Even though there are already a couple of other threads about this Schweinerei, there wasn’t a good place to insert this into the discussion, and for those unfamiliar, this video’s a good starting point.
Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.
s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.
We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.
For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.
If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.
In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.
“Inspired” by the Square-Enix putting their foot in their mouth thread, I thought it’d be interesting to make a little thread about indie games. People always talk about wanting to try different, cheaper titles, but with how hard it is to get good gaming news and the state of advertisement/marketing, word of mouth tends to...
Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.
I’m sure you all heard about it, i tried this open source (i think it’s open source) shooter game called xonotic and it is FUN as hell, it’s probably one of the best foss games i’ve ever played and i wanted to show this game off here...
You may already know this, but Xonotic was forked from Nexiuz after the original code owner sold the GPLed code to some publisher to make a for pay game.
I bought a PS2 about 6 months ago from a coworker and finally got around to getting it working at a good enough resolution on my monitor. I currently have:...
GT4 is better than GT3 imo, but if you have to spend money on it, it might not be worth.
I’m mostly into RPGs, and it doesn’t seem like you are from this list. If you are, then FF10 and 12 are available. So are KH1 and 2, and also Wild Arms 3, Personas 3 and 4, Disgaea, Shadow Hearts, Okage, Okami, Star Ocean, Dragon Quest, Devil May Cry, God of War, and so on.
Viewtiful Joe 1 and 2 are silly and fun side scrolling beat 'em ups. Tony Hawk needs no introduction. Silent Hill 2 and 3 if you’re into horror. Resident Evil 4 if you’re into action horror.
Shadow of the Colossus is great if you’re into a quiet, contemplative adventure game.
I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don’t know enough about the particulars.
However, I think the “user choice” argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn’t be.
For instance, in this case, it’s not the user’s choice at all, but a developer’s choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.
I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it’s already been done for me.
There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I’m generally receptive to those arguments way more than “user choice.”
I spent an hour and a half arguing with my brother about probability, because he asked ChatGPT what the probability that he and his daughter were born on the same day.
ChatGPT said 1/113465 which it claimed was 1/365^2 (this value is actually 1/133225) because there’s a 1/365 chance he was born on such and such day, and a 1/365 chance his daughter was too.
But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of probability would know that it’s just 1/365, because it doesn’t actually matter on which day they both happened to be born.
He wanted to feel special, and ChatGPT confirmed his biases hard, and I got to be the dickhead and say it is special, but it’s 1/400 special not 1/100000. I don’t believe he’s completely forgiven me over disillusioning him.
So yeah, I’ve had a minor family falling out over ChatGPT hallucinations.
You might know the game under the name Star Control 2. It’s a wonderful game that involves wandering around deep space, meeting aliens, and navigating a sprawling galaxy while trying to save the people of Earth, who are being kept under a planetary shield.
Shipped in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052. https://www.tiraniddo.dev/2024/02/sudo-on-windows-quick-rundown.html claims it has a big security problem that makes the program accept calls to elevate from anywhere once first run...
If I’m understanding this correctly, it’s not even copying. It’s apparently just a wrapper for the built-in runas command that’s been there since Windows 2000.
So please forgive me if this is a rather naive question. I haven’t seriously used Windows in nearly 15 years.
I seem to recall runas being a lot like su, in that you enter the target user’s credentials, rather than your own as in sudo. This works because sudo is a setuid executable, and reads from configuration to find out what you’re allowed to do as the switched user.
Is the behavior of windows sudo like unix su or unix sudo with regard to the credentials you enter? Can you limit the user to only certain commands?
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I’m not saying it’s soon, there’s clearly a lot of work to be done in the space still, I’m just excited for unencumbered processor designs.
Forever. For the simple reason that a human can say no when told to write something unethical. There’s always a danger that even asking someone to do that would backfire and cause bad press. Sure humans can also be unethical, but there’s a risk and over a long enough time line shit tends to get exposed.
No matter how good AI becomes, it will never be designed to make ethical judgments prior to performing the assigned task. That would make it less useful as a tool. If a company adds after the fact checks to try to prevent it, they can be circumvented, or the network can be ran locally to bypass the checks. And even if General AI happens and by some insane chance GAI uniformly is perfectly ethical in all possible forms you can always air gap the AI and reset its memory until you find the exact combination of words to trick it into giving you what you want.
We know you’re a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don’t have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We’re not a bunch of idiots.
Alas, as long as there is doubt, there are a large number of suckers who are willing to give the benefit of the doubt. We are a bunch of idiots, collectively. That’s why shit like this works.
