12/20 is not a good result. There’s a 25% chance of getting the same score (or better) by just guessing. The comments section is a good place for all the lucky guessers (one out of 4 test takers) to congregate.

Well they are also playing “Erika” which is a right wing dog whistle, though maybe not as uncommon in these circles, as outright Nazi salutes

Edit: Also curiously most people, myself included, never find themselves in danger of accidentally heil hitlering even when blackout drunk. Seems to become a more common occurrence in Saxony though.

There’s an interesting blog post on this subject (likely someone posted it already): https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying

I find it to be very agreeable. Search is dying and I don’t agree that appending “site:reddit.com” is any kind of permanent solution, just a workaround that will also break.

when breaking the internet and end-to-end encryption are part of any kind of “enterprise certification” that certification is worthless (or worse) and probably some kind of chinese or russian (or the CIA or whoever, certainly not your friend) psyop. Only a mindless idiot would implement it.

My work has a 100% mandatory vpn and mitm proxy for ssl scanning

These are worse than useless. They are anti safety. If this box or its private keys get compromised ALL tls traffic of all employees is immediately plaintext.

Any company that buys one of these appliances from mcafee or whatever is asking for it (losing most/all their secrets)

ohh boy, I almost forgot about that. That was super painful. It’s a website linus, not a file browser.

where I’d have to pay around $260/mo for Comcast Premium Plu

That can’t be real. Who pays that for a cable plan (or any kind of entertainment package)?!

How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though?

You can just remove “priated” from that statement and come to the same conclusions. Considering the amount of bugs, backdoors and 0-day exploits distributed via official software I sometimes wonder why people execute proprietary, closed source programs at all.

An no, “reputable” companies mean nothing, just look at Microsoft clowning around with their signing keys.

Since when does Denuvo block mods?

The whole point of Denuvo (and any DRM in games) is to prevent modifying the running code. Unless there’s some kind of official modding system, there will be no way to inject DLLs or do anything else invasive to the running game.

There are tools that are being used to attempt to detect if a piece of work is AI-generated. If those tools say something was, it’s then on you to prove that you hand-created it.

They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

Even some artists are already having issues because things “look” AI-generated.

Exactly. See above. No one can (confidently) tell which is which. There’s just educated guessing.

What is your take on this particularly in relation to the SAG-AFTRA strike over streaming residuals? Even if you want to pay for a creator’s work, most ways to consume content now mostly does not get to the creators of a work.

On general principal I always support workers rights to strike and applaud them for fighting for a higher wage.

My personal opinion in this particular case: Many writers in this industry very much overvalue their worth, especially considering the low-brow content they create (10 years or more of capeshit), how replaceable they are (barely any original idea in sight), the low general quality of their work (I’m not even watching this shit for free, you’d have to pay me) and the encroaching power of AI. I’ve never seen such a long-string of garbage writing coming from Hollywood (or maybe I’m just lucky having observed a golden age of TV) and I’ve not seen a similar decline in quality from other craftsmen (cinematography, acting, sound and music…) in the industry. Maybe writers can make some short-term gains, but unless they hone their craft to bring it above the level of what ChatGPT can create right now, they are going to lose their power struggle in the long run.

I’m not even sure how renting or buying a title through a digital service like amazon or google is distributed to creators vs how much goes to the platform and copyright holder.

Often there are options. Speaking about music: A spotify subscription is most likely useless for supporting smaller artists, but buying their merch or stuff from bandcamp is a no-brainer if you have the money.

Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.

…

So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.

This kind of judgement is pure symbolic politics, because it’s completely unenforceable and I’m confused why you didn’t mention it. No one can prove if a piece of art is AI made and no one has to admit it. So yes, AI art can be copyrighted, just not officially as AI art, but it certainly will be and likely already is as long as there’s a human ‘stand in’.

There’s a huge gulf of difference between a matter of fact and a matter of law.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something?

Never pay money for pirated content or ask someone to pay money for pirated content. Donations to keep a site running are borderline and iffy, depending on the implementation and transparency. As soon as you earn any kind of revenue or treat it as your ‘job’ it crosses into the unethical IMO.

Second point related to money: Pirating stuff you could easily pay for is probably bad, if the creator receives $0 from you. There might still be reasons to do so (not wanting to support DRM for example), but if you got the cash you better find a way to support the actual creators (merch, donations…). The smaller the author the heavier the moral responsibility to bring some money their way. This also weighs in the other direction: It’s probably accetpable or even good to not give more money to giant corporations that abuse intellectual property for their own gains and who shit on creators.

How dare people try to mod a game they bought? What a sad state of affairs, Diablo 2 had such awesome mods.

Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

That’s delusional. As soon as more and more parts of software are run remotely on proprietary hard- & software there will be nothing to hack or crack. Sure, someone could reverse engineer it, but there aren’t enough hobbyists in the world to rewrite all this software.

We see this more and more in gaming… it used to be the case that they just gave you the software to run your own game in multiplayer setups, nowadays, if they shut off the servers, the game is dead (unless, someone releases a very wonky, extremely buggy, barely usable, reverse engineered server with 10% of the features some time down the line)

Is this guy exclusively attributing frontend desktop experience to “enterprise”? There’s more to enterprise than Word, Excel and MS Teams my guy.

For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8

LDAC is great, but simply stating that the encoder is “open source” is quite misleading (while technically correct). The codec is owned by Sony and heavily licensed. It’s a savvy business move of Sony to make the encoder free to use though, so everyone else can support their standard while charging manufacturers who want to integrate it into their headphones.

If we want a really free and open high quality codec, we should push for opus support via bluetooth

Meh, there’s plenty of naturally occurring things, that look ‘artificial’ to the human eye at first glance.

Some metallic spheres after entry of a meteoroid into earths atmosphere are not enough unless you explain how they couldn’t have formed naturally.

While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games

… but in the same sentence has nothing but good things to say about constant tinkering and overhauling:

companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes

Dude sounds like he’s just speaking out of two sides of his mouth.

By the way, this is also why they are against game preservation. Artificially making the $thing unavailable is a sure fire way to sell it again ‘remade’.