Nibodhika

@Nibodhika@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t give you the right to resell, rent or even giveaway that. Which is what the first sale doctrine allows you to. Not to mention that GoG is one store, which proves it’s not a law since others can do it differently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  First sale doctrine allows you to resell, rent, or giveaway things that you bought without having any claim over the IP. So for products where first sale doctrine applies you can buy it now, and then a few years down the line still use it or sell it to someone else. You can’t do the same with digital games, and that’s the issue at hand, that first sale doctrine is not being follow here, you can’t resell digital games, rent or even give them away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we need legal genders at all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Biology exist whether you or anyone likes it or not. The question here is whether the government should track your biological characteristics, and if so which characteristics and why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we need legal genders at all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly, you can’t change your biological hair color, and you can’t change your biological sex, so they’re the same. So why are people making a big fuzz about one and not the other? you shouldn’t need to inform the government about cosmetics treatments to change the apparence of either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we need legal genders at all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not a legal definition, your document also doesn’t have the hair color, and yet you used that in your description. Not to mention people are known to change their hair color at will without having to communicate it to the government, why should gender be any different?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we need legal genders at all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For your shaving the head example I would argue that if the person is incapacitated and needing urgent care the solution with the most chance of success should be preferred regardless of gender norms. If both are equally likely the one that doesn’t remove hair should be preferred. You might be a man with attachment to your long hair even in a society where that’s uncommon, gender does not dictate anything of the sort. So I still don’t see a reason why gender is relevant medically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we need legal genders at all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, I might have wrong assumptions and you certainly know more about this than I do so let me ask you. If I understand correctly you were born female and have undergone hormone therapy and plastic surgery to transition to male, correct?

  If that’s the case, first of all isn’t it relevant to a doctor that you take hormones? One of the first questions most doctors ask is if you’re on any prescription, and to a doctor wouldn’t your genetics+hormones give a more correct picture than either male or female would?

  When most people say sex matters to doctors I think they’re talking about genetics and things derived from that, for example unless you had a hysterectomy uterus cancer is still a possibility, but prostate cancer is not. In that sense sex is important for doctors and helps them diagnose better.

  It might be ignorance on my part but I can’t see a situation in which being medically treated as a female would be life threatening, but I can see several where being treated as a male would. Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Console market craters as Xbox sales crash 33% to the lowest since launch 25 years ago, PS5 sales drop 25%⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You literally can’t get one because they already sold every single one they were able to manufacture and there’s a wait-list of a few months for the next ones they will be able to manufacture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do dogs actually like having their belly rubbed or do they just know we really like to rub their bellies?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a movie with a talking dog, in which the dog says something along the lines of “dogs don’t like belly rubs, they only get them because it makes humans happy” to which the human replies they only give them because dogs like it, and they argue over who likes it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do dogs actually like having their belly rubbed or do they just know we really like to rub their bellies?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you just watch Absolutely Anything?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does all AI graphic design have the exact same style?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except good artists and coders enjoy the creation process, so they won’t use it like that.

  I need to change every instance of this function to another? Sure, let an LLM do it, that’s tedious to do and easy to verify. Implement a new system? Hell no, that’s interesting to do and hard to verify. I imagine artists have similar feelings on the matter, but I don’t know what’s a tedious task that’s easy to verify for an artist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bitcoin is a protocol, kinda like HTTP or Morse code, whoever created it can’t change what things mean unless those using it accept it.

  To answer your question with some more technical details, Blockchain use a public/private key pair, explaining what they are and how they work is quite difficult without going deep into mathematics, but in short a private key is a secret number so big it would take billions of years to brute force even with the entirety of the computational power of earth. In short, it’s impossible to guess a private key. On the other hand a public key is a number that’s derived from that first number without a way to going back to it, a very dumb down example would be think on 2 numbers (123 and 5) multiply them and you have your private key (615) add them and you have your public key (128), knowing just the public key you can’t know what the private key is.

  Ok, so you have a number no one can guess and another number derived from it, so what? Well, because of the way the public key is derived from the private one you can encrypt things with the public key that only the person with the private key can decrypt, which is cool and all, but the important part here is the other way around: you can sign a message with a private key that anyone with the public key can verify. This is extremely important, because it means that if we use the public key to identify someone, only the person who knows the private key can sign as them, and no one (not even the creator of Bitcoin) can falsify that signature, because to do that they would have to know the private key.

