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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • Do you use it on Linux? I recently got a Vader 4, it works wireless on xbox mode (using the xpad linux module), but I was hopping to make use of the gyro (hopefully without losing the analog triggers), and it seems that the dinput mode (which does allow some gyro action + analog triggers and working extra buttons) does not really work with the wireless dongle for me (it works if I plug it via cable, but that’s also not optimal since it disconnects mid play sometimes for some reason).


  • I have astigmatism too and for me it looks just as bad when inverted, a blurry mess of black on white.

    To me, what makes one a better choice vs the other has more to do with my environmental lighting.

    • If I’m on a place with a lot of light, the screen being black makes it have reflections so I prefer black on white in those cases.
    • If I’m in a dark place, the bright screen makes the screen itself the primary source of light which is not good for my eyesight, it can make my eyes feel like burning/tired after a while.


  • It’s worth noting that presently mozilla earns $0 from my not using google, and not seeing sponsored tabs.

    I thought Google pays (or paid?) Mozilla just to be the default engine out the box, regardless of whether you change it or not.

    Another point is that it’s so easy to turn those things off (the sponsored shortcuts too) that I wonder if it would be worth the cost of launching an alternate version behind a paywall while making sure it works only for people who pay (which could be seen as DRM anyway, with potentially massive backslash). So I imagine the end result would not be that profitable (whether they decide to paywall it properly or not). Those who wanna donate and have no ads can do that already, those who want a cleaned up version of Firefox can have that and from neutral and independent third parties which I’d argue is better than if it were Mozilla who did it (and you can donate to Mozilla while using those too)… so I’m not sure it would make sense.

    But it would make sense to have a donation pool specifically to fund Firefox development. That would be something interesting, considering Mozilla does other things besides Firefox. But I expect they don’t do that because they probably fear all donations will move there and they don’t want to lose funds for other things. We might need to create a separate organization if we want an independent fund for Firefox-based browsers.



  • Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.

    It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.

    So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.

    The reality is that if it wasn’t for Jimmy, it’s likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can’t work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn’t wanna be his friend.

    So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D

    Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich… but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?


  • There are many games that had that mechanic before Arceus.

    In particular, Craftopia (which is from the same developers of Palworld) had capsule devices that you can throw to enemies in a “virtual space” while characters “engage in combat” before Arceus was a thing.

    Just because they wrote a patent does not make it enforceable… patents don’t really mean anything until they are actually tested in court so they are just tools to try and scare people away whenever a company wants to bully with the prospect of a lawsuit.

    I feel that Palworld is likely to win this, this actually is an idiotic move from Nintendo and a win for Palworld… now they will get more publicity, perhaps another spike in sales, and they are finally given the opportunity to prove how they are in the right, so they can shut up all the naysayers who complained about it. I’m hoping all the paranoic empty claims about “blatant asset theft” will be settled once and for all.


  • My worry is that the other 20% might actually come from other forms of partnerships and integrations not unlike what they probably had in mind with this, and that dropping Google might actually make them more dependent on seeking this kind of initiatives, not less.

    I don’t know how many people you actually need to maintain a browser. But if it’s actually possible to do it without any kind of money from any of those sources in a way that can be sustained, then it would make more sense to make a fork (or alternative, like Ladybird) and just use that.

    Like I said, I think it’s too late for Mozilla to shift course, I don’t expect they’ll ever do that. At least not until they are forced by a competing project if it happens to become successful (or a similar huge wake up call that leaves them no alternative).



  • Is “intent” what makes all the difference? I think doing something bad unintentionally does not make it good, right?

    Otherwise, all I need to do something bad is have no bad intentions. I’m sure you can find good intentions for almost any action, but generally, the end does not justify the means.

    I’m not saying that those who act unintentionally should be given the same kind of punishment as those who do it with premeditation… what I’m saying is that if something is bad we should try to prevent it in the same level, as opposed to simply allowing it or sometimes even encourage it. And this can be done in the same way regardless of what tools are used. I think we just need to define more clearly what separates “bad” from “good” specifically based on the action taken (as opposed to the tools the actor used).


  • I think that’s the difference right there.

    One is up for debate, the other one is already heavily regulated currently. Libraries are generally required to have consent if they are making straight copies of copyrighted works. Whether we like it or not.

    What AI does is not really a straight up copy, which is why it’s fuzzy, and much harder to regulate without stepping in our own toes, specially as tech advances and the difference between a human reading something and a machine doing it becomes harder and harder to detect.



  • To each their own. For me, a good lore and dialog is what makes a good RPG stand out.

    If I want action and reflexes, I’d go play an action game. If I want strategy, I’d go for a puzzle game, or a 4X, deckbuilder, etc. But in a proper RPG what I look for is good lore, engaging story and some level of freedom that makes me feel I’m having an impact in that world. If AI can help with immersion and/or dynamic changes, I’m all for it. Of course, for that to happen they need to make sure it does stay in character and does not hallucinate something incoherent.

    If there’s an AI chatbox that actually can stay coherent and be set up as a game without feeling like you have to input too many instructions to the AI to push the narrative (I think AI Dungeon gets close) then well, you could almost consider that being an RPG already. After all, the first RPGs were all text based. So I would already consider that the first iteration of AI-based RPG game. But translating that to a live 3D environment would be the next step.



  • The article talks about how they are ok with using AI for things outside generating images, texts and so. For example, they are fine using the rudimentary AI of any typical enemy in one of their games. So I expect procedural generation that does not rely on trained bayesian network models is ok for them.

    It looks like they just seem to be concerned about the legality of it… so they might just start using it as soon as the legal situation for AI models is made safe.




  • It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

    What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.

    In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.

    Like, for example, there’s this function:

    function vc() {
        var a = za.navigator;
        return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
    }
    

    Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

    And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.


  • It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.


  • That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

    For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

    if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {
    
        setTimeout(function() {
            c();
            a.resolve(1)
        }, 5E3);
    
    } else {
    
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    
    }
    

    It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

    And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.