I’m happy that the news over here has to continually specify “the messaging service X”. Though I wish they would avoid potential confusion and also say “formerly known as Twitter”.

Andrew Tate’s site was based on some OSS software that they didn’t credit (in violation of the license) and was an old version with known vulnerabilities. Which is why it got hacked.

I don’t know if Truth Social is in the same boat, but it’s possible. I think I heard it’s just Mastodon with federation turned off? Or am I thinking of some other crappy alt-right site?

Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out

Oh, thank you! MO2 seems a lot more clean and simple than Vortex.

…and in related news, now that I’m redownloading everything for funsies anyway, I have graduated from trying to keep my mod lists on a website to scribbling a list down in Joplin. With links and everything. In case these mods I’m using decide to move from Nexus or something.

Ok, so what is the current alternative nice option for SkyrimSE mods?

Preferably one with a mod manager/download client. Vortex is kind of janky but it did the job. I’d prefer not to manage any of this stuff manually, like cavemen. it’s been decades you shouldn’t need to do that

Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.

And while the law isn’t settled on the topic, it’s wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.

Sure, there’s a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It’s quite similar to the “TiVo loophole” in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.

You either use Debian, or Debian With Extra Steps, so I went with Debian

Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.

My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.

The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.

Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!

Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.

Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.

Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.

Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.

I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.

This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.

(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)

Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.

Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.

This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.

I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.

The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd

I don’t have that many tabs open. I keep them neat and tidy!

Now, the bookmarks… 😩

For the life of me I can’t remember where this happened, but this was in one of the heavily moderated “safe space” subreddits.

I said something sarcastic, which some powermod interpreted as being against the rules. I didn’t think it was, even if it had been taken at face value.

Problem was, I was in middle of dealing with what I now think was a mental health episode of some description so I ended up arguing with the mod in PMs. Wasn’t fruitful, dude was also rude as hell because I asked them to chill.

When things looked up a few days later I was like “yeah, screw them”. Left that community. Left Reddit entirely for a month.

I now realise this is one of those moments that turned me away from socialising in general. There are dipshits out there who just don’t care.

(Not saying heavily moderated safe space communities are bad! Just maybe not have uncaring career dipshits moderating them. Maybe have clear rules and enforce them consistently.)

The AI industry doesn’t want to abolish or reform copyright law, they just want an exception so that they can keep appropriating shit. On the contrary, they’re pretty mad that AI stuff isn’t covered by more copyright.

AI bros are not on the side of open culture.

Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.

I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.

Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy