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Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
  • To be fair, weren't Valve the first company to do that? People were really annoyed at having to install steam just to play some Half-Life.

    Of course, that was only 1 launcher, no launcher-in-launcher shenanigans back then.

  • DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow
  • Aside from echoing @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and Doctorow's statements about unionizing, I am aware of a few others who are trying things that I'd describe as complimentary to unions.

    This is a panel titled "Why hasn't Open Source Won?" where several of the speakers attempt to sketch out a framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used: https://youtu.be/k3eycjekIAk . I'll admit, I'm not the most impressed with where they get to in the limited time they have. Nevertheless, I think it's a useful angle of consideration to have in the tool belt.

    This is an org/foundation that is trying to walk the walk with regards to governing tech democratically: https://nivenly.org/ I haven't kept up with any recent developments of theirs.

  • DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow

    cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10771034

    n’hésitez-pas à me demander de traduire certains passages de mon post en français si besoin

    > Personal review: > > A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15. > > As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways. > > I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up. > > I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

    4
    DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow

    cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10771035, https://jlai.lu/post/10771034

    > Personal review: > > A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15. > > As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways. > > I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up. > > I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

    2
    DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow

    cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10771034

    > Personal review: > > A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15. > > As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways. > > I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up. > > I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

    0
    DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation - Cory Doctorow

    Personal review:

    A good recap of his previous writings and talks on the subject for the first third, but a bit long. Having paid attention to them for the past year or two, my attention started drifting a few times. I ended up being more impressed with how much he's managed to condense explaining "enshittification" from 45+ minutes down to around 15.

    As soon as he starts building off of that to work towards the core of his message for this talk, I was more-or-less glued to the screen. At first because it's not exactly clear where he's going, and there are (what felt like) many specific court rulings to keep up with. Thankfully, once he has laid enough groundwork he gets straight his point. I don't want to spoil or otherwise lessen the performance he gives, so I won't directly comment on what his point is in the body of this post - I think the comments are better suited for that anyways.

    I found the rest to be pretty compelling. He rides the fine line between directionless discontent and overenthusiastic activist-with-a-plan as he doubles down on his narrative by calling back to the various bits of groundwork he laid before - now that we're "in" on the idea, what felt like stumbling around in the dark turns into an illuminating path through some of the specifics of the last twenty to forty years of the dynamics of power between tech bosses and their employees. The rousing call to action was also great way to end and wrap it all up.

    I've become very biased towards Cory Doctorow's ideas, in part because they line up with a lot of the impressions I have from my few years working as a dev in a big-ish multinational tech company. This talk has done nothing to diminish that bias - on the contrary.

    44
    Please stop the bus of life, I want to get off
  • Some choice excerpts:

    Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

    "These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."

    She says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

    And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

    But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

    "There's nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they're lazy," he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, 'Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.' "

    My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.

  • Please stop the bus of life, I want to get off
  • Call me naive, but it seems to me that if everyone was pitching in for a season of farm work, less people overall would be doing 8/15/etc consecutive years and getting their bodies destroyed.

  • Thieves snatched his phone in London, UK - it was in China a month later
  • the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot "arrest their way out of the problem". They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

    Even though I fully expect the police here aren't doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I'm at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can't "arrest their way out of the problem".

    I imagine that's poor compensation when you've just had your phone snatched, however.

  • NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
  • The audacity to tout classism and ableism as reasons as to why people should "get to" use LLMs for their "write a novel in a month" challenge...

    Even when someone's inability to write a novel in a month is because of their class or disability, I somehow doubt they want to let a machine write their novel for them. I mean, it's not like NaNoWriMo is a way to put food on the table or something, right?!!

    This feels like the arguments Mid journey fellators fanboys were spouting a year ago (or has it been two?) on how not everyone can afford a school of fine arts 🙄

  • NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
  • Their starting aside is pretty great as well;

    And I’m using that term throughout this post because it’s the commonly accepted descriptor, but we all know it’s not really artificial intelligence, right? I also want to distinguish it from actually-useful and ethically-produced technology like what gets used in the medical field to help humans examine and analyze impossibly huge datasets in the service of doing things like curing cancer. We’re talking here about the plagiarism machines like ChatGPT, everything it underpins, and all of its conceptual mirrors.

    Leave no wiggle room for the AI sycophants.

