forestbeasts
@forestbeasts@pawb.social
- Comment on 16 hours ago:
Hm? Like, lack of disk space or?
If it’s potato in the sense of CPU specs, you don’t need a non-potato machine for this stuff.
Also if you’ve already cloned a project you’ve already got the history (unless you specifically told git not to do that). It generally isn’t huge. So like, you don’t even need tons of disk space unless you want to download a metric buttload of projects and/or they’re weirdly huge and long-historied (I bet the linux kernel repo is pretty big for instance).
– Frost
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Why not just keep them locally? It’s a full copy of the project, independent of the copy on Github. Git doesn’t need, or even have the concept of, a Big Central Server. It’s just that you can push/pull to/from other computers, and Github is one of those. Your local repository is on equal footing with Github (except for the fact that the project devs don’t consider it official, obviously).
– Frost
- Comment on Do you buy PC games from third party key sites or from Steam? 1 day ago:
all nations have a form of VAT
Is all sales tax VAT though? Or is VAT more of a specific thing?
(we’re American so we’re used to sales tax being randomly added onto everything, and know other countries generally don’t have that because they’re more, uh, civilized places; not super clear on how VAT specifically works though.)
- Comment on Is this a scam or am I being paranoid? And if so, what kind of scam is this? 2 days ago:
Our laptop runs Linux. I kinda wonder what would happen if someone tried that on us. :3
(not that Linux is inherently more secure, it’s just way more obscure and they probably wouldn’t have a hack prepared for our particular setup)
– Frost
- Comment on 4 days ago:
LineageOS isn’t quite as hardline about the hardware having specific security features, and works on a BUNCH more phones. Maybe even your current one. If not, it’s a lot easier to avoid Google buying for Lineage support than for Graphene.
– Frost
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Termux is on Fdroid too! So you’ll be fine on a custom Android.
- Comment on Sony 4 days ago:
The pirates have been wearing archivist hats for a good while now, I think. At least in the movie space.
– Frost
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Honestly even if you weren’t using “AI” for stuff, coming in to spam (this post is already ad spam) isn’t a good look. Stacked with saying Reddit banned you for spamming and that’s why you’re here and, yeah.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
I got bad news for you: spamming shit here will probably get you banned FASTER than on reddit.
Real people run this place, not bots, and real people don’t tend to take kindly to spammers shilling their slop.
– Frost
- Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe? 5 days ago:
Hey, I’d burn the entire box set of Debian (yeah, ALL OF DEBIAN! 27 discs!) to some DVD-Rs if we had any DVD-Rs! All we’ve got are CD-Rs and those ain’t big enough.
– Frost
- Comment on End of an era? 5 days ago:
How I wish it actually worked that way…
– Frost
- Comment on Why Does Everyone Seem Ahead of Me? ??? 5 days ago:
They don’t post the bad stuff.
Personally we’re about to be homeless in like 2 months, we have a job but it doesn’t pay enough to get a room for rent (not even an apartment. just a room in somebody’s house.) and a car at the same time (and I’m kind of leaning towards the car because if we get sick and lose some income and can’t make rent it would be… a problem, and a car would be more affordable / easier to cut back on).
But nobody’s gonna post that kind of stuff on Instagram.
– Frost
- Comment on What's the weirdest thing in english? 5 days ago:
Fun fact: “Love I apples?” and “Apples, I love not” are how German works, and English used to be like that (back when it was still turning into English)!
- Comment on Sorry about the immense compression lol 6 days ago:
Am in the US. Can confirm. Do not come here.
- Comment on End of an era? 1 week ago:
…Have you not heard of DRM?
Because DRM is a thing too. They can make it so you can’t open that program on your local machine.
- Comment on Anon is a nostalgic gamer 1 week ago:
Two of us.
And we’re on Linux even. It has its own share of issues. Generally, if a problem is game-specific, the fixes are stuff like “switch Proton versions” (there’s a little dropdown in Steam or whatever launcher you use) or “toss some environment variable in the launch options”. But those are really a thing of the past now, stuff just works.
And it never took installing drivers for a specific game (…huh?). Installing drivers is a thing you do once, if that, during initial setup, just like you’d do account creation for a console.
– Frost
- Comment on Anon is a nostalgic gamer 1 week ago:
We’re 26. The new stuff is crap, and that’s not just nostalgia goggles, it is actually objectively worse.
There’s plenty of new stuff that isn’t crap, like say indie games. But the platforms, the consoles, etc.? Those are intentionally disrespectful these days in a way even, say, the Wii/PS3 era of consoles wasn’t (and they certainly weren’t perfect either, it just started getting way worse way faster after that).
