alyaza [they/she]
internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
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- 614 Comments
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•Meet UpScrolled, the anti-censorship TikTok alternative
8·2 months agothey’re actually more overzealous in terms of policy about nudity and sexualized material than basically any alternative

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•Meet UpScrolled, the anti-censorship TikTok alternative
25·2 months agoIt’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.
i don’t know if it’s a function of the ideological bent or just because the gigantic influx of users has totally swamped their moderation, but yes it does have problems with fascists as of writing
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick
3·2 months agooh, this is probably just because of the national strike day people are observing–it’ll be back up tomorrow
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
World News@beehaw.org•Live updates: Anti-government protests spread in Iran as authorities cut communications
8·3 months agoi don’t know if these are going to topple the current government, but they’re in effect the culmination of every protest movement of the past few years and they’re coming after a reformist was elected so it seems something is going to have to give here
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto
World News@beehaw.org•Gunmen kill at least 11 people in attack on Jewish holiday event on Sydney's Bondi Beach
51·4 months agodeath toll is now at least 15 plus one of the shooters; it appears the duo were father and son and it is the son that is in custody
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Japanese devs face font licensing dilemma as leading provider increases annual plan price from $380 to $20,000+
28·4 months agoAs reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.
The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.
The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Roblox is a problem — but it’s a symptom of something worse
19·4 months agothe interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:
Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?
Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Activists Are Using ‘Fortnite’ to Fight Back Against ICE
2·4 months agoChildren can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.
you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Activists Are Using ‘Fortnite’ to Fight Back Against ICE
5·4 months agoHolding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.
the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy
55·5 months agoplease continue to “device hoard” folks
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto
World News@beehaw.org•Axios reveals text of peace plan: Ukraine to relinquish its territories permanently, Russia to receive amnesty
1·5 months agoits founder, Georgiy Gongadze, was a late-90s crusader for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and anti-corruption initiatives in Ukraine and was likely murdered at the behest of the state for his reporting. i think the name is fairly straightforward
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto
World News@beehaw.org•Axios reveals text of peace plan: Ukraine to relinquish its territories permanently, Russia to receive amnesty
7·5 months agoUkrainska Pravda has no relation at all to pravda.ru as far as i’m aware
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•OpenAI maps out the chatbot mental health crisis
16·5 months agogiven that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Technology@beehaw.org•Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck
90·6 months agothere’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:
How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?
People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Gaming@beehaw.org•Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'
21·7 months agoyou’re being pointlessly aggressive about something that is subjective and which obviously cannot progress from the fundamental disagