• 1 Post
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • Nowadays, I think it means “agreeable”. “I agree with this”.

    It is a term that changed a lot in such a short time. I remember it was a way to call a drug addict, like crackhead/basehead. Then it changed to call people talking nonsense, like they were on crack.

    I imagine, at some point, someone agreed with the crackhead talk and read some comment of the nonsense being called “based”.



  • I agree, and I am glad we are on the same page.

    I just think it is important to highlight missing key-points, that people often misunderstand and can misconstrue, like the devs and lawyers from the now class action from the post. So it is important to clarify to prevent further misinformation.

    • Steam does not care how much you sell keys for different platforms(e.g. GOG, Epic), just Steam Keys (i.e. keys for the Steam platform).
    • And when you sell Steam Keys in different stores, you need to give Steam Store Customers comparable, but not necessarily at the same time or same price.

    If you check the historical low on “is there any deal”, often stores have games with historical low lower than Steam’s historical low. From what I saw, the prices are usually around 10%~12% lower.



  • Borg is arguing in bad faith, don’t give him more attention.

    A good part of what the said about Apple is not even true, and nothing he said has anything to do with Steam vs Apple Store.

    From the first line, recently Apple released an OS update that broke some software from the Apple Store, like MS Office. They made people call the support from the app developers, Apple did not help anyone with that.

    Borg went on an unhinged rant about how bad they are at deploying software to specific hardware, and how little they know about the industry. Completely unrelated to what you are asking.

    It is not worth spending time, please don’t feed the troll.

    If you want to talk seriously about the industry, there are better places to do it.


  • I imagine that the discussion we are having would be more beneficial to c/main

    However the banhammer is a tool that can make any comment look like a nail,

    That is why methods are important, if your only tool is a hammer, the screws will look like nails. And people waiting for a solution will be expecting a “thunk”.

    In real life, people do not get arrested for reposting fake news. Well, maybe if you call a war “war” in some countries. Correcting myself, in real life, people should not get arrested for reposting fake news.

    Many people share them because they do not know better, are afraid, for many reasons. I have so many examples in my family. Usually, speaking with them with compassion and understanding, while using a common language works.

    But there are people that benefit from it, instigators, bad actors. How long do you think it should be allowed to fester before you get to a point of no return?

    From my experience, the places doing it properly without installing a censorship state, are the ones with well-defined and transparent process. They are doing proper investigations, working with the community, taking proper action against bad actors. Canada is not far from achieving it, it needs work, and I wish it was faster.

    You cannot expect that an online community that depends on volunteer work would have the same level of scrutiny. I don’t even know if it would be possible to create some sort of committee to oversee lemmy.ca like is common in some forums and other open-source communities.

    Do these users, or the users that might post a misinformed take within the power-users’ posts deserve bans? Do we analyze every comment, post and news-source and remove those that meet the criteria for MDM? …

    Yeah, those are the questions that need to be discussed! And plans made over it.

    I have facts, experience and opinion - for one, I am averse to mass scanning, even more without proper methods, but I have been proven wrong many times, if people think is the right way to go, I might as well understand it better and help where I can.

    Back, to the community from OPs post

    I imagine you are old enough in lemmy.ca to remember Geopolitics, trying to be more neutral, but the mod there would pin all his posts to hide people’s post, or just delete them. The account was also accumulating bans across instances until they were banned fully in this instance. Endless war does not try to be neutral, and the mod accumulated an even longer rep sheet, and in less than 2 months.

    I understand a human can read their posts, analyze their actions, and understand they are acting in bad faith intentionally, dishonestly arguing and ill temper when talking to people. I don’t think an AI can classify this kind of thing consistently yet. But in quantitative analyze, there are enough bans and content removed to warranty at least an investigation and a warning.

    …Over the past couple years, they have become far more careful to avoid…

    Wow, that user was banned in so many communities and had a lot of content removed over time, including in ml.

    They post many memes, but their reaction to people’s comments are not the most amicable, they take everything as direct offence, that could surely be improved.


  • I feel like you are arguing with me about OP points. I am not sure if it is a Lemmy error, but my comment you replied to first

    I do not understand people here defending misinformation/intolerance as a merit of discussion. The dichotomy of naive or complicity.

    People spreading misinformation and intolerance are not here for healthy arguments, you just need to check their history to see their dishonesty and ill temper.

    In the meanwhile, accounts like the one OP highlighted are just creating trouble for mods of other instances to solve.

    I don’t feel like you are here defending that person’s acts or being complicit, neither trying to defend misinformation/intolerant with malicious intent, or being disingenuous with semantics. So, for the healthy discussion, I continue.

    You don’t need to go too far in that person’s history to see the examples of their dishonesty and ill temper, if that is the hill you chose to defend. You might need some special privilege to see their removed content in other instances.

    From your message, sorry if I am mistaken your words the first time, but I imagine now that by that you were not saying intolerance, but misinformation, as in:

    who is the arbiter of “misinformation”

    In that case,

    Canada might be a little behind on misinformation laws, it was always behind when the subject involves technology. But they define very well their types (MDM they call), qualify damages and campaign to raise awareness and minimize its effects. https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/how-identify-misinformation-disinformation-and-malinformation-itsap00300 https://www.canada.ca/en/campaign/online-disinformation.html

    “Misinformation” is serious, causes harm, and should not be used interchangeably with “agreement”.

    Just because OP is complaining about misinformation, it does not make it any less severe than intolerance, when used for the same goal - to cause harm.

    Even before technology, we had laws and procedures about harmful discourse, be them intolerance or misinformation, it just makes things different.

    That is why I was suggesting a discussion of well-defined and transparent methods to deal with them, that should be constantly reviewed and improved.

    Edit: bold line



  • I feel like I mostly played old games this year, at least it helped me to pick Labor of Love: Cassette Beasts.

