often in articles that included Valve’s response asserting that it contained questionable content related to minors, and them going, “hey what? Hold on a sec, we don’t know anything about that.”

  If you were about to sell a bunch of cars, and a major dealership announced they wouldn’t sell them because their trunks were all full of cocaine, a couple days before launch, you’d probably delay your launch to double-check as well.

  Unfortunately, the developers’ own initial press statements where they sort of feigned innocence (after they had already changed the scene in question, meaning they at least had some idea that was likely the issue) probably didn’t help their credibility in other platforms’ eyes, as far as being business partners goes.

• An unsettling indie game about horses keeps getting banned from storeswww.theverge.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨gaming@beehaw.org⁩ | ⁨56⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon Musk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So large skyscrapers, large nuclear plants, datacenters, etc would be state owned. Actually more…. This would be hundreds of the largest companies. This means the state would commandeer a company when what, the market cap hit a billy? The nav? That actually seems kinda crazy to do

  Not state-owned, just state-managed. We already generally subsidize power plants, but for other large projects it could provide both funding and oversight of the build.

  When it comes to really large companies themselves, if there’s a cap then they would just stop being such large companies, not be taken over.

  But if you wanted to make a process for a company to grow beyond the $1B cap, I could see a system where depending on the level of impact to peoples’ lives, either something like monthly reporting of financials and business plans, or for companies operating in areas with a higher potential for harms, something closer to a Fannie Mae-style conservatorship, that would directly advise the company on minimizing risks (and potentially actually prohibit actions outright if they clearly were harmful). Ownership, stocks, profit, etc, would all still be private. We actually already embed IRS auditors in companies if they’re caught doing tax evasion, and I think of this more as a logical extension of that. We’ve tried voluntary compliance with laws and regulations, and too many of the very large companies are happy to flout them, and use their wealth to help them do so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon Musk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You quoted the wrong part, then. The company cap that Phoenixz proposed was $1 billion, not $10-20 million. Companies can easily build large-scale projects with a billion, and projects that are going to run over that should probably be weighed against public interest and publicly-funded and managed, if they’re beneficial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon Musk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  personal net [worth]

  personal

  Privately owned power plants aren’t built and owned by individuals. Ditto for 99% of large buildings. And we can do without the personal skyscrapers, yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI desperate to avoid explaining why it deleted pirated book datasets - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Guarantee that their lawyers told them they were a huge, illegal, indefensible liability, and it was better to axe them than potentially pay the per-work copyright violation penalties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BoM asked to explain ‘what happened here’ after cost of website redesign revealed to be $96.5m⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ten years was the total time for everything under the “larger overhaul”. The frontend website portion is not broken down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"It's extremely frustrating and also f*cked up" - one of the world's best indie studios is facing shock closure following confounding Steam ban [Eurogamer]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think society is actually more prudish; you couldn’t have had 80% of the shows that are made now, 50 years ago. I think there are just several things that combine to make it appear otherwise (note that these are all 100% my opinion):

  1. Corporatism has run rampant, and corporations detest liability. Independent movie stores didn’t have to worry about being noticed by political groups, but big chains did, and big corporations’ shareholders only care about stock prices are much more reactive to ‘threats’. And big corporations killed most independent stores, even before digital took over. Digital is all big corps.

  2. The US has sanitized violence in media to such an extent (e.g. superhero movies where logically thousands of people die, or where all violence is ‘bloodless’ but not cartoonish) that I think sex has become the only metric by which to delineate ‘kid’ vs ‘adult’ media for a lot of people. That has a feedback effect on large media creators, who will be less likely to depict sex in anything not squarely targeted for adult consumption, which in turn makes any sexual content in e.g. young-adult media stand out even more, which will get it outsize attention by the wannabe morality police types.

  3. Prudish political groups made a lot of strategic inroads into positions of policy influence by using “protect the children” rhetoric, with sex being the #1 thing they actively demonized. It’s much less common to see pro-sex groups making any kind of public messaging or policy impacts, so it can seem like the prudes are the majority.

  WRT the current thread: Steam doesn’t ban sexual games at all; at this point it’s one of if not the largest adult games distributor just thanks to its user base. They even implemented a ‘private’ feature for games so people could buy adult games on their Steam account but hide them from others, which makes people more likely to buy. This particular game is really just an unfortunate case of edgy content accidentally running up against a legitimate guardrail. I won’t be surprised if Valve does walk back the ban soon based on the amount of media coverage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BoM asked to explain ‘what happened here’ after cost of website redesign revealed to be $96.5m⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  92 million dollars over cost on a 4.1 million dollar project is not incompetence and mismanagement.

  Doubling the cost of a project should have triggered reviews or an audit. 23x’ing the cost of a project is either corruption, or such gross negligence with public funds as to be criminal all on its own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"It's extremely frustrating and also f*cked up" - one of the world's best indie studios is facing shock closure following confounding Steam ban [Eurogamer]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most stores choose not to sell X rated (later NC-17) movies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve responds as indie horror studio accuses Steam of 'censorship' for banning its game about nude human 'Horses' (Update)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a game where people are put in animal masks, chained up, and ridden around naked.

  what the studio calls “grotesque, subversive imagery” of a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as animal livestock.

  To pretend that said “grotesque, subversive imagery” is not in this case functioning on it’s proximity to sexual degradation, is disingenuous imo. I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to wade into an “art vs shock-sploitation” debate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BoM asked to explain ‘what happened here’ after cost of website redesign revealed to be $96.5m⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Minchin said the total cost “includes the previously stated $4.1m required to redesign the front end of the websites”.

  “The remaining cost ($92.4m) reflects the significant investment required to fully rebuild and test the systems and technology that underpin the website, making sure it is secure and stable and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from our observing network and weather models,” Minchin said.

  So 92 MILLION dollars on SQA and maybe some pentesting? Bullshit. Pentests run $50k-$400k for single-domain websites like this, and $400k is on the very expensive end.

  Even if you paid 30 people $200k apiece for 4 years to work on this, which is more people and at higher salaries than would have happened, that would still only come to $24m, less than a third of the cited cost.

  There is no possible way for this to have legitimately cost this much. There was corruption of some kind involved.