  • Steam On Linux Drops Below 2% For August 2024 Survey
  • As we have seen in months past when Linux takes a sizable dip, it’s correlated to a rise in the Simplified Chinese use. In August the Simplified Chinese use further grew and helping out Windows at the cost to the Linux percentage.

    So, the solution is clear: get all Simplified Chinese users to switch from Windows to Linux :D

  • En anglais : Comment jouer à Age of Mythology Retold sur Linux (+Steam)
  • Après ~6h de jeu, je fais le constat : ca fonctionne plutôt bien !

    J'ai pu faire une partie en quick match sans soucis. J'ai aussi pu faire plusieurs parties custom avec un pote via le système d'invitations. Le seul soucis avec celles-ci, c'est qu’apres la partie terminée je n'arrive pas a rejoindre une nouvelle partie via invitation sans redémarrer le jeu. Il met a peine une dizaine de secondes a se lancer sur ma machine, donc c'est loin d’être bloquant pour y prendre mon plaisir !

    précisions : je suis sous Arch Linux et j'ai suivi a la lettre les instructions dans le lien de ce poste, inclus la partie "pour jouer en multi"

    ping @diminou@lemmy.zip qui voulait un retour d’expérience

  • [Vidéo] Bazar du Grenier - Mais pourquoi l'IA est pourrie?
  • Je suis agréablement surpris par la qualité de cette video !

    Traînant dans le game dev moi-meme depuis quelques années, je n'ai rien a rajouter sur le sujet de l'IA, et ma seule critique de la video serait sur un des tout derniers propos. Si la lutte est souvent requise pour prendre du plaisir en la réussite, il faut quand meme avoir l'impression qu'un jour on réussira pour continuer a lutter (dans le cadre du jeu video comme passe-temps ludique).

  • AoM on Linux in 2024
    aom.arkanosis.net AoM on Linux in 2024

    Documentation about how to play Age of Mythology on Linux, up-to-date for 2024

    cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/10083697

    Haven't bought the game yet, but these instructions seem legit. I found this link in a ProtonDB comment who claims to be its author/hoster: https://www.protondb.com/app/1934680#WRxwBwtv-Y.

    0
    Factorio Friday Facts #426 - Resource search & Assembler GUI improvements
  • We also added the ability to pin the resource patch, and the count of remaining ore will update as the patch is mined. You can use this to keep an eye on how things are going, and be aware when a patch is running dry.

    Yet another great mod transcending its mod status to be assimilated into the base game!

  • NSA releases copy of internal lecture delivered by computing giant Rear Adm. Grace Hopper
  • Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.

    Given that, I think it's quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding "systems of computers" and "management" vs "leadership", to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I'd call "military thinking", but that's just because she's in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.

    The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.

  • EN DIRECT - Panne géante chez Microsoft: aéroports, télévisions, bourse... Le monde entier est concerné
    www.lefigaro.fr EN DIRECT - Panne géante chez Microsoft: aéroports, télévisions, bourse... Le monde entier est concerné

    La multinationale américaine a annoncé vendredi une panne mondiale affectant les clients professionnels. Compagnies aériennes, médias et banques du monde entier sont touchés.

    EN DIRECT - Panne géante chez Microsoft: aéroports, télévisions, bourse... Le monde entier est concerné
    1
    AI enthusiasts continue to cause the rest of us to not have nice things: project maintainer shuts down experiment to curtail backlash exacerbated by fan
    github.com I'm confused: what's with the project descriptions at https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/? · Issue #5358 · pkgxdev/pantry

    Sorry if this has been reported elsewhere already, or if this is explained in docs somewhere, but I don't understand the contents you have in https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/. Lets take a few popular project...

    I'm confused: what's with the project descriptions at https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/? · Issue #5358 · pkgxdev/pantry

    The closer I look, the more depressed I get.

    First of all, the entire thing feels off. Quoting one commenter:

    > So this seems to be some kind of universal package manager where most of the content is AI generated and it's all tied into some kind of reverse bug bounty thing thing that also has crypto built in for some reason? I feel like we need a new OSS license that excludes stuff like this. Imagine AI-generated curl | bash installers 🤮

    The bug bounty thing in question apparently being tea.xyz. From what I can tell, the only things actually being AI-generated are descriptions and logos for packages as an experimental web frontend for the registry, not package contents nor build/distribution instructions (thank god).

    Apparently pkgx (the package manager in question) is being built by the person who created brew. I leave it up to the reader's sensibilities to decide whether this is a good or bad omen for the project itself.

