t3rmit3

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" supposition, I don't think that really holds any water; it's just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it's eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I'm just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they're by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It's just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.

the ‘one good company’

No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.

there are plenty of examples to the contrary

Of course, it's a company. But it's still a billion times better than most of its competitors.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

Agreed. I like Steam.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

I'm glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn't choose that, and they're certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

It really feels like this author is just saying, "they're resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo 'timebomb'!".

"Every person who isn't a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!"

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly "Steam releases you might have missed this week" article, and they're always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren't actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they're just checking the top releases that aren't AAA publishers.

I get there's not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren't all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it's more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can't directly write the ad copy for).

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

The person you're responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don't provide offline installers like GOG.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

I use them regularly, and have never had issues

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Low tech DHCP

The RFC is actually real, though it it basically a joke: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2322

Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp

Introduction
This RFC describes a protocol to dynamically hand out ip-numbers on
field networks and small events that don't necessarily have a clear
organisational body.

History of the protocol.

The practice of using pegs for assigning IP-numbers was first used at
the HIP event (http://www.hip97.nl/). HIP stands for Hacking In
Progress, a large three-day event where more then a thousand hackers
from all over the world gathered. This event needed to have a TCP/IP
lan with an Internet connection. Visitors and participants of the
HIP could bring along computers and hook them up to the HIP network.

During preparations for the HIP event we ran into the problem of how
to assign IP-numbers on such a large scale as was predicted for the
event without running into troubles like assigning duplicate numbers
or skipping numbers. Due to the variety of expected computers with
associated IP stacks a software solution like a Unix DHCP server
would probably not function for all cases and create unexpected
technical problems.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Socialism in New $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in California is set to start Monday

Hell yes, California! I don't love everything most things that Newsom does, and I certainly don't like many of our state and federal legislators, but we are at least markedly better than most other places in this capitalist shithole of a country.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

everyone can see it

Yes. Your comment here: https://beehaw.org/comment/3046503

Here's a screenshot of you literally saying what I quoted:
https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/77af0732-42ed-41f4-9337-05d27d07443b.webp

Hope this helps.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

I'm not arguing they're comparable; I'm the one out of the 2 of us arguing not to have any interaction with Meta apps, including via federation. I'm arguing that you shouldn't be trying to sell a false sense of anonymity with fediverse instances. You said they're "spy-free", not "far less intrusive than Facebook". The latter is true. The former is not.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

Scraping public data is entirely different from collecting your contact history, location history, web browsing traffic, decrypting WhatsApp traffic, etc. etc. and on and on.

Fediverse instances can also do most of this. They know your IP and email, and the stuff you reveal about yourself. You could de-anonymize many users with those 2 plus the info they share about themselves on here, with a bit of OSINT work. Any fediverse apps could also get access to contacts or other locally-stored info on your phone.

"But I wouldn't use that app." Well then you wouldn't be someone using Facebook either. People using Facebook would also be the people granting shady fediverse apps undue permissions.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

No, that’s not what I asked.

Yes, it literally is. You quoted where I said:

If your instance starts to try to “convert” people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.

And then responded to it by saying:

…why would they do that?

That is literally asking why they would block instances trying to convert users into fediverse users instead of Threads users.

Do you work with Meta?

Do you?

me: Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services.

you: Are you not aware that WhatsApp is also interoperating to comply with DMA? Another Meta company?

I think you are conflating portability with interoperability. Those are 2 separate requirements.

Portability is about preventing platform lock-in, making it so that users can leave a platform (i.e. Threads), and take their data with them to another platform (any platform, not just ones of the originator's choosing). This is not solved with federation.

Interoperability is the ability for users of one platform to interact with users of another platform, without platform-imposed loss of functionality. Whether ActivityPub can serve as a replacement for an API is something that courts in the EU would have to decide. It is certainly not 1:1.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

Are you going to explain what UGC means?

"User-generated content". Posts, comments, uploaded files, etc.

…why would they do that? Why would they introduce something new just to turn around and try to prevent you from using it?

Why would they try to prevent users from migrating away from their service? Are you seriously asking this?

The reason they’re federating is because of the Digital Markets Act. Same reason WhatsApp is going to interoperate.

LOL they only need us to comply with regulations.

You have asserted this in multiple comments, but the only site I can find asserting this link is a blog post by someone who admits to having only a "surface-level understanding" of DMA, and thinks that this is gaining them data portability.

As someone who works at a very large company that is also affected by DMA, this is not how any company whose legal teams we've spoken with are interpreting this requirement. Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services. Streaming someone's data over to another platform where they may or may not have an account, or ever intend to go, wouldn't fulfill that requirement, because if the user wishes to move to a non-federated instance, that would not be possible. Portability also cannot be 'favored' under DMA.

That is a separate issue from interoperability, which only works if Threads is allowing federated instances to fully interact with their users' posts, with no loss of functionality, which was at least originally not the plan.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Technology in Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed"

Federating doesn't prevent that either, but at least you won't be rewarding them for it by engaging with them. If Meta wants to sink ActivityPub (or rather, subsume it), it will, and no actions we can take will prevent that, bar forking the standard in some way.

In fact, not federating with Threads is the only potential way to ensure that our instances don't become reliant on functionality that Threads adds, even if we can't save the ActivityPub standard itself.