Star Trek vs Star Wars. I like both.
Blasphemy!
Sincerely, someone who does not watch either.
Steam. Apparently I’m supposed to be angry they are a locked down monopoly but compared to practically EVERY OTHER GAMING COMPANY IN THE WORLD they are frickin’ saints.
Yeah, it’s one of those things where one could argue that steam is successful in part to being entrenched (all of your friends are on steam and all of your games are on steam, so might as well continue using steam), but also… other game launchers are just worse? The fact steam has a lot of useful features, as well as surprisingly few scummy incidents in its history just makes it not worth switching off for me :p
Do other launchers have the workshop functionality to add mods directly from their launcher? That’s been something I love about steam
All the ones I can think of are for individual games rather than general launchers lol. And third party mod launchers that you have to add your own games obtained elsewhere :p
For me steam input the big one that pulls me towards steam; seamless proton integration too, but that one I could handle losing, steam input on the other hand I think is one of the best input remappers out there, I even added all my non-steam games to steam to make use of it too haha
I buy based on trust, and at this time, steam hasn’t lost it.
They’ve made their drm more lax over the years while Sony and microslop have worsened theirs. Like how you couldn’t easily play your games offline before steam deck.
Still buying my games from GOG first though.
They’ve done so much for gaming on Linux I forgive them for having a convenient launcher that launches everything
Yeah, I saw an article about Epic’s CEO having a gormless rant about Steams AI filtering and how but Steam was for them.
All I could think was: “well, make a better product then”
GOG Galaxy is the only launcher / storefront that comes close to competing with Steam, and that is because the one thing they do better:
DRM-free games.
The rest is about equal or slightly worse.
If Epic looked at the customer base and analyzed what people wanted I am sure they could build a better platform than Steam, but with a CEO as unlikable as Epic’s and with his trackrecord it would take many years of hard work and effort to even begin to come close to Steam.
It would probably take some massive PE/VC enforced changes at Valve where they start to enshittify Steam and the loss of confidence in the platform that will follow to make the other platforms competitive.
It would probably take some massive PE/VC enforced changes at Valve where they start to enshittify Steam and the loss of confidence in the platform that will follow to make the other platforms competitive.
Make no mistake, it’s coming eventually. I held off on trusting discord for years buy finally they won me over. Now look where we are.
Never again.
Valve has been around since 1996, Steam since 2003
Discord has been around since 2015 and was funded on VC money.
Kind of different situations lmao.
Sure, but once Gabe passes the torch it’s just a matter of if the person(s) getting it gets a big enough blank check to walk away from it
That’s true, but we’re not at that point yet so… What is your point? They’ve managed to thrive as a private corporation up to this point, clearly everyone working there is making bank too and treated well. (From all accounts I’ve read) so I’d hope the incentive is higher to keep with the same philosophy for whoever comes after. Of course hard to say, can’t undercut the greed some people have for making more money then they literally could ever spend.
I have decided to bite the sour apple, as we say in Sweden, and overpay for the last two hard drives for my NAS build to complete it, then I will grab every offline installer for my games I can find and keep a local copy.
32TB of storage that can loose two drives before any data loss, a solid start for backups, media and software.
Firefox purity testing. Oh no they ran an ad or made a post on a mainstream platform or developed a widget. Look at the state of the world this is such a non issue and compared to the other browsers out there they are fighting the good fight unequivocally.
I had to lol at Firefox today, it wouldn’t let me log into my modem because it was DANGEROUS. Awwww. Lucky I have Librefox as well, it lets me play with matches and drink puddle water.
librewolf but also any flavor of chrome should show the same warning for self signed certs, for the first time. check it in a private window of librewolf
It’s more that the internet demands that I’m constantly outraged, but I want to spend the majority of my time being chill and happy. I can get my dander up for most things the internet wants me to be mad about, I just… don’t.
that makes them angry though.
Rage bait is the worst internet trend to date. Yeah yeah, I know trolling always existed, but it was actually funny sometimes, done to bait assholes or uppity people usually, and done for the love of the game. Rage bait is just doing something out if pocket or legitimately bad just to get eyeballs on you which now translates to free money for them because the world is a fucked up place that rewards people with no principles now. My wife just saw a TikTok video where some jackass stuck his hand down his pants and the rubbed his hand on his toddler’s face. What the actual fuck are we doing, humanity?
Cultural appropriation.
