• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • Discord has quite a few good features that IRC doesn’t. I will agree that it being used as a replacement for a forum, while also being unsearchable, is amazingly stupid. However, it’s used by almost everyone for a reason, and to ignore that (if you were to develop and alternative) ensures you won’t succeed. Yeah, we don’t need every feature from Discord, but easy voice/text/video chats, image/file sharing, and all the other useful things are required. Yeah, we can probably lose the emotes and crap and be fine.






  • Flawless? Fuck no. When have you ever come to expect a flawless experience from any software? I had to deal with so much shit on Windows though, over a very long period of time. I mostly learned to tune it out, but after switching to Linux full time it became obvious what I had just grown to ignore.

    Linux isn’t flawless, and never will or should try to be. It’s just better than the alternatives. You have to spend some time with it and figure out it’s quirks, just as you did with Windows but forgot. You need to also not expect it to be Windows. It’s a new thing and you have to learn it knowing it’s not trying to copy Windows.



  • Again, the point is you were saying (or agreeing) that copies being available for free decrease the value. You then later say it has intrinsic value.

    I’m not arguing that they don’t have intrinsic value. I’m arguing that you undermined the point of value decreasing if it exists for free by admitting this. It doesn’t. It’s worth something no matter what someone else paid, and no matter what you paid.

    A game decreasing in price over time isn’t doing so because it’s worth less (usually, with the exception of online games). They’re decreasing the price to capture customers who don’t agree with the original valuation. It doesn’t change value to the consumer based on the price changing. The object is not suddenly less valuable when there’s a sale and more valuable again after. It has a degree of “goodness” no matter what. The price doesn’t effect this.




  • Adding on to say: no. It doesn’t cost the creator anything when a pirated copy is made. They potentially miss a sale, but if their item wasn’t in a store where someone may have made a purchase you wouldn’t call that actively harmful, right?

    In addition, most media the creators don’t actually make money from the profit. Most of the time they’re paid a salary, maybe with a bonus if it does particularly well. The company that owns the product takes the profit (or loss), not the actual creators.

    Also, a lot of media isn’t even controlled by the same people as when it was made. For example, buying the Dune books doesn’t give money to Frank Herbert. It goes to his estate.



  • Very few programs require anything complicated to get them working. A lot of productivity programs don’t support Linux though, like anything from Adobe, but there are usually alternatives, and if not can often be run in a VM. This probably doesn’t matter for you though, since you don’t seem to be particularly technical (not an insult). You probably know what programs you need that may not work. If there’s nothing like that then you’ll be fine.



  • I’m not the person who brought git up. I was just stating that work is work. Sure, git is doing something useful with it. This is arguably useful without the work itself being important. Work is the thing you’re complaining about, not the proof.

    This solution is designed to cost scrapers money; it does this by causing them to burn extra electricity. Unless it’s at scale, unless it costs them, unless it has an impact, it’s not going to deter them.

    Yeah, but the effect it has on legitimate usage is trivial. It’s a cost to illegitimate scrapers. Them not paying this cost also has an impact on the environment. In fact, this theoretically doesn’t. They’ll spend the same time scraping either way. This way they get delayed and don’t gather anything useful for more time.

    To use your salesman analogy, it’s similar to that, except their car is going to be running regardless. It just prevents them from reaching as many houses. They’re going to go to as many as possible. If you can stall them then they use the same amount of gas, they just reach fewer houses.

    Compare this to endlessh. It also wastes hacker’s time, but only because it just responds very slowly with and endless stream of header characters. It’s making them wait, only they’re not running their car while they’re waiting.

    This is probably wrong, because you’re using the salesman idea. Computers have threads. If they’re waiting for something then they can switch tasks to something else. It protects a site, but it doesn’t slow them down. It doesn’t actually really waste their time because they’re performing other tasks while they wait.

    Let me make sure I understand you: AI is bad because it uses energy, so the solution is to make them use even more energy? And this benefits the environment how?

    If they’re going to use the energy anyway, we might as well make them get less value. Eventually the cost may be more than the benefit. If it isn’t, they spend all the energy they have access to anyway. That part isn’t going to change.


  • Proof of work is just that, proof that it did work. What work it’s doing isn’t defined by that definition. Git doesn’t ask for proof, but it does do work. Presumably the proof part isn’t the thing you have an issue with. I agree it sucks that this isn’t being used to do something constructive, but as long as it’s kept to a minimum in user time scales, it shouldn’t be a big deal.

    Crypto currencies are an issue because they do the work continuously, 24/7. This is a one-time operation per view (I assume per view and not once ever), which with human input times isn’t going to be much. AI garbage does consume massive amounts of power though, so damaging those is beneficial.



  • The performance impact of these systems really aren’t a problem for most modern computers. If your computer is running other GUI applications, I think worrying about that is insane. If you’re running a server, sure keep it minimal because you aren’t going to interact with it directly much. For your desktop if you’re running games and stuff, it’s going to be the smallest of your issues. Just do what feels best.

    Even Valve, optimizing their handheld device for maximum battery life, includes KDE. You shouldn’t worry about it probably.