  With that knowledge understanding what Bitcoin is is much easier. Imagine your public address is 12345 and you want to send 1 coin to me, my public address being 54321, you essentially send a message saying “12345 gives 1 coin to 54321” and sign it, now a miner will see that transaction, and if you have 1 coin to give they’ll try to build a block of transactions which includes yours. Eventually your transaction will make it into a block, and all blocks that are built on top of it will make it more difficult to revert.

  Final details, how do they know you have 1 coin? They tally all of the coins 12345 has received and sent over time. They store the total for each account in memory so they don’t have to calculate it every time, but that’s how they know if you have enough. And finally, every time someone creates a block they can claim a special transaction that creates a specific amount of new coins to any public key they want, that’s how new coins are created.

  As you can notice, you sign transactions and no one can falsify that, miners group transactions and it’s in their best interest to be honest (otherwise other miners won’t accept their block and they will have spend computer power for nothing). It’s a system where everyone is kept honest because attacking the system is more expensive than playing by the rules. And the rules are set and forget, although miners can change the rules collectively it requires lots of people to be in agreement and it won’t happen to revert your purchase.

  In short, it’s not exactly 0 trust, but it uses game theory to make sure that you can trust the system as it’s in everyone’s best interest that the system remains honest.

  If you have any other question let me know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s talk about Proof of Work which is what Bitcoin uses (Ethereum uses Proof of Stake, and that’s slightly different).

  The way Blockchain works is that every block depends on the previous one, I won’t bother with the mathematics of it, just accept that a block needs to have a parent block. The protocol is that the longest chain is the valid one, once your transaction gets on a block miners are incentivized to build on top of that. In short, suppose the chain currently has 100 blocks, your transaction on block 101, a miner that purposefully ignores that block to try to build a different 101 block is racing against every other miner who’s trying to build block 102, because I’d any other miner builds 102 before then he now needs to build 2 blocks before the miners build 1, so on and so forth until he has to accept defeat.

  In short, a single miner depends on luck to be able to “rollback” (it’s not really a rollback, it’s a pretend it never happened and move the tokens elsewhere so the original transaction is not valid, in an attack called double-spending). This is why the more blocks (or verifications) are on top of a transaction the harder it is to “revert”. To “undo” a transaction that just happened you have to get lucky twice and build two blocks in quick succession, to undo a transaction from an hour ago you have to build 7 blocks in average before others can build one. To give you an idea of just how unfeasible this is, the reward for finding a Bitcoin block is around $80.000 currently, this means that to “undo” a transaction that happened 1 hour you’re losing the opportunity to earn over half a million dollars (which is what you would earn if you were to find 7 blocks without having to race against anyone else)

  Because no one has your private keys, the only way to move the tokens from your ownership is to rollback the chain until that transaction happened, remove it, and rebuild the chain from that point onwards. So, it’s doable, in the sense that it’s physically possible, but unless you can convince the majority of miners that the transaction should be reverted, and even then until the new chain reaches or surpasses the old one the old one is the valid one, so if you only convince 51% of miners and the transaction happened a few hours ago they’ll probably spend a few days catching up, and if in the meantime some miners flip side they might never catch it and miners might abandon your cause as it’s coating them 80 thousand dollars every time someone else finds a block.

  Finally, if such a thing were to actually happen, trust in that coin would drop significantly, and with that its price, and with that the money minera receive from finding blocks. So it’s not in their best interest to do that, as it can yield to them losing money from their source of income.

  In short, yes, it’s possible, but unless your attacker can essentially burn millions of dollars to fuck with you it’s not very likely to happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  An NFT doesn’t dictate ownership, neither de jure nor de facto.

  Sure, just like a property deed doesn’t dictate ownership. Just like money, deeds of any kind are only as valid as what we allow them to be, if our society were to use NFTs to track ownership of something then it would dictate ownership just as much as any other deed and would be enforceable by judges and police in the same manner.

  In other words, NFT are a way to use Blockchain technology to obtain a non fungible token, whether that token means something depends on our societal agreements, just like any piece of paper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel that most people who speak very badly or very well about NFTs and crypto in general don’t really understand it.

  In simple terms what the Blockchain technology solves is a way to have an append only database with no centralized authority. This is a HUGE accomplishment, but you very likely don’t care about it.

  In short, this means that Blockchain provides a way to exchange “tokens” without any user needing to trust each other or a third party. If you can trust the other person, or can trust a third party to be impartial then you don’t really need a Blockchain.