So… You’re offended. People are living out of their cars now. I’m more worried about that.
Also, the person being offended usually isn’t even from the target culture. They’re being vicariously offended on behalf of somebody else, when the actual members of that culture usually dgaf or like it.
Don’t get me started on “Latinx.”
Oh I’ll happily get started on that one. I’m latina. Latinos very rarely use latinx because it can’t be fucking pronounced in Spanish. If you must use a neutral version, latine is more common.
My understanding is that it was originally created in I think Puerto Rico?, but quickly got picked up and pushed by non-Hispanic (mainly white) people. To put it in perspective, 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it (2024)
Don’t use latinx
Sony discontinuing physical media.
I haven’t bought a physical game for any platform in I don’t even know how many years and I doubt I ever will again.
I think I wrote this in a few hundred comments already. It’s a little weird people make it about physical games, it’s not really about that, physical games are dead on PC, barely anyone cares. It’s about Sony locking people into the Playstation Store and having full control over prices. With physical copies you can buy them wherever you want and they usually go down in price relatively quickly after release. Digital store prices remain high for years after release and only drop sometimes during sales, but even then they drop to the level of physical copies. The other issue are used games, at the moment that only works with physical copies.
Taylor Swift. Like, I get that billionaires are a problem, and her carbon footprint is huge. On the list of problematic billionaires, I feel like she really doesn’t do that much problematic shit compared to the others.
Musk is a Nazi that gutted the US govt, Ellison has a laundry list of major issues, bezos is killing small businesses and bought a news company to whitewash himself, gates was involved with Epstein and did some shady shit to grow Microsoft, the waltons single handedly massacred thousands (millions?) of small businesses with anticompetitive practices.
I really don’t think that Swift rises remotely close to the same level of degeneracy and existential threat that these guys do, yet the only other billionaire I see getting criticised as much as her is Musk.
"Yes, but have you considered the fact that she is a woman, women enjoy her music, and women enjoying things is a problem because they’re wrong? It’s like you don’t even have a vendetta against pumpkin spice! " - general underlying factor
“her music is not deep” - the opinion of men whose only exposure to her music is the pop songs that gets airtime, not the lyrical depths of the rest of the album that directly hits women in the feels
On the first point: yeah, I didn’t even want to get into the underlying sexism that drives the critique lol.
On the second: yeah, she made a billion dollars on her music. If you want to appeal to that wide of an audience, you’re going to need to pump out some generic shit, at least on occasion. It’s not really a great criticism of her, because that’s her main skill. She can throw together 10 somewhat specific songs to cater to the fan base, then 2 tracks that get massive airtime and hook more people into the fan base. She’s literally the best at it by the numbers.
Usually anything to do with celebrity drama. While it’s not that common on Lemmy, the rest of the pop internet seems infatuated with what actor/musician threw shade or dissed some other, or which diva is being treated SO unfairly…
Trans people: I don’t care which sportball team you play on or what bathroom you use, just wash your hands when you’re done.
Whatever is in your pants is none of my business unless you’re trying to make it my business (in which case, I’m flattered, but in a monogamous relationship, sorry).
This should be the baseline bottom, but somehow its not. If you care or not or think its “wrong”, just keep it to yourself because Trans people are not harming anyone.
I have met 4 Trans people in my entire life, and they are just normal kind people. They’re not cheating at sports, or being weird in bathrooms, or anything people are fearmongering; they just want to live their life comfortable in their bodies
I’m with you on this, but I’m also against the opposite: the blind praise and promotion of being trans for some reason. Look, if you have something wired in your brain different that makes you present as another gender, go ahead. Present yourself how you want, I can’t imagine why I’d give much of a shit. It’s a free country. But why do people have to constantly yap and take over every non right wing chud internet space to make it about being trans or related like talking about how hot femboys are. It’s like…I mean honestly? A trend. And something major and life changing like that shouldn’t be a trend. I’m sorry but that is dumb. Have your own spaces where you can talk about your own issues, sure. Don’t be afraid to mention it in other spaces, sure. I’m cool with that. But maybe don’t take over everyone else’s spaces and make everything about you. Being annoying on purpose just doesn’t work in your favor.
