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Melody Fwygon

@ Melody @lemmy.one

Posts
3
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249
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • NSFW Deleted

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  • No; Piracy won't stop.

    Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

    Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in 'missed profits'.

    Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing "lost sales"; but that's provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?

  • While there is no harm; I could easily understand why parents might not want this measure passed. Frequently the costs get passed onto them in a painful way; either at the lunchline every day or indirectly via the taxes they pay and how much the school spends.

    I think it could be easier if instead of passing the law for everyone statewide; they just let schools and districts "opt into" this sort of thing by polling parents; and "voluntarily join the study of this subject" rather than being forced into it by state legislature statewide. Then the State can control and gather data in their own ways...and maintains their own control group; which makes a better study. They can't control the quality of the control group when using data borrowed from other states...what they get is what they get.

  • To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

    The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it's creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

    This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

    So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it's own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

    In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

    A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they've banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you'll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

    Most important is those checks typically don't take place naturally; they only occur when you're connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you've ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting "Mommy Nintendo" and asking "Mommy, May I?". Yeah. DRM sucks.

    If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won't know when this will happen, and it won't prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you'll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.

  • I really hate when lawmakers base policy on shaky evidence.

    I do think that some children could benefit from dye-free diets; but not all. Make it a matter of school policy that is defined every 3 to 6 months by asking the parents to lend their voices/ballot on the matter; outline the potential "pros and cons" directly on the ballot and let the parents decide each cycle if they want school lunches to go dye-free. Additionally you could poll the children regularly to monitor for dislike of food as well as have lunch monitors just take notes on how much food is eaten.

    Then sit back and watch as some schools try it out and some don't; and you'll have the ability to gather solid empirical data on if these are indeed problematic for children.

  • This is Material You icons; and this is basically not something you can opt out of...that I know of. You may want to find a different Launcher that allows you to load icon packs or disable that Material You behavior. (If yours doesn't)

  • Pardon; but I do happen to be a lady; thank you.

  • Like a Hydra; You cut one head off; and two grow in it's place.

  • The homogenization of these icons has been a long source of consternation for me.

    They're barely functional as icons; you can scroll right by them and miss them; which makes finding the apps in a list of apps a bit annoying sometimes. Removing each icon's unique color scheme and replacing it with the 'company 4 colors' was the stupidest fucking idea ever.

    Even more infuriating is how they keep renaming the applications to unexpected things every so often; so they move around; and it's dreadfully annoying to remember if they prefixed the name of the app with a G or something else completely different, which renders strict alphabetical sorting a bit moot.

  • You don't hire a well known "PR Superstar"-level lawyer without being super worried that your conduct might be viewed as wrong in a court of public opinion, regardless of whether or not you broke the law. The Lawyer ensures public opinion doesn't affect the possible legal case mess that's likely going on.

    Until those legal tangles are resolved, we really won't know more; and oftentimes details left for public record will be minimal if no wrongdoing was found.

    Personally; I think it's possible that the allegations might not be 100% legitimate, I do believe people would love to smear him if it meant potential financial gains and social notoriety. But I also think it's equally as possible that he is in fact as bad of a person as is alleged; and I believe he's likely to be very much a self-serving person who hides that dark side with his very public persona. There are a number of people in creator circles who whisper stories of negative interactions with him.

  • In general he is not a nice person when criticized. This is usually obvious in his content and social media interactions.

    His content is low quality, 'feel good', Reality TV garbage. Think like Dude Perfect; except they give out giant wads of cash and recruit random people. He has TWO FAILED BRANDS; Mr. Beast Burger, which is a chain of low quality ghost kitchens, and his Chocolate brand; which shows a clear lack of business acumen and capability. Much of his video content is clickbait; written explicitly to game the algorithm and garner attention with only minimally required guardrails to obey ToSes and relevant laws that are actually enforced. Frequently he invades other YouTuber's channels for a video or more to "promote his brand" and spread his junky content around. This is sometimes fine; when the channel is celebrity centric or otherwise good at staying on it's own topic; but I've heard...horror stories from certain youtubers about working with Mr. Beast...and even the Greens, (John and Hank, vlogbrothers) don't seem to like him all that much it seems like; as evidenced by their large lack of interactions with him. Sure, they 'professionally respect' him; but that's about as far as that seems to go. I think a lot of Nerdfighteria (Fans of the vlogbrothers) doesn't seem to interact with Mr. Beast that much and it makes me wonder.

  • Lemmy has it's start by being that upstart anti-reddit competitor. ...Just like Reddit was back when Digg dominated the web.

    Give it time; it seems Spez didn't learn his lessons from how reddit ended up dominating over Digg.

  • Honestly; I think the "Negative" reactions to the bot are overblown and only done by a vocal minority who are sockpuppeting followed by a few people who are irrationally angry that the bot can be, GASP! Dare I SAY IT???!!11, Wrong.

    Personally I don't find the bot problematic at all; and I think it could easily be blocked or ignored by people who find it too inaccurate. So I find it extremely disappointing that the mods are listening to the vocal minority about this.