- Comment on Blocking 1 week ago:
Mastodon has that (it calls it ‘filters’).
(it’s in the twitterlike side of fedi rather than the redditlike side of fedi like here, so not really relevant for a “go use it”, more for a “yeah that has precedent in other similar server software”.)
- Comment on Poll: Will you buy GTA 6 when it launches on your platform? 1 week ago:
Nah.
We’ve got GTA 5, but don’t really enjoy it. (The excessive open-world free-roam, great! The “doing nasty shit” part, not so much.) And THEN there’s the whole “they’re trying to kill discs” thing and just, nah.
– Frost
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
This is probably a bit cheating since it just came out, but we had A Fox Tale on our wishlist since 2021 and it apparently actually came out a couple months ago and we completely missed it!! I immediately went and grabbed it and yeah, it is good. Fox platforming, great story, really good level design and gosh the ART is just so good!
– Frost
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
Ooooh this looks fun as hell. I saw “released 2024” and expected online-only PvP nonsense, but no, it’s singleplayer + coop? and the movement looks SO GOOD.
And it has a demo! This recent trend of games having demos is pretty awesome. Would be nice if the store page didn’t hide it in the sidebar, though. Wonder why it did that (I saw reference to a demo in the reviews and assumed the demo had been delisted at first).
– Frost
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
I do not like downvoting you, because Hyperrogue is awesome, but them’s the rules I guess!
It’s also open source, and actually open source enough that it’s in the Debian repos!
Great game, too.
– Frost
- Comment on 1 week ago:
That makes sense for FOSSheads, but regular people might not get it!
(also fun bonus of calling stuff open source: it annoys the “permissive licenses aren’t REALLY FREE!!” people. :3)
- Comment on What is the fundamental difference between sudo and doas ? 1 week ago:
sudo and doas do basically the same thing. The OpenBSD people wrote doas because sudo is super overcomplicated and they wanted something smaller and simpler (they do that a lot!). In typical OpenBSD fashion it’s way less of a pain to configure. But like, sudo is also fine.
– Frost
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Clarity. Personally we treat “open source” and “free software” (in the FOSS sense) as synonyms, and “free software” could easily be used (by someone who doesn’t know FOSS context) for something that’s just not paid.
So saying “open source” makes it clear that it’s /actually open source/ and not just “not paid”.
- Comment on What do you think about the dead internet theory? 1 week ago:
Eh? Doesn’t pretty much everything support HTTP 1.1 still? It’s not like it’s dead.
And growing a community of HTTP 1.1 website people certainly isn’t any harder than growing a community of alt-protocol website people. Even if it were an alt-protocol nothing normal supports anymore (which it isn’t, thankfully).
- Comment on What do you think about the dead internet theory? 2 weeks ago:
Oh there’s absolutely reupload bots. They even say that they’re bots, heh.
– Frost
- Comment on What do you think about the dead internet theory? 2 weeks ago:
We don’t even need a new protocol. HTTP/1.1 is perfectly fine! I wish people would stop trying to throw it out.
– Frost
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Two discs. You put in one, it installs half the game, you put in the other, it installs the rest of the way. Or three or even more discs if the game is THAT big.
- Comment on What is the difference between http and HTTPS ? 3 weeks ago:
HTTPS is literally just HTTP, but shoved inside TLS, which is a generic encryption thing you can use on TCP* connections. It’s like shoving your message inside a magic envelope that can’t be broken into before you send it, the receiver can open the envelope though and read it. The stuff inside is still regular HTTP.
(*connections to a server that let you send/receive a stream of data, instead of just firing off packets and hoping they make it there like how UDP works.)
But as for HTTPS itself: First off there’s the encryption, which prevents anyone listening in from reading the stuff. But you also need to know that you’re talking to the right server, and some attacker isn’t just pretending to be the server you want and forwarding your messages to the real server, then relaying its answers back.
That’s where certificates come in. Those are, unfortunately, centralized at least as web browsers use them; there’s a Big List of allowed “certificate authorities” in each browser and/or OS, which are organizations you can get a certificate for your website from. Certificates are signed (more cryptography math magic) by the CA so that your browser can know the cert came from a known CA. If it doesn’t, it goes basically “huh? I don’t know who signed this! maybe an attacker did. I don’t trust it.”
There are other ways to handle that sort of trust. Mumble (a voice chat platform) also uses TLS certificates, but instead of just having a Big List, it just assumes that the first time you connect you’re not being actively attacked, and then if the certificate ever changes it can freak out and let you know. Much like SSH works (but SSH has its own completely different encryption scheme). Mumble also knows about the big list of CAs though and will accept ones signed by a known CA without questioning it.
– Frost