Also related, if psychologists and such agree that the best way to treat gender dysphoria is hormones, that’s cool. But like maybe don’t push socialized treatment for that so hard when we have literally nothing else socialized in healthcare. Priorities, you know? People are dying, every day, and cosmetic appearance for something a lot of people find weird and off putting is too easy of a target to keep healthcare terrible. I’m not saying it’s right, but you have to pick your battles sometimes. Just like if you want to make someone not racist towards black people, maybe show them something like jazz or soul first, not hip hop. Is hip hop art? Absolutely, one of my favorite genres. But it’s going to be an immediate turnoff if you jump to bad language and drug dealing and bitches and the other rap tropes. Should you have to cater to someone racist or transphobic? No, but that’s the world we live in. Everyone gets to vote. and everyone starts somewhere with understanding people different than themselves.
Trans rights are human rights in the sense that you should be free to look and present how you want and not be harassed about it. But that doesn’t mean you get to have everything you want, for free, and everyone has to not only treat and react to you exactly how you imagined it in your head, but also praise you for being different. That’s not how the world works, for anything.
Couldn’t agree more.
It’s like…I mean honestly? A trend.
This is the thing that really bothers me. So many kids claiming to be “trans”, when they are very clearly going through common teenage rebellion/finding themselves. It does a disservice to those who really do have gender dysmorphia. The conservative “anti-trans” crowd can point to this and say “see, they’re all just being weird”.
And sure, there are kids who really are that way. My old ass thinks they should wait until they’re actually adults to go messing about with their hormones. That shit is permanent and they’re still developing. They can live as another gender in the meantime, no reason to stop that. But at least make the body modification decision as an adult.
Chat Control. It’s not evil EU trying to read everyone’s messages. It’s EU working with various groups to solve an issue, like they do all the time.
Yes, various groups trying to solve a problem that barely exists by creating problems orders of magnitude worse but gives them more power. But surely there are no nefarious motivations there.
Online grooming barely exists? I’ve seen reports that it’s quite common in Roblox for example but I don’t have kids so I don’t know.
I am not saying online grooming is not a problem, but as you said, it happens on public spaces like Roblox, where predators can find children. Chat Control is unnecessary to monitor those. Random youtubers have been able to do that. No need to build a massive spy apparatus. Instead, of adressing this, Chat Control tries to pry open secure communications like Signal used by journalists, protesters, etc. Applications where grooming is not much of an issue as you only communicate with your existing contacts.
Chat Control ignores the rampant grooming in plain sight while trying to spy on communications where it is rare. So tell me, am I paranoid to think they have different motivation to breach those and are only using “protecting kids” as an excuse?
So tell me, am I paranoid to think they have different motivation to breach those and are only using “protecting kids” as an excuse?
I don’t think you’re paranoid, more uninformed.
Chat Control proposed two things:
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Some, let’s call them, ‘anti-grooming’, common sense rules by default. They propose identifying high risk services in which you can for example search users by age and send them private messages. Those services would be required to do things like age verification to separate children from adults. If services don’t want to do age verification they have to implement measures like not letting users send private messages to everyone, not being able to search by age, limiting what info is visible to other users (pictures? names? locations? interests?), limiting public spaces (do you need common, public chats in Roblox or can it be limited to chats with friends only?) and so on. I think this is way better than hoping youtube vigilantes will look for pedos for views.
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The other thing they are trying to solve is using e2ee messaging apps to distribute CSAM. Here they don’t want to touch encryption in any way and the proposal is to let providers voluntarily scan media client side. This was proposed as mandatory at first but was changed later. This is the part people don’t like as it indirectly forces providers to scan media client side. Nobody likes it but no one proposed any other solution to limit distribution of CSAM.
So what you’re describing is not very accurate. No one is proposing large scale monitoring using some massive spy apparatus. They do actually propose common sense solutions implemented by individual services (how you search users, who can you contact, etc). No one is also proposing breaking e2ee and monitoring messages, the most controversial part is about client side scanning of media. And the original proposal was different but after talking with many privacy groups it was changed. Now it’s very close to what privacy advocates are proposing with the only problematic part being the client side scanning. Privacy advocates simply propose to ignore the issue of distributing CSAM and EU still wants to address it.
If you think client side scanning is not a massive spy apparatus, you don’t understand the technology. There is no such thing as purely on device CSAM detection. See Discord banning people for minecraft inventory pictures if you need an example how broken the automated part of the technology is. It’s just sending messagis to law enforcement to read with extra steps.
