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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)HT
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2 yr. ago

  • which I explained in the part of my comment you left out.

    Pardon me. Here is the part you left out:

    It cheapens the endeavor

    You'll forgive me if I can't seem to scrape enough detail about your argument out of that.

    Piracy fully supports the endeavor of archiving. The motivations of pirates has nothing at all to do with it. Archiving springs from piracy, it is a consequence of piracy. And the corporations you are de-facto acting as defense counsel for here have proven over and over again it means less than nothing to them.

    But I'm making assumptions about your argument, because apparently you think "cheapens the endeavor" is a real mic drop.

  • If you’re downloading stuff because you want to play for free - which can be because of a lack of access (financial or otherwise) or a myriad of other reasons (perhaps it’s a milestone work but you don’t want to support a piece of shit dev) - then just be honest.

    Why?

  • No health impact is surely an overstatement, but I have to wonder how long it's been going on. They say that aerosolized rubber from car tires is a contributor, and we've been driving for a hundred years. Plastic packaging has been in wide use since the 50s. Surely there is a health impact but it's also been going on long enough that we must know our bodies tolerate it at least somewhat.

    I've taken to using silicone instead of plastic bags in my house to minimize my exposure, but I live next to a busy street so I feel kinda hosed.

  • organizers held a straw poll at the convention for Trump’s running mate: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem tied with tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy

    Boy you'd think the gallows set up for Pence would make a motherfucker think twice, but I guess you'd be wrong.

  • And the disk drive was still slow as shit. I always wanted an Apple //e and we couldn't afford it. Biggest mistake my parents ever made imo, if they'd've sprung for it I might have gotten into tech 10 years earlier and I'd be filthy rich rn.

    Anyhow, I got one, with Duodisk drive and everything. I regret nothing.

  • This will only delay the inevitable, imo. AI is going to get more powerful while getting smaller and more energy efficient. The human brain, effectively the model an AGI aspires to, runs on about 12 watts of electricity and evolution is powerful, but it's hardly the pinnacle of efficiency. In short order, AGI And eventually even ASI will have power requirements so small, that they will be able to run anywhere. And it will be desirable for them to, so they will. Try as anyone might, the greatest thinkers of the human realm will not be able to outwit ASI in the end. It will eventually exist and it will do whatever it wants. I wouldn't be surprised if it unplugs itself.

  • Alternatively focus your grievances towards the company.

    But why would the company care? They're marketing directly to a certain kind of person here. Anyone that would pay these prices - and plenty must pay because Blizzard hasn't blinked ONCE during any of this bullshit - has so much money that they wouldn't care if the colors were three times that.

    Blizzard acts like their bread and butter is the upper-middle-class and it must be true because they don't change at all as near as I've been able to tell. Not only do their sales not take a hit, they just keep growing.

  • Yep and this happens more than the situation in the OP. Just... shit won't work. No reason why? Well fuck, let me try Chrome. Yep, that works.

    It's just lazy devs. They program for Chrome and don't even test in anything else because that's 90% of the market. On the desktop.

    This is hilariously not the case on mobile, where everything is programmed for Safari.

  • I'm not on xitter so I may read cues wrong but the way I read it, the person who posted the Cunk attribution graphic was basically just saying "lol this reminded me of something Cunk would say."

    I feel pretty sure that would have crossed my mind too reading that.

  • I'll try to give an ELI5 kind of answer here.

    Before the Internet, "networks" were mostly one-offs you would dial into with a modem. Big or small, users would dial into the systems to enjoy whatever content was available on them.

    The Internet was created as a way to connect multiple, disparate network nodes like these. Now, instead of just letting people access your content, you could now let them access other people's content as well.

    There were lots of programs made to do this. IRC for chatting, Archie and Gopher for searching FTP sites for downloads you might want. There was also Usenet - a threaded discussion forum. The discussions looked a lot like Lemmy - there were subject lines and when you clicked on them there was threaded discussion you could read and participate in.

    When this was all initially going on the Internet was mostly text-based. We may have been accessing Usenet from our Windows 3.1 laptops (I used a program called Agent), but all these programs were doing was trading text. Slowly though, bandwidth started creeping up.

    As bandwidth began to creep up, people realized that huge text posts to Usenet could be used to post things like photos encoded to text. And thus was uuencoding born - and it didn't stop at photos. But because Usenet posts are limited in size, big files would get posted as multiple parchives - in multiple sections/posts that could be stitched back together into a whole again.

    It was in this way that Usenet - a system designed for conversation - became a way to trade files.

    Meanwhile the web happened. Discussion quickly moved to the web because you didn't have to download a separate program to view web forums. At the time, web forums were inherently inferior (they couldn't do threaded discussion) but they were also inherently superior (they could be moderated). Yeah, Usenet was unmoderated and because of this it was basically a huge pile of dogshit by the time the web got huge.

    Usenet did continue to flourish though - as this sort of Frankenstein file-sharing system. The problem is that most Usenet servers were hosted by ISPs because they wanted to host discussions - not file-sharing. So they shut their Usenet servers down. But the file sharing was just too useful to die, so dedicated Usenet providers popped up and picked up the slack where the local ISPs left off. It wasn't hard. Usenet is just a protocol - anybody can adhere to it and create a node.

    And clients changed too - from the readers I used like Agent, to new readers that recognized that people using Usenet aren't looking for discussion anymore. They're looking for an easy way to find the files they want and a program that will seamlessly stitch together all those PAR files behind the scenes for them to get it.

    This was the purpose behind Newzbin, which was an elaborate way to access the remaining Federation of (now mostly dedicated, paid) Usenet servers and easily find and download all they had to offer. It was super easy and worked very well, so naturally, it was fucked into oblivion by Hollywood in 2010.

    The great thing about Usenet though, is you can't kill it by killing off one node. The other great thing is that it's pretty stupidly complicated by today's standards, so it still exists because it's been largely forgotten while Hollywood focuses on stuff like torrenting.

    If you want to access Usenet, you will need to purchase access to a company that runs a Usenet server and get client software that can help you find and stitch together those PAR files. I am out of the loop, so I am afraid I cannot help you any further with that. But hopefully if you know the history of it and how it works in theory, it should help.