TehPers
@TehPers@beehaw.org
- Comment on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling 1 day ago:
Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way
Just to clarify, we’re only talking about mainstream social media here, right? Those are the only platforms they’re considering here, and more specifically, only TikTok right now.
“Infinite scroll” is also how you can scroll up in your chat log and see more messages. It’s how you can open logs for a VM online and see logs going further and further back. It’s how you can search for a video on YouTube and keep scrolling down (past the inevitable pile of shit) until you find it.
On social media platforms, and in particular not in a chat interface, it can be toxic.
- Comment on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling 2 days ago:
You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck.
I think the point I was getting at was that a lot of things dark patterns do are individually things that have the potential for good or bad. Infinite scroll is one example. There’s also modals, sale banners, and so on.
What makes a dark pattern dark isn’t the specific, individual tools at use. It’s the sum of those, plus the intent.
- Comment on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling 2 days ago:
Doesn’t look like this extends beyond TikTok, or at least mainstream social media as a whole.
Infinite scroll itself isn’t really a problem. It’s just one of the many tools used to keep users engaged on these platforms specifically by removing an interruption from the experience, but isn’t sufficient on its own to create that unhealthy behavior. It’s also used in healthier ways, like search results, chat logs, and so on.
The EU attempting to rein in these platforms’ control over its users will be interesting to watch. There are decades of research these companies have done on user psychology to maximize their capture of the user’s attention. Forcing them not to use all the tools they developed might result in people breaking out of the cycle of endlessly scrolling. Or it might just annoy users. I don’t know which will happen.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
On the oven, I’ll use the clock to see how long something has been baking for without pulling up my phone. Otherwise, the time it says doesn’t mean much to me.
I’d rather just see a stopwatch-style function on it. Ovens usually have timers already, but sometimes it’s nice to just manually track it, especially if you have to pull the food out to flip it or something mid-way.
- Comment on More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey 1 week ago:
As opposed to where? India? China?
Companies in the US aren’t the only ones pushing AI.
- Comment on More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey 1 week ago:
Sounds like a nice deal. Every job posting I’ve seen here comes from a company that wants you to use an LLM.
- Comment on More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey 1 week ago:
Am software engineer. Am required by work to use it lest they lose their ungodly investment into a tool that wastes as much time as it does money.
- Comment on The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick 2 weeks ago:
But it increasingly seems a reasonable solution to þe financial aspect is “free for personal or FOSS use, everyone else pays.” Which isn’t quite GPL, but I’m sure þere’s a license for it.
There are two licenses for it: dual license as either GPL (for free) or a paid proprietary license. Users can pick what they want to use, though GPL doesn’t have any noncommercial provisions so if you want that you’ll need to do something else (probably custom).
- Comment on LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV 2 weeks ago:
or even go see a local sports event in person.
Usually doing this can also get you close to people, even if only spatially. Occasionally it does get you close to people figuratively, though. If there’s nobody in your life that you would want to get dinner with, then I’d recommend the sports event, or something similar to it anyway. You can always invite people you meet there to your next month’s fancy dinner.
- Comment on LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV 2 weeks ago:
Or, hear me out, and I know this is crazy, but you buy a cheap, used TCL for a couple hundred pounds. Then, with the money you’re saving every month, you get a nice dinner with someone you’re close to, or even go see a local sports event in person.
Ok, I don’t know what they cost in the UK, but they’re sub-$500 new here in the US for a decent size TV. You have to put up with the TCL bullshit, especially if it’s a Roku one, but you were probably getting a smart TV anyway, and they all have this bullshit.
- Comment on BlockchainFX Presale Surges as Investors Hunt Top Crypto Plays for 2026 2 weeks ago:
On top of this not linking to anything, it takes a special kind of person to invest into something as volatile as crypto.
- Comment on Do you think my games should have optional calls to assembly functions for certain CPUs and GPUs if possible. 3 weeks ago:
Do you want to? Go for it.
Does your game crawl? Have you identified this code as the bottleneck? Are you certain that asm will give you a meaningful performance increase, and that your issue doesn’t lie with your approach to the problem? Sure, I guess. You said your game runs fine though, so this probably doesn’t apply.
Is your game fast already? If you don’t want to do it, don’t.
