skullgiver

skullgiver, 14 days ago

The Federation’s secret is that everyone wears wigs.

skullgiver, 14 days ago

Last time I checked, almost all those were all off by default. Could be because I’m in Europe, though.

skullgiver, 14 days ago

I still enjoy the comics, but I have no idea how they got an animated series. The jokes are fine for a once-a-day thing, but minutes of this stuff at a time? I barely managed to get through the first episode.

I guess Apple must’ve been desperate for content.

skullgiver, 17 days ago

It’s stupid, but bcm is a commonly used abbreviation for a billion cubic meters of gas.

As long as the b is in there, I don’t think it’s that confusing, just stupid. I guess not everyone can find the ³ symbol on their keyboards.

skullgiver, 17 days ago

If glue wasn’t naturally part of the sauce, then why would the people advertising the same foods use it to make their commercials? Clearly, cheese is supposed to come with glue inside!

skullgiver, 22 days ago

All of this is already possible with the current Steam Deck hardware. Valve even has its own DRM (though that’s not hard to bypass in practice).

With secure boot, combined with a signed kernel and initramfs, and basic TPM keys, every official Steam Deck can have full hardware attestation the same way mobile phones and some laptops do. This, combined with existing anti cheat solutions, can work to detect cheating.

One rather annoying problem for anti cheat developers would be the Linux kernel license, though. The moment they link their code to the Linux sources and make it run, they’d need to provide the source code and details on how to build it to anyone running their anticheat code. There are ways around this (i.e. the Nvidia GPL condom) but the people behind the Linux kernel don’t really like that and sabotage attempts to work around the GPL requirements sometimes. Of course Valve could maintain its own kernel with those anti-GPL-bypassing code in it, but that’s quite a high workload compared to just using the standard kernel and supplying small patches to it where necessary.

I think it’d be a waste of time, to be honest. Whatever Valve produces will get bypassed eventually, as they’re no anti cheat company, and they’ll need not to convince us, but game publishers that their special Linux DRM is safe.

skullgiver, 26 days ago

I mean, you can just run Winamp in Wine already.

Linux support will depend on how tightly integrated the application is with the Windows API. It may very well be easier to just keep running in Wine, maybe after patching out some Wine related bugs.

It also depends on the llicense. If they don’t license Winamp and just show off the code, nobody is actually allowed to do anything with it. The title of their announcement uses"source available" so I assume the license is quite restrictive.

skullgiver, 26 days ago

You can keep the trademark with FOSS. That’s why Debian had Iceweasel rather than Firefox.

skullgiver, 27 days ago

Gitlab and a few others are actually working on using ActivityPub for this use case. There’s still a lot of work to do, though, so give it time.

skullgiver, 29 days ago

The project has build instructions for building your own copy. These are terminal commands.

You may need to install additional software if you get “command not found” errors. If you Google the exact error messages + the name of your distro, you should find out how to install that. The instructions seem comprehensive, though.

skullgiver, 29 days ago

Mint is based on Ubuntu, so the Ubuntu steps should work. I’m not sure what version of Ubuntu the latest version of Mint is based on, though. You can probably find that info somewhere on the Mint website.

skullgiver, 1 month ago

Messing with 18650s is rather risky, I’m not sure if exposing them as individual cells is a good idea. I hope the company is smart enough to put a “if you burn your house down replacing the batteries, we’re only liable if we sent you the replacement” clause in their sales contract or they’ll be sued into the ground if this thing ever takes off.

As for ARM+games: with tools like Box64 you can get some impressive performance out of 3D games assuming your GPU is supported. The native code of the game will be running translated, but the expensive calls to 3D engines and such will all be caught and replaced by native ARM libraries. I doubt you’ll be running Cyberpunk on this thing, but don’t count it out just because of the translation step.

skullgiver, 1 month ago

I don’t think regulated 18650 cells is a problem, but most users don’t know the difference. With every other laptop, you can pop out a battery and replace it with a model with the same part number, but with 18650 cells that’s a lot harder to accomplish. I’d rather see them “package” a bunch of 18650 cells together with its own part number and lets the people who know how batteries work figure out how to add their own cells (anyone with background knowledge will recognise the pack configuration the moment they take out the screws!)

I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.

A lot of Windows programs run on .NET, which is architecture independent, especially if they target UWP (which is more common than you might realise). The remaining applications will need porting to get decent performance, but the most important applications (browsers and Office) already work.