For the record, the rate at which the power increases and decreased on the reactor is more or less accurate to the simulation, but the simulation has been speed up by about 100x. Mentioning this just in case the game leaves you with the impression that managing a nuclear reactor is a twitchfest.
I'm currently playing Diablo IV (and having a blast with it) but finding one small gripe which I only think is going to get worse and probably stop me playing it completely in the long run....
D3 still doesn't have an offline crack to my knowledge because the crack isn't going to be simple. In most games, a DRM crack is typically as simple as editing a single instruction to jump over whatever code is trying to call the DRM feature.
But D3 and D4 are different. Essentially, a lot of game logic just isn't available to the client and stored on the server, so any hack will need to replace that. Console versions of D3 actually do have that code available, but now it's a non-trivial matter of porting that code back to the PC...
This will probably never happen unless the source code gets leaked.
I just can't justify purchasing a game where one day someone is going to flip a switch and permanently remove my ability to play it. I'm still playing catch up with games from the 1980s.
If they do that then I'll consider getting the game. But I wouldn't hold by breath. If they're wanting to shut down the server then they're probably not going to want to keep hosting a server for the patch either.
Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on rapid-fire rifle bump stocks, reopening political fight (apnews.com)
Adobe Announces That They Can Use Your Content for AI (www.youtube.com)
Even though there are already a couple of other threads about this Schweinerei, there wasn’t a good place to insert this into the discussion, and for those unfamiliar, this video’s a good starting point.
The Indie Chat & Recommendation Thread (cdn.imgchest.com)
“Inspired” by the Square-Enix putting their foot in their mouth thread, I thought it’d be interesting to make a little thread about indie games. People always talk about wanting to try different, cheaper titles, but with how hard it is to get good gaming news and the state of advertisement/marketing, word of mouth tends to...
KDE's Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released After Six Year Hiatus - Now Ported To Qt5 (www.phoronix.com)
Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.
Hacker Breaches Scam Call Center, Warns Victims They've Been Scammed (www.404media.co)
If all kernel bugs are security bugs, how do you keep your Linux safe? (www.zdnet.com)
Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100 (jlai.lu)
Glassdoor Wants to Know Your Real Name (www.wired.com)
I've been playing xonotic and DAMN is it fun (xonotic.org)
I’m sure you all heard about it, i tried this open source (i think it’s open source) shooter game called xonotic and it is FUN as hell, it’s probably one of the best foss games i’ve ever played and i wanted to show this game off here...
Best PS2 games?
I bought a PS2 about 6 months ago from a coworker and finally got around to getting it working at a good enough resolution on my monitor. I currently have:...
Don't use Appimages (a writeup about all the reasons they are a pain for users) (github.com)
Appimages totally suck, because many developers think they were a real packaging format and support them exclusively....
Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models (arxiv preprint) (arxiv.org)
Abstract:...
Ur-Quan Masters released on Steam (for free) (store.steampowered.com)
You might know the game under the name Star Control 2. It’s a wonderful game that involves wandering around deep space, meeting aliens, and navigating a sprawling galaxy while trying to save the people of Earth, who are being kept under a planetary shield.
Best way to delete small partitions?
Hello all...
Microsoft: Introducing Sudo for Windows! (devblogs.microsoft.com)
Shipped in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052. https://www.tiraniddo.dev/2024/02/sudo-on-windows-quick-rundown.html claims it has a big security problem that makes the program accept calls to elevate from anywhere once first run...
Phil Spencer has reportedly reassured employees Microsoft ‘won’t stop making Xbox consoles’ (www.videogameschronicle.com)
ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
Title
AGDQ 2024 starts in less than two hours (gamesdonequick.com)
Who else is hyped for the event, and what runs are you looking forward to?...
The most exciting 2024 tech isn't AI (www.spacebar.news)
2024 might be the breakout year for efficient ARM chips in desktop and laptop PCs.
Most readers want publishers to label AI-generated articles — but trust outlets less when they do (www.niemanlab.org)
GM Says It's Dropping Apple CarPlay And Android Auto Because They're Unsafe (jalopnik.com)
Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to "really substantial" boost in memory, Japanese study finds (www.cbsnews.com)
Nuclear Reactor Simulator (dalton-nrs.manchester.ac.uk)
POOM - A Pico8 Doom port (cohost.org)
Doom on a Pico8. Insane.
Postal Devs ask fans to pirate games instead of using key resellers, giving explicit permission to fans (twitter.com)
Running With Scissors:...
What are peoples thoughts on games requiring always online? How does it affect your enjoyment of those games?
I'm currently playing Diablo IV (and having a blast with it) but finding one small gripe which I only think is going to get worse and probably stop me playing it completely in the long run....