Writing asm by hand is almost always a waste of time. There are only a few times where it’s actually necessary, and unless you’re writing a bootloader and running your game on bare metal, I can’t imagine why it’d be necessary. But you know your code better than anyone else here, so you should know whether it’s needed or not more than any of us do.
To begin with, you’re apparently targeting the Z80, which I haven’t seen used for games in the wild… probably in my entire life? Maybe an arcade machine I played on once used it, but I can’t think of any other times. If your targets need custom assembly, then you should already know that. We don’t know your targets.
- Comment on Heroic former PC Gamer writer creates a script to banish all the AI features from Google Chrome 3 weeks ago:
I don’t disagree that running random scripts off the internet is a bad idea, and I even made that clear. I was just pointing out that these specific scripts are verifiable entirely by the URL (which is just the raw GH file URL for the file in that repo).
I agree that signing the scripts would be a good idea though. I’m not sure how hard (or expensive) it is to do so though. If it’s anything like TLS certs, it’s probably just not worth it to them (though LE exists for TLS).
- Comment on Heroic former PC Gamer writer creates a script to banish all the AI features from Google Chrome 3 weeks ago:
You shouldn’t trust random scripts off the internet of course, but…
You do realize these scripts all come from this GitHub repo, right? It’s possible to verify them all, unless I’m missing a script here I guess. Even the registry files are plain text and readable directly in GH.
- Comment on Asking Grok to delete fake nudes may force victims to sue in Musk's chosen court 3 weeks ago:
Not a lawyer, but if this isn’t a clear case of duress, then nothing is. Nobody with a functioning brain would say that someone begging a service to stop publishing generated sexual imagery of them is doing so under anything other than duress. That claim would be equivalent to saying someone agreed to your TOS when they begged you to stop stabbing their mother on your service.
- Comment on The TikTok deal is done - TikTok is now under new ownership in the US 3 weeks ago:
to be specific, when you refer to “that all” happening, you mean Biden signing the bill that banned TikTok in April 2024, I think?
Yes. Biden happened to be president, but any president would have signed that into law because of the support, and even if it hadn’t become law, we’d still be in this position. Trump wants to control the media. He’ll do it however he needs to.
your timeline is jumping around a bit here, because now you’re referring to “that period” and linking to a source from January 2025, the time of Trump’s inauguration.
The period in question went on for quite a while (a yearish if I remember correctly). Anyway, your comment doesn’t actually say anything to contradict my point of ByteDance spreading their cheeks for Trump.
this ban only passed because Democrats were bamboozled into supporting a proposal that has its roots in Republican “omg China scary” bullshit. I don’t know how to explain it any more clearly.
You don’t need to. The ban is irrelevant. Without the ban, we’d be in the same place, with Trump attacking all forms of media to gain control.
ahh yes, “criticizing Democrats is the same thing as supporting Republicans”, the free square on the bingo board.
You’re not criticizing lawmakers here. You’re criticizing the common person, the people actually affected by the purchase. What you’re doing is essentially victim blaming.
Your entire analogy is irrelevant. The people you’re criticizing are the people who reviewed the exterminator, not the exterminator.
- Comment on The TikTok deal is done - TikTok is now under new ownership in the US 3 weeks ago:
The ban had bipartisan support, and even if that all never happened, you’d still be in the same situation. They would have sold off their US business anyway whether they were forced to or just got a big offer.
Keep in mind that TikTok also put out messages during that period practically deep throating Trump and sent it out to all their users. This was going to happen either way.
Ironically, a ban could have prevented this from happening entirely by making TikTok no longer relevant to the US. Not that banning it wouldn’t come with other issues as well, of course.
Maybe rather than blaming those in search of a solution, you could try blaming those who created the problem. Friendly fire doesn’t do a whole lot of good, but does support Trump, which I’m assuming isn’t your goal here.
- Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 3 weeks ago:
I suspected there was something. Last time I saw ID verification in the EU mentioned here, I think someone mentioned this there as well. Thanks for the link!
- Comment on ChatGPT is rolling out YouTube-style age prediction 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, seems to just show an image on Beehaw. Thanks!
- Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 3 weeks ago:
This depends on how the verification is done, in my opinion, as well as whether there is a presence of more anonymous alternatives.