    That being said; I do understand why Mods want to make the bot more accurate. It's assessments and information can easily make obvious extremists and trolls more obvious to the naked eye; and can help people consume media with some grains of salt. More sources of data are good for accuracy.

  • Yeah this seems like a non-issue to me as well; the source material for the models is probably the cause of this bias.

    I also don't think there's a lot of sources for this manner of speaking. Let's also not forget that there's oftentimes instructions given to the LLM that ask it to avoid certain topics which it will in fact do.

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  • This is why I use SearXNG; locally hosted on a container. It collates and sorts out the crap from all the engines at once. I get a useful list of results normally. My personal instance is configured to shotgun several engines at once and uses Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia for informational boxes over other engines; if those services present a result.

    My experience:

    • Infobox (if applicable), Source is reliable; usually Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia. May not always be immediately relevant but it's usually a close enough match.
    • Most relevant results (3 to 7 of them)
    • Relevant results containing any terms (Many)
    • Less relevant results (Usually on page 2 or 3 by this time)
    • Nonsensical results; may be slightly relevant (Usually you're 7 to 10 pages deep by then)

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  • Typically, using your own VPN should suffice. Depending on your situation you can do other things as well. If you are unable to download these tools on the school network in question; do not attempt to do so again. Use a public or other network connection elsewhere to obtain the tools you need to bypass their crap.

    For example, NextDNS could be helpful. By running their client app; ( https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki/Windows ) you can make sure all your DNS requests are encrypted. Similarly you could simply set up a local DNS server that you point Windows at which can redirect those requests over DNS-Over-(HTTPS or TLS) to a DNS provider of your choosing.

  • As someone who owns a similar set; I can estimate you're probably dealing with the upsampling issue due to an OS configuration issue. You should try listening to MP3s and FLACs at 44100hz sample rate for your comparison. Not 48000, not 96000.

  • In general I don't believe you can tell any difference between MP3 and FLAC if you listen to the audio at the intended sample rate.

    Meaning that @44100hz with 8 bit samples; you can't tell.

    Listening at higher sample rates with higher bits per sample; sure...there's lots of room for unwanted and even audible error. Audio interpolation algorithms are not miracles, not smart, and not even close to being finely psychoacoustically tuned to your ears in most cases.

    If you say you can hear a difference...you are lying or you are cheating by playing back the MP3 over an audio pipeline with a higher sample rate and bits per sample. Anyone could hear the difference when cheating like that. Human hearing can span all the way up to 128Khz; but oftentimes most people can't notice a credible difference even at 96Khz.

    But if you listen to a 44.1Khz signal via a 96Khz set of equipment; you'll pick out exactly when the audio output shifts between being 96Khz and 44.1Khz.

    This is how you can tell when audio is a recording at a lower sample rate. Most hardware is capable of outputting 96Khz so long as you don't put older things in your audio chain (The pipeline from file to your ears, and yes this includes software and your operating system as well).

    The problem usually arises when something is upsampled. Going from 44.1Khz to 96Khz is noticeable when you "Compress" the audio signal to boost apparent loudness. Most low-end equipment and unaware software will do this sort of operation automatically when upsampling your audio to make sure the process does not render your audio too quiet to hear. Your ears can hear frequencies being clipped or limited to a certain volume as well; which can also happen a lot to prevent certain issues. Because most people are unable to regulate this hidden software aspect of their playback chain; you can sometimes hear it.

    Luckily if you spend some time with proper DSP software and/or hardware, you'll be able to unmuddle/unmix these mistakes in your chain. It does take time and patience; and you'll need a large blend of HQ audio (like FLACs or MQTTs) as well as your standard "downsampled" audio (like MP3s and other lossy tracks), and you'll be able to tweak things so that everything sounds good.

    Software packages like Viper4Windows or Viper4Android are good starting points and are often easy to figure out how to use and offer a very wide and diverse range of controls you can use to adjust the audio to your needs and liking.

    Because everyone's ears are different; there's also plenty of tools that claim to adjust for your individual ears...and those can be helpful as well in chasing your perfect flat audio response curve and equalizing things to your preferences.

  • Businesses that do this do not get my visits usually. It's usually pretty evident.

    I'm not going to fund that; and they should be demanding that the system stop and be adjusted so that such cases do not in fact happen.

  • I never advanced from a 10% tip...if I thought the service and establishment justified tipping at all. Otherwise 0% tip.

    Tipping is strictly optional; and anyone pressuring you otherwise is an asshat who doesn't need your business.

  • The CEO is oftentimes a company policymaker; I think it would be foolish to ignore that fact.

    I've been boycotting C-f-a for at least 15 years now; and I don't tell my friends or suggest that my family eat there either; except as an emergency uber last resort. The gas station (burritos/sushi/hot-dog-warmer) would be suggested first.

    My current partner(s) know and respect my feelings for the company and they feel roughly the same anyways; and so we never eat there.