As for the first part, Chat Control is not mandating age verification. It’s identity verification. If a beraucrat decides lemmy.world is a risk, you will have to provide an ID to post here regardless of your age and the instance admin will have to use their limited abilities to store and protect them. Good luck with that shit. That is a spy apparatus. And it is unnecessary. The conversations are public. Instead of just letting the predators find a different place, create a better reporting system. Or hell, at least make it an actual age verification using Zero Knowledge proofs. But they don’t want to do that, they want our identities.
Same thing with CSAM, you don’t get born knowing the phone number of your local CSAM distributor. Law enforcement can monitor for people advertising. They can pose as interested people or distributors. There is no reason to break encryption over this. Nor is it even possible while open source exists.
If you think client side scanning is not a massive spy apparatus, you don’t understand the technology.
I think scanning of media is not a massive spy apparatus. Breaking e2ee and scanning of all communications would be. If they want to monitor journalists and protesters by only scanning media they are doing shit job at building their spy apparatus.
The conversations are public.
No they are not, most of social media (if not all) has some direct message mechanism.
Instead of just letting the predators find a different place, create a better reporting system.
Most kids don’t report those things. This is part of the problem and Chat Control does address that by mandating better reporting systems.
As for the first part, Chat Control is not mandating age verification.
It does:
“”" 3.Providers of interpersonal communications services that have identified, pursuant to the risk assessment conducted or updated in accordance with Article 3, a risk of use of their services for the purpose of the solicitation of children, shall take the necessary age verification and age assessment measures to reliably identify child users on their services, enabling them to take the mitigation measures. “”"
Chat Control only talks about identifying child users. I don’t see anything there that mandates storing of IDs. Can you point me to the relevant part of the legislation?
Same thing with CSAM, you don’t get born knowing the phone number of your local CSAM distributor. Law enforcement can monitor for people advertising. They can pose as interested people or distributors.
And I’m sure law enforcement already does that. As I said, privacy advocates think that’s enough and this problem should not be addressed by EU. EU think it should. Chat Control was not approved yet, there are discussions to find the right solution.
You are reading the text and not thinking what it looks like in reality.
I think scanning of media is not a massive spy apparatus. Breaking e2ee and scanning of all communications would be. If they want to monitor journalists and protesters by only scanning media they are doing shit job at building their spy apparatus.
What happens when the scan identifies an image as CSAM? If the answer is notify authorities with unencrypted chat, then it is a spy apparatus. The false positives are high enough that they will get to read countless innocent conversations and there are ways to intentionally induce false positives if you want specific conversations. And if it does not report, then what does it do?
No they are not, most of social media (if not all) has some direct message mechanism.
Those are rarely available to strangers by default and I have no issue in banning direct DMs to strangers.
Most kids don’t report those things. This is part of the problem and Chat Control does address that by mandating better reporting systems.
So there is one decent thing in this law, let’s pass all the privacy invasive stuff as well. /s I have no issue with better reporting, but the chat monitoring needs to go.
Chat Control only talks about identifying child users. I don’t see anything there that mandates storing of IDs. Can you point me to the relevant part of the legislation?
Sure, so how is a company supposed to implement it? Only to government issuing IDs can realistically provide Zero Knowledge proofs. If they don’t support this option, companies can’t really use it. And companies generally need to keep records that prove they are complying with the law, which is again impossible while preserving privacy unless the government helps.
And I’m sure law enforcement already does that.
Just google how underfunded to agencies responding to existing reports are. They are not doing anywhere near what they could.
Chat Control was not approved yet, there are discussions to find the right solution.
The reason it did not pass so far is because of privacy advocates spreading awareness of how fucking broken the law is and creating push back. The time to consult experts and improve the law was in the EU commission, before putting it to vote in the Parliament. Clearly they did not care to protect privacy until people pushed back. The commission and other supporters are still looking for ways to pass it without addressing the privacy issue. See recent emergency measure passed using vacations to bypass a proper vote.
I am sure there are people that support the bill with good intentions but I have lost any fate in the EU to care for the privacy of its citizens.
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Almost any single thing about movies or shows. I don’t consume either and literally could not care less about any of it. Double whammy with superhero stuff.
What entertainment do you consume if you avoid all movies and shows? I don’t watch much myself either, but I still do on occasion
Maybe they just watch shows passively, like my grandmother does. She watches Murder She Wrote, Judge Judy, Jeopardy, but she doesn’t really care about any of those shows and doesn’t really absorb what she watches.
Or maybe they mainly read books or play video games or just don’t consume entertainment at all