    Cassette Beasts is made with Godot, devs are still releasing content, and they just added support for steam workshop.

    There were so many good games for this category that it was hard to choose. e.g. I learned from Lemmy about Shattered Pixel Dungeon, that is open source and has been receiving updates for almost 10 years.

    My other picks are: Shadows of Doubt, Tactical Breach Wizards, All Quiet in the Trenches, and Tiny Glade.

    I also liked Star Fetchers : Escape from Pork Belly, but they released it as DLC rather than its own game.

    I was thinking about Keep Driving, and Dice Gambit for the soundtrack, that was also when I thought about Cassette Beasts. But they are not from 2024. I will probably vote for the abbot rapping in Esperanto from Metaphor.


  • The problem is, who is the arbiter of that?

    Intolerance is well-defined in many languages, and, so people do not confuse I am talking about milk intolerance, the hate crime is defined in many law codes across the globe, including Canada. There is no need for philosophical discussion of what is “intolerance”.

    There is no need for a linguistic expert to realize someone’s discourse is ill intentioned, when the semantics of “the victim deserves to suffer” is the same as the call to action.

    For countries that depend on common law, the account in question was already punished in other instances, creating precedent.

    The modus operandi of these kinds of accounts are also well-know and documented. And popularity contests should not be a tool to define what is right in an online platform where there is no real accountability. How many upvotes do you think a single worker in a troll farm can generate in a couple of minutes?

    We should not depend on admin humour for results (philosophies, as you suggest), but I agree that we should help when/where we can, their volunteer work is invaluable for the health of the instance.

    I think that the discussions worth having in these kinds of posts are about methods, checks and balance to prevent bad decisions from people in power, and that people will be fairly treated.

    Methods are many, and there are many examples out there.

    • would twitter like community notes solve some of these problems or create more? Would lemmy repo accept such PR?
    • the problem of twitter x Brazil: is it worth locking those accounts while an investigation is pending? One of them was instigating machete attacks in school/nursery. When would this lock be ok, or not ok?
    • how long should people complain/report before a something (an investigation, a lock, or a conclusion) happens. - The account we both mentioned not in this thread (but in this post) went on it for 2 months before being banned - they did not leave on their own. …


  • If you check the history of lemmy.ca, you will see that this intolerant propaganda/misinformation is cyclical. One user disappears and another comes in. Sadly, it usually takes a few months before something happens to them.

    The mod of the community you shared, created an account and on the same day started to post propaganda and tiptoeing around the instance rules. Before, it was another user posting the same content from the same sources, with the same tactics, until they went a bit too far and were banned.

    They always do the same thing, create an account, create a community with a “normal” name, like geopolitics, and start spreading stuff. I would not be surprised if it is an agency doing this kind of stuff: I cannot imagine someone being so evil to do it willingly, might be either coerced or depending on the money.

    I do not mind when the propaganda is benign, like bots posting random video game or Canadian news, but I draw the line on intolerance.

    Another of those intolerant people tactics (tiptoeing) is that they do not demand for people to get killed in their comments. They construct it as a consequence of the victims’ actions, they deserve to die. For me, that is just as bad, if not worse, because they know the things they are doing are wrong, and they are trying hard to no get caught.

    I hope the instance comes with a better and swift way to deal with these kinds of problems.




  • Those metrics are bollocks.

    For Denuvo, you don’t need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.

    For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.

    A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.

    For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.



  • It depends on the tasks you are planning to do.

    Here is a list with a bunch https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multimedia#Video_editors I tested most of them. While they all work fine, I had better experience with the flatpak versions when available.

    If you just want to do some quick cutting, trimming or merging - LosslessCut https://mifi.no/losslesscut/

    I use ffmpeg from terminal for quick stuff that I do often. Like resizing a video, cutting, getting an image from a frame.

    Lightworks and DaVinci resolve are industry standard, but require a license to use most of it. The problem with their free version is the limitation of input and output formats. Ideal if you are making movies/going professional. I prefer DaVinci Resolve, keep an eye for hardware sale, sometimes it comes with a license bundled - Speed Editor being the cheapest.

    Kdenlive is well-rounded, from the open source is the most robust, and with most maintainers. I use it mostly for gameplay and to add voice over to videos.

    For recording voice over and sound FX, there is nothing better than Ardour https://ardour.org/

    Natron is great for Visual FX, you can also use Blender for pretty much everything.


  • I use Calibre to organize my e-books, it is great. Mobi was giving me the best result when I converted from epub, the other Amazon format my Kindle supports is azw3.

    Sadly, I lost half of the last words per line converting from DRM-free books I got from humble bundle, and figuring out the proper settings was taking too long.

    When I learned about KOReader I never looked back, it allows me to sync with Calibre through Wi-Fi and accepts way more book formats. I have been using Kindle more since I installed it.

    The problem is that the process to get it running on Kindle is not that straightforward.



  • What kind of question is “Do you need an E-ink display?”

    Currently, Apple does not offer any hardware form factor with an e-ink display. If the poster was interested in hardware, that would filter out Apple devices.

    What’s wrong with the kindle? I have a 2012 kindle paperwhite

    I also have a Kindle, PaperWhite 3.

    The list is long, in short: Kindle has a closed system. Similar to the reMarkable brand of e-ink devices, they make it hard for you to do anything it was not made for, and to be heavily dependent on their services.

    You can still run Doom and other programs on Kindle, but I would not recommend buying it new, nor to someone who does not want the hassle of tweaking it, as there are better options working well out of the box.

    In the poster case, converting DRM-free e-books to Amazon’s proprietary format is not always straightforward and can cause severe artifacts in your books. You either need time and patience to tweak the settings of your conversion tool, or install something like KOReader that can read them as-is.