If the EU has a system which does not rely on third parties for verification and allows the platform to verify directly with a government-run service, then the only real issue there is lack of anonymity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on a platform if there are also popular anonymous alternatives people can use when they want to.
The article doesn’t go into how ID verification will work though. If it’s through third parties like how the US does it, then that’s disgusting and waiting to be breached.
- Comment on ChatGPT is rolling out YouTube-style age prediction 3 weeks ago:
Anyone have a link to the article? These posts don’t link properly on Lemmy.
Also, how old does it predict you are if you ask it if there’s a seahorse emoji?
- Comment on Hytale's first major update adds in dinosaurs, stops skeletons drowning and lets you have an early night 3 weeks ago:
If you just want to play a fun game, wait until it’s more complete. Game is so WIP that the whole world gen is expected to change soon (to their “V2” world gen) which might break old saves. There’s very little content beyond the generated structures and terrain and some decorative blocks. Even the current “endgame” can take just a few hours to reach, and there isn’t much there.
- Comment on Notes about The Algorithm: There are no gods, aside from those we've built ourselves 4 weeks ago:
Ironically, it felt to me like the post deified algorithms itself, but this is the main takeaway:
We should neither mystify, nor deify these systems, because it makes us forget that we have built them ourselves and infused them with meaning.
An “algorithm” is nothing more than a set of instructions to follow to complete some kind of task. For example (and closely related), a sorting algorithm might attempt to sort a list by randomizing the list, then checking if it’s sorted and repeating if not (bogosort).
Lemmy uses an algorithm to sort posts by “most recent”, for example, and I think that having a “most recent” sorting option is noncontroversial.
Where algorithmic feeds become problematic, in my opinion, is when they start becoming invasive or manipulative. This is also usually when they become personalized. Lemmy, Reddit (within a subreddit), and other kinds of forums usually do not have personalized feeds, and the sorting algorithms for “hot” are usually noncontroversial (maybe there’s debate about effectiveness, but none usually about harm). Platforms like FB, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YT, etc all have personalized feeds that they use personal data to generate. They also are the most controversial, and usually what is referred to as “algorithmic” feeds.
These personalized feeds are not magic. They often include ML black boxes in them, but training a model isn’t sorcery, nor are any of the other components to these algorithms. Like the article mentioned, they are written by people, and can be understood (for the most part), updated, and removed by people. There is no reason a personalized feed is required to invade your privacy or manipulate you. The only reason they do is because these companies are incentivized to do so to maximize how much ad revenue they make off you by keeping you engaged for longer.
- Comment on The European Commission wants help pushing for open source software 5 weeks ago:
The EU can start by finding a way for full-time open source contributors to make a living off it. Solve that problem, and you’ll have plenty of open source projects, as well as open source devs who want to move there.
- Comment on Google employee made redundant after reporting sexual harassment, court hears 5 weeks ago:
It’s used outside of UK too. I’ve seen it used in the US, for example. Usually it’s just a corporate term that says “you’re fired” but without saying that. They use terms like these all the time to try not to take accountability for fucking someone’s life up.
- Comment on These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? 5 weeks ago:
I’m not surprised at all that removing distractions like social media could “feel their focus sharpening”.
To answer the title, I could not go without my phone because I need it to authenticate to stuff.
- Comment on YouTube's long unskippable ads may have finally met their match 5 weeks ago:
The biggest issue with Youtube is that it has no real competition, at least for traditional long-form content. They have no incentive to improve the user experience.
- Comment on Valve amended the Steam survey for December 2025 - Linux actually hit another all-time high 5 weeks ago:
Looks like mostly SteamOS users, which isn’t too surprising. Hopefully we can see that number go up over time as people get sick of Windows.
Slightly off topic, but it looks like they reopened the forums!
- Comment on X now lets any user AI-edit other users’ images without consent, and there is no opt out 5 weeks ago:
Surely you have an example where it’s appropriate for a service to generate nonconsensual deepfakes of people then? Because last I checked, that’s what the post’s topic is.
And yes, children are people. And yes, it’s been used that way.
- Comment on Five Europeans denied US visas for combating hate speech online, accused of censoring ‘American viewpoints’ 5 weeks ago:
When someone clicks the “edit” button, I guess.