paris @ paris @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

Even if that was somehow possible, it would be infeasible to implement and wouldn't solve any problems. The best solution would have been to implement mod features natively first, and then implement EAC. That's the consensus of me, my friends, and the people I saw talking about it on twitter. Most people who supported the move without nuance were streamers who didn't understand that most mods were not malicious and were just happy they wouldn't get crashed or ripped in public lobbies anymore (which the update didn't actually stop).

About two weeks ago I thought about this in regards to google podcasts.

"Well this one will probably stick around long enough that I'll have moved on by the time google shuts it down. They don't even host the episodes anyway. They source the metadata and audio files from elsewhere. All they really host is my listening history, queue, and subscriptions. Certainly this is less likely to get the axe anytime soon."

two weeks later*

It really does suck though. I genuinely like the google podcasts app/website. Best one I've found so far that works how I like my apps/services to work.

I don't think this lends enough credit to how centralized the music industry is and the role that plays. If you want the world's music catalogue, you need contracts with like three companies. That level of centralization makes it straightforward to get a music catalogue going with basically everything someone might want to listen to, but it also severely hampers your ability to do anything those three companies don't want. If anyone's wondering why Spotify is pushing podcasts so hard, it's because that's the only way for them to get out from under the thumb of the few music megacorps that they have to license from to stay relevant. Spotify needs a revenue stream less dependent on the big three and it sees podcasts as its way out.

I'm sure music files being smaller and easier to pirate helped light a fire under the ass of the music industry to modernize, but that isn't the only factor at play here and I don't even think it's one of the main ones. If I recall correctly, Spotify is the company who went to the music labels asking for a contract. In order to show that the tech works, they had to pirate the initial catalogue until they had deals with music labels to license the music. Spotify brought their streaming vision to the music industry, not the other way around.

I believe Netflix had a good catalogue at first because every other company was sleeping on the streaming boom that Netflix was ahead of the curve on. Netflix could get good streaming license deals because nobody really cared about this little company they'd never heard of. As soon as everyone realized what was up, they scrambled to copy Netflix and pulled their libraries to fracture the streaming space.

From the start, the music industry knew what Spotify was and could be and knew how to use their leverage to keep themselves on top (Spotify isn't functionally allowed to be their own license for music creators, for example). I don't think the movie streaming space realized what Netflix was until it blew up.

I don't think the problem is that movie/tv hasn't "figured it out." The music space would be just as fractured if it wasn't as centrally organized. I think the problem is that the industries are just structured really differently, so they played out really differently.

To be clear, I'm not defending the music or movie/tv industry. I just think the situations are more nuanced than "music freaked out and got their shit together and movie/tv hasn't yet."

Getting real sick of the high road bullshit

The Alt-Right Playbook: You Go High, We Go Low by Innuendo Studios

If your Plex server was hosted on Hetzner and only stopped working very recently, this is probably what happened.

They are as well!

I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you're replying to is I think the first time I've seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I'm going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I'm looking for. Half the time it feels like it's reading my mind.

I genuinely don't know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I've gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn't find was the first result.

Few reasons. First, the United States is huge. Texas alone is twice the size of Germany. Second, the U.S. has three main power grids. The left half, the right half, and Texas. It's a little more complex than that, but the important part is that Texas is on its own. Third, Texas hates people. They let companies deregulate to hell and back, even at the expense of its residents.

The combination of being on its own power grid, deregulating that power grid and the companies that maintain it, and not taking proper precautions to protect its residents all leads to a less-than-reliable power grid when it gets hit with any non-standard weather. Texas especially needs to prepare for climate change, but things could definitely be going better…

Kopia actually has a GUI option too! I use it all the time! I pair it with a docker webdav server running on my server pc across the room.

Easy-Anti Cheat prevents modification to the game. Some people used malicious mods that could, for example, grab every single grabbable item in the instance and teleport them to one spot and crash people nearby as a result. Most mods were not that and everyone I know hates those people.

Some people say mods allow you to upload crasher avatars. This is not true. You can just upload an avatar with an absurd polygon count or custom shader that crashes people — no mods required. People who use these avatars are "crashers" and while they're not as common nowadays, everyone hates them.

