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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

    If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.




  • They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d’être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn’t tied to the store and did improve even though it’s barely used.


  • They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn’t happen until the time of day you’re least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you’re using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that’s not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don’t want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they’re doing from users who don’t so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.




  • It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

    The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

    Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.


  • And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.”

    Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.

    You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.

    As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.


  • It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals

    As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.

    If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.


  • The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.


  • I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

    Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

    If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlGame difficulty
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    2 months ago

    Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.



  • Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It’s that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there’s no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

    That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it’s part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn’t.

    We also don’t know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren’t true, and they settled out of court, so the public can’t see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they’d make Yuzu’s position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn’t require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

    Not long before this, Dolphin’s Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn’t at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they’re generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.