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  • 19 Posts
  • 1.3K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2023

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  • Any Linux OS with Steam installed, but yes most likely the same on SteamOS.

    My experience with games on Steam:

    • 75% of games: Click to Download, click Play, nothing more needed.
    • 20% of games will work, might need to select a special Proton version or put in one command.
    • 4% of games need tweaks specific to that game, to enable multiplayer, get around certain crashes etc., OR the game works fine but multiplayer doesn’t work at all due to anticheat set to block Wine users.
    • 1% of games don’t work at all due to either anticheat, DRM or another problem.

    Workshop works just fine, 3rd party mods will often work, but then you’ll need to get into the weeds of Wine to properly set it up, since installers are separate to the game.





  • I guess my question is “Since when?”

    Yes there was an annoying influx of election politics last year. Then there was another since January, Trump getting into power and saying dumb (but apparently newsworthy) shit almost every single day without fail.

    a bunch of the stuff the Trump admin did

    Following that there is the Project2025 high-veolcity dismantlement of democratic establishments and norms, while simultaneously destroying the relationships with allies through trade negotiations.

    This week, of course before an unusual military display that is usually planned by North Korean and Russian dictators, Trump is setting up the suspension of freedom of expression by improperly summoning the National Guard and Marines to what was originally a disproportionately small anti-ICE protest.

    So yes, a lot more crazy stuff is happening than before, and it certainly isn’t healthy. However, I don’t consider it the fault of people posting/cross-posting on Lemmy, I blame the chaos-stirring narcissistic arsonist who leads what formerly was the leader of the free world.

    Yes, you should filter it to a level that you can tolerate in a good mental state. Each person is different. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed, but be aware enough to hold onto the thread of knowing what you can or cannot do about it.


  • Mr. Doctorow has expressed before he doesn’t mind enshittification being used casually as it helps proliferate it. But strictly speaking by his original definition, there are three stages:

    • Offer something extremely good to your customers, to expand reach even at a loss.
    • Once enough of the market is captured, offer something very good or unique to your business clients, at the expense of customers.
    • Once enough of business is captured, extract value from the platform at the expense of business clients and customers in favour of shareholders and owners.

    Now, yes, this type of thing has long been common, in terms of oligarchic, monopolistic capitalism, cartels, mafia, colonial market exploitation, etc. But the original context of the word, to clarify, has to do with the kind of changes enabled by technology (twiddling), where digital firms can A/B test, degrade the experience in minor increments or for algorithmically based sectors, pretending certain failures are accidental glitches, so that it is hard to notice and the justice system can’t keep up. With traditional rackets, a court with enough of an anti-trust mindset can effectively identify the affected class, identify and effectively deal with the scheme. The modern “enshittification” is much more elusive, and we’re only beginning to think about how to tackle this form of subtle yet widespread manipulation enabled by digital technology.


  • I watched this episode last night and I found Robert struck a surprisingly optimistic tone. It suggested to me that Mr. Reich has more of a sense of trust in the American system than I do (and that could be because I’m not American).

    On one hand, my gut tells me that sitting back, looking smug and saying “Trump’s approval rating on everything is through the floor” is not going to fix anything and is not going to stop the administration from trying to assert the Presidency as a dictatorship.

    On the other, when courts had come to the conclusion that Trump’s “trade deficit emergency” tariff power was illegal, was a rare moment of Trump that might actually be put in check for once. It felt like a turning corner, and what I can hope for is that Americans learn the purpose of what democracy’s nominal guardrails were supposed to protect against, by seeing what happens when you let someone enact Republicans’ pipe dream. As Robert said, Americans are learning “from first principles” on why we don’t make President’s kings (the Unitary Executive Theory).

    If democracy survives, this is the Republicans’ ship that will sink with Trump. Perhaps Democrats will follow Republicans down to ruin (as a matter of fairness and decorum), but they have right in front of them a golden opportunity to reform themselves, if there ever was one.


  • So the whole thing about FOSS is that at its core, someone could add malicious features or whatever to a codebase, but it can be discovered if people notice adverse effects and dig into it.

    Like that one supply chain attack by “Jia Tan” on xz tools, that was quite nefarious, well planned and executed, yet some nerd noticed a slightly longer than normal response time and looked into it (a gross simplification, some luck might have been involved but you get the point). If it were a closed-source proprietary tool, the owners would shrug their shoulders and gaslight people into believing it’s nothing.

    That’s why people make a fuss about binary blobs in FOSS code, if anything unwanted was happening, it could always be from there.

    My personal level of checking is ensuring that I have gone to the correct official source, but I will generally have to trust the builder that was linked from that source did not modify or inject anything.




  • The English + Undefined issue is indeed a nasty issue that makes half of the content disappear for a reason that’s not easy to figure out. It really should be a separate checkbox of whether to show or hide posts where the language is not labelled. I do think that Undefined is selected by default now, but might still get unselected if the language setting is clicked and changed.

    For those people saying “Ctrl+Click, should be obvious”, that won’t work at all on mobile web UI.


  • Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/science_memes@mander.xyz means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.

    A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: !science_memes@mander.xyz, or !fediverse@lemmy.world to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.

    There’s still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it’s not completely a bad thing.