Some people say mods allow you to "rip" (pirate) avatars from other people, even private ones. This is partially true. Most (all?) ripping happens by taking VRChat's local cache, de-obfuscating the avatar (or world) you want, fixing it, then re-uploading it to your account. Mods can automate this process, but EAC doesn't stop ripping. Recently, VRChat announced that they've made some changes to make ripping harder, but they didn't explain what or how. Hopefully this becomes less of a problem.

Sidenote on piracy: it's really easy because of how Unity packages work. Ripping is a form of piracy, but piracy doesn't necessarily mean ripping. Don't pirate VRChat avatars or worlds. People put a lot of work into making this stuff and they need an income. There are good free avatars you can find on gumroad/payhip/etc.

tldr: malicious mods could let you be malicious. except for game worlds, you can't really "cheat" at vrchat, but you sure as hell can make the experience worse for everyone else. most mods didn't do that, which is part of why there was fallout when they implemented EAC to eliminate modding.

Hi, I'm one of the people who stopped playing when EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) was introduced. I and most of my friends stopped playing for 6+ months. It genuinely became unusable for some of us between the time that EAC blocked modding and the time that most of the features that mods added were finally implemented into the game natively. The development speed and communication also shifted drastically since that event and it genuinely feels like a different team. We know what's going on behind the scenes now and get to actually have an input in upcoming features in a way that we didn't get to even just a year ago.

A lot of us have decided that these changes in development speed and communication are enough to warrant coming back. Those who disagree have left entirely for alternatives like ChilloutVR that explicitly allow modding. Things died down because the situation changed. The problems that were caused by the decision have for the most part been fixed. The people who still don't trust VRChat work on ChilloutVR now.

Also, VRChat has had a sizeable increase in its playerbase. People leaving the game was noticeable, but any lingering effects have been smoothed over. There are just a lot more people playing now.

tldr: yes, things have changed a lot. no, the people who were angry didn't "go back after a week" like some other comments suggest. a lot more people play this game now and the developers are more transparent with what they're working on. the problems that were caused by banning mods have mostly been addressed.

do… the rest of you not milk your urethra after peeing? i thought we all did that >.>

You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up "installs" for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I'm doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.

Updated again to more than 800. Jesus…

Yes! It's called uBlock Origin Lite. It doesn't have element filtering, but it works well if you just want a super lightweight adblocker.

Chrome

Firefox

I agree. Right now, websites maintain tracking infrastructure to build a profile of individual people as they move across the web. All of that comes down to one thing: targeted advertising. If companies had some way to know what types of ads to show users without tracking them, it would be way easier and cheaper. It would also be better for users since they wouldn't be invasively tracked all over the web. Privacy Sandbox seems to meet those goals. It does all the tracking locally and sends the end result (advertising topics of interest for this user) so the website knows what kinds of ads to show you without actually doing the tracking. This is a more privacy-focused way of doing targeted advertising for both websites and users. From what I can tell, it's a win-win. Most of the people I see complaining seem to hate it just because it's an advertising feature implemented by Google, but to me it seems unambiguously better than the current standard.

In the two years I've watched Vaush, every single time trans people have come up, he's been the first to defend us. Not to be a walking "wHaT aBoUt ThE cOnTeXt" stereotype, but using this (very) old clip to represent Vaush is super disingenuous.

To whomever is reading this: before you hate this guy, watch one recent video from his channel or tune in to one livestream. I think you'll find that he isn't remotely the person the clips paint him as. I'm not demanding that everyone like the guy, but at least form an opinion of him based on more than just the clips shown to you by someone who hates him. Here's a video from a week ago on his second channel covering trans politics in Germany (and then getting sidetracked over the German language). You'll find a very different person from the clip above.

It's reductive, but still close enough if you don't know/interact with nonbinary or two-spirit people on a regular basis. At least to the extent of my understanding.

Most places in the world recognize two genders and their respective social roles: men and women. Some places recognize a third gender and its respective social and/or ceremonial role. This is the case for (some) North American Indigenous people, and two-spirit is a catch-all term to refer to a third gender role that they recognize.

It's hard to map onto the more standard two gender system that most of us are familiar with. When you think of men as the breadwinners and women as the child bearers, some cultures think of an additional distinct third gender with a designated social/ceremonial role.

But as you might have thought while reading that, men being the breadwinners and women being the child bearers is already a fairly outdated view of gender and social roles. Turns out social constructs are messier than they seem when you start to really analyze them and attempt to strictly define them.

TLDR: two-spirit is a catch-all term for a type of queer identity recognized by some North American Indigenous cultures.