    Now we get to the actual sneer-worthy content (in my view): the comments given by a certain user for whom it seems PKGX is the best thing since sliced bread, and that any criticism of using AI for the project's hosted content is just and who thinks we should all change our preferences and habits to accommodate this

    > PKGX didn't (and still doesn't) have a description and icon/logo field. However, from beginning (since when it was tea), it had a large number of packages (more than 1200 now). So, it would have been hard to write descriptions and add images to every single package. There's more than just adding packages to the pantry. PKGX Pantry is, unlike most registries, a fully-automated one. But upstreams often change their build methods, or do things that break packaging. So, some areas like a webpage for all packages get left out (it was added a lot later). Now, it needed images and descriptions. Updating descriptions and images for every single package wouldn't be that good. So, AI-based image and description generation might be the easiest and probably also the best for everyone approach. Additionally, the hardwork of developers working on this project and every Open-Source project should be appreciated.

    I got whiplash from the speed at which they pivot from arguing "it would have been hard for a human to write all these descriptions" to "the hardwork of developers working on this projet [...] should be appreciated". So it's "hard" work that justifies letting people deal with spicy autocomplete in the product itself, but less hard than copying the descriptions that many of these projects make publicly available regardless??? Not to mention the packaged software probably has some descriptions that took time and effort to make, that this thing just disregards in favor of having Stochastic Polly guess what flavor of cracker it's about to feed you.

    When others push back against AI-anything being so heavily involved in this package registry project, we get the next pearl of wisdom (emphasis mine):

    > But personally I think, a combination of both AI and human would be the best. Instead of AI directly writing, we can maybe make it do PR (for which, we'll need to add a description field). The PR can be reviewed. And if it's not correct, can also be corrected. That's just my opinion.

    Surely the task of reviewing something written by an AI that can't be blindly trusted, a task that basically requires you to know what said AI is "supposed" to write in the first place to be able to trust its outpu, is bound to always be simpler and result in better work than if you sat down and wrote the thing yourself.

    Icing on the cake, the displayed profile name for the above comment's author is rustdevbtw. Truly hitting as many of the "tech shitshow" bingo squares as we can! (no shade intended towards rust itself, I really like the language, I just thinking playing into cliques like this is not great).

    My original post title was going to be something a bit more sensational like "Bored of dealing with actual human package maintainers? Want to get in on that AI craze? Use an LLM to generate descriptions for curl-piped-to-bash installations scraped from the web!" but in doing my due diligence I see the actual repo owner/maintainer shows up and is infinitely more reassuring with their comments, and imo shows a good level of responsibility in cleaning up the mess that spawned from this comments section on that github issue.

    0
    Data is Beautiful @lemmy.world Jayjader @jlai.lu
    Graphing Wikipedia Articles by Inbound & Outbound links + "community" detection
    1
    Rust for Lemmings Reading Club - Alternate Slot (18:00 UTC+1)

    Hi all!

    What?

    I will be starting a secondary slot/sessions for the Reading Club, also on "The Book" ("The Rust Programming Language"). We will, also, very likely use the Brown University online edition (that has some added quizzes & interactive elements).

    Why?

    This slot is primarily to offer an alternative to the main reading club's streams that caters to a different set of time zone preferences and/or availability.

    When ?

    Currently, I intend to start at 18:00 UTC+1 (aka 6pm Central European Time). Effectively, this is 6 hours "earlier in the day" than when the main sessions start, as of writing this post.

    The first stream will happen on the coming Monday (2023-03-04).

    Please comment if you are interested in joining because you can't make the main sessions but would prefer a different start time (and include a time that works best for you in your comment!). Caveat: I live in central/western Europe; I can't myself cater to absolutely any preference.

    How ?

    We will start from the beginning of "The Book".

    There are 2 options:

    1. mirror the main sessions' pace (once every week), remaining ~4 sessions "behind" them in terms of progression through "The Book"
    2. attempt to catch up to the main sessions' progression

    I am personally interested in trying out 2 sessions each week, until we are caught up. This should effectively result in 2-3 weeks of biweekly sessions before we slow back down. I'm not doing this just for me, however, so if most people joining these sessions prefer the first option I'm happy to oblige.

    I will be hosting the session from my own twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/jayjader . I'll be recording the session as well; this post should be edited to contain the url for the recording, once I have uploaded it.

    Who ?

    You! (if you're interested). And, of course, me.

    0
    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/)JA
    Jayjader @jlai.lu
    Posts 10
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