  A Token is a representation of something, for currencies a token is a representation of value, and value is a fungible attribute, I.e. 1 of them is the same as any other, like coins, where you can replace a coin for another of the same denomination and they’re worth the same.

  However tokens can be non-fungible, which means that one token is not the same as another, think for example house deeds, if someone takes your house deed they can’t just give you a different house deed and be the same.

  We use non-fungible tokens a lot on our society, some examples are steam keys, vehicle registrations, or certifications of ownership for expensive pieces of art. We usually can trust valve, the government and whoever issued the art certificate to be impartial when someone tries to sell a game, car or art. But what if you couldn’t? How would you safely validate ownership without having to trust anyone?

  That’s what crypto NFT bring to the table, someone had the idea to create a platform where artists could create tokens of authenticity for their art, and sell that to people giving them a way to own digital art in the same way that someone owns a painting. Then crypto bros started pumping that to sell their tokens for a higher price and a lots of people fell for it and started buying tokens representing ownership of things they didn’t wanted or understood to try to sell for s higher price later.

  Obviously that scheme fell, but that doesn’t mean the technology is useless or untrustworthy. But for most cases crypto is not needed as most people can trust their government or some other centralized authority.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wiki Documents at Least 44 Instances in Which Sony Says You Own Your Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First of all, you’re the only one talking about copyright, none of the things we’re talking relate to copyright. Copyright has been a thing for a long time and we’ve never had these issues with anything from books to kitchen utensils.

  Also you’re purposefully ignoring the points I keep making every answer, I keep giving you examples of rights you have on a book that you don’t on a digitally downloaded game and you keep ignoring that as if it was the same thing. It’s not, the issue at hand is with that difference, if you can’t spot it maybe you should read more on the subject.

  But just to give you an answer since you seem hell bent in making this about copyright, what do you think would happen in the society we live in if tomorrow all copyright laws were to vanish? People already do derivative work as long as they’re not profiting from it, fanfics and fan drawings have never been an issue, but now they can charge for it. Big whoop, nothing much changes there. But on the other hand, a starving writer who wrote his first good novel and wants to publish it takes it to a book publisher and his name gets erased and it’s published by the company instead, because no copyright means the author has no claim over it. An artist creates a cool character that becomes viral, now Hollywood is making a movie, but does not have to give 1 cent to the artist. You’re only looking at the ugly side of copyright, you’re forgetting that companies will abuse anything , and you’re failing to see that the lack of rights will be more abused, and if you remove copyright laws that’s in THEIR best interest, you won’t be able to make a new God of War that can compete with theirs, but they can take any idea you might have and make a million dollars product out of it that you won’t see a cent.

  Finally, I never said I don’t believe in free and open platforms, or copyleft or creative Commons licenses, but that’s not the same as removing licenses. First of all, that is optional, you’re not forced to make your project free and open source, if there were no copyright laws you would still not be able to reproduce closed source programs, but they could simply copy open source ones. GNU license is very restrictive and contagious exactly for this reason, which has stopped corporations from doing nasty things, without those copyright protections GNU and Linux would not be where they are now because corporations would have stolen it. Copyleft and CC licenses follow similar patterns, you’re free to modify and redistribute but only if your product keeps that license, that discourages companies from stealing it as it would poison the well and their product would not be copyrightable, but if nothing is copyrightable then everything is fair game and the companies would not think for a second before stealing content. Think for one second on how companies operate and you’ll understand why copyright is needed to protect indie artists from them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wiki Documents at Least 44 Instances in Which Sony Says You Own Your Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It won’t radicalize me against copyright because I believe people are entitled to profit from their creations, and until we live in a society beyond the need of money corporations would fuck everyone in the ass (even more so than what they do now) if there were no copyright laws. Or do you any of the mega corporations in Hollywood would give a cent in the direction of a good story of they weren’t legally required to?

  In any case, that is different from what Sony is doing now. Like I said before:

  • the author can’t go into your house and take the book back
  • they can’t force a new version of the book onto you
  • they can’t require you to proof you own the book before they allow you to read it
  • they can’t stop you from reselling the book.

  Those are not covered by copyright law, you have a right to do that with your books but not with your Sony games.