Re: Windows: Windows on ARM already has a binary translator, developed in part by Qualcom, that comes pretty close to Apple’s Rosetta2 for many types of software. It’s not as complete as qemu-static is, though it is faster for the software it does support. The worst part of the translation layer is that the ARM chips made by Apple’s competitors just aren’t very fast in comparison.

I believe Steam can distribute different binaries (there were games with x86 and amd64 binaries for a while!), but until ARM laptops with decent GPUs start coming along, I don’t expect any game devs to use features like that. Still, apparently current ARM devices can hit 50-60fps with current gen devices already, and the upcoming Snapdragon chips are supposed to compete with Apple’s CPU, so who knows!

Microsoft already tried (and failed) to make Windows on ARM a thing before with the Surface RT. I hope they don’t go all Windows 8 over their current attempt…

skullgiver, 1 month ago

In my experience, the AE customer support is quite customer friendly in its business. I don’t trust these stores for anything important, but when I need cheap shit, I tend to use AE to buy it from the source rather than spend three times as much on a local drop shipper.

skullgiver, 1 month ago

Your quote doesn’t seem to imply anything about North Korea and Russia. I would say it supports the idea that this is just China bullying people coming close to what they consider to be their territory.

The “you came close to your airspace so we scare you away” response seems like regular old territorial bullying to me. They know no country with a relevant navy or air force is going to risk going to war over just one aircraft, so they can do as they please. At worst they’ll receive complaints in the next UN meeting that nobody is going to really care about.

skullgiver, 1 month ago

They never claimed to have a problem with the UN resolution, they claimed that the ships and helicopter came closer to their airspace than they needed to to enforce the resolution.

If China wanted to block the UN resolution, they could’ve veto’d the entire thing for any reason.

skullgiver, 2 months ago

Kbin and Lemmy don't seem to federate admin activity. I get a lot of spam from the various Kbin instances whereas Lemmy spam seems to be dealt with already.

I think fixing this requires dev work on both the Lemmy side and the Kbin side.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

Thank god whatever evil spirits are doing this to babies are leaving my general area alone!

skullgiver, 3 months ago

I liked it. Some slight comic relief worked a lot better than just naming some random battle or supposed historical event that will later be shown disappointingly by some future spin-off.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

I don’t think DMCA stuff will be very relevant for most Fediverse servers (though being careful about federating with piracy focused communities may be wise), but this one stands out:

Service providers are required to report any CSAM on their servers to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, and can be criminally prosecuted for knowingly facilitating its distribution. NCMEC shares those reports with law enforcement. However, you are not required to affirmatively monitor your instance for CSAM.

While I don’t think the NCMEC would appreciate being flooded with thousands of reports from federating servers all reporting the same content uploaded from one specific server once the next CSAM troll appears, this does pose more significant risks. The people who left their Fediverse servers running after kind of dropping out of the Fediverse (the many servers that were used to generate the spam waves we recently saw, for example) can easily accumulate a significant portion of illegal material to the point law enforcement actually starts caring.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

As a talk by Deviant Ollam indicated: watch out with those settings. If someone you know is incarcerated and needs help, they may just get filtered out without you ever knowing.

Be mindful of the spam filtering settings you have in case something bad happens!

(I don’t see why prison calls need to be filtered out by spam filters, but unfortunately this has happened in the past and will probably happen again)

skullgiver, 3 months ago

So does iMessage, to be fair. The problem is that Apple decided not build clients for alternative platforms, but the app itself is quite competent.

Hopefully Apple can convince the telco people to implement E2EE in RCS (though good luck getting that through with wiretap laws all around the world, lol) so there’s some kind of cross-platform standard here. Apple is going to implement RCS to save Americans from blurry videos at the very least, but it won’t add Google’s proprietary encryption standard.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

RCS is controlled by GSMA, not Google. I’m sure they’ll welcome Google’s extensions, but Google doesn’t get to decide.

Google can try to do the same thing they did to XMPP, but then they get the same “Androids don’t receive our pictures” problem that’s driving teenagers to buy iOS in the USA in the first place.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

It definitely is, but “better” does not mean “good” unfortunately.

Hopefully Nvidia will push harder for decent drivers now that corporate Linux servers are in route to disabling X11, but as you can still get X11 back with just a simple package, I expect this process to take years.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

The plastic liner is impossible to recycle, isn’t it?