  This steamed from the way digital downloads came about, and we agreed to trade some rights for ease of access, but companies like GoG show that it’s possible to have digital downloads while preserving some of those rights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wiki Documents at Least 44 Instances in Which Sony Says You Own Your Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, this has never been how copyright works, if you buy a book you own that copy of the book, the author can’t go into your house and take the book back, they can’t force a new version of the book onto you, they can’t require you to proof you own the book before they allow you to read it, and they can’t stop you from reselling the book. You OWN that copy, you don’t own the IP, but you own that copy of the book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If circumcision is so insanely common in the USA, why do people tease about it on the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  While I get where you’re coming from, most people don’t understand what’s normal to others because they think their experience is normal. And most of us won’t get to experience someone else’s experiences to figure out what’s normal for others and what isn’t. You might be fully satisfied with your situation because it is a good situation, but it also might be because you don’t know any better and think what you experience daily to be the norm for everyone, similarly to people living in a dictatorship regime who don’t even know about the possibility of living free so they’re content with their situation.

  I’m not saying it’s your case, I’m not saying you should feel bad or that there’s something that doesn’t work the way it should. I’m saying you don’t really know how things should work because you only have your experiences to rely on, and your satisfaction might derive from not knowing what something should actually feel/be like in comparison to what it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If circumcision is so insanely common in the USA, why do people tease about it on the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Also not necessarily correct, foreskin protects from chafing and other similar micro fissures that happen daily for people without foreskin (as shown by the person above you having issues running). And while removing a part of you does lower the chances of getting cancer there, if it’s protecting another part of you from something it can increase the risk of cancer on that other part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just to get this straight. If I stand outside a voting center and give each person 500 bucks to vote for me. That is illegal? But if I am a Dipshit In Chief and offer 5k that is 100 percent legal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very different. One is “I will give YOU money if you vote for me” and the other is “I will give EVERYONE money if I win”. The main difference is that one is not discriminating against who people voted for. The first is buying votes, the second is a campaign similar to “I will retroactively lower taxes for this year if I win”, which I don’t think anyone would see as problematic but it’s exactly the same outcome as the one you’re finding problem with, i.e. give people money.

  It’s a stupid campaign because anyone with half a brain understand that he’s not going to do it and that that money would have to come from someplace else, but it’s still a campaign promise similar to any other promise politicians make to ask you to vote for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is weird because “thou shall not kill” comes before adultery in the commandments, and go forth and procreate is also somewhere in that book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely, have the game without it and a free (or with a stupid price like 10 cents just to ensure legal age requirements) DLC that’s parked as adult only. But I think in this case it might be too engrained to the core of what the game is, that they can’t, and if that’s the case it makes sense to mark the entire game as adult IMO

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is that they don’t want the game to be flagged:

  If the game remains flagged this way, it will “have very serious implications on its accessibility and visibility,” says Pedercini.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally always find it weird that killing hundreds of people is okay but nudity requires scrutiny.

  That being said this derives from stripe threatening Valve in the near past (which is why their previous games didn’t face this scrutiny). This is a known thing that any game developer, especially one developing mature content, should know. And the content in that game is definitely mature, if the screenshots of the game were shared without context I would think it’s one of those sex simulators, which I get this is not and those are just small parts of the bigger picture of the game, but that’s just like saying “this chocolate bar shouldn’t need to be classified as containing peanuts, it only has 1 peanut”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dude, there’s a limit to how much issues you can put a blind sight and pretend are not there or that the next LLM will fix them. At some point companies will start getting hacked and they’ll have to take action, and that will not take decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trying to flash 256GB image to almost 256GB flash drive, space is barely not enough!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You have 256 liters of water, and a 234.3 liter jar and are asking how to put the water in the jar. Either get rid of some of the water (shrink the image) or get a different jar (different drive). Writing 256L on the side of the jar will not let it fit more water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even by their own estimates it’s 2-10 million dollars per launch, imagine thinking that spending 6 million dollars to get a single rack in space where it can’t be maintained and will become garbage in a couple of years is a good investment. And that’s just the launch price, you still need to build the satellite, with its hundreds of square meters of solar panels and radiators. There’s no point arguing this any more than there was a point arguing hyperloop, until they present a feasible product it’s just big talk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool, so we moved from a single motorcycle to a couple of cars, still a long way from a parking lot. You’re not understanding the issue, the scale is not feasible, you’ll spend millions of dollars to launch a single satellite that’s not even 1/10th of a tiny data center.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless I missed something, all of his math assumes 20kW of computers, that’s not even one rack for heavy stuff, of course you can run a data center in space if you send one satellite up for each computer, that’s just unpractical.

  Let me put this into perspective, what you’re saying is like someone has an idea for a revolutionary parking plaza, and they’re showing you it’s feasible to spend millions of dollars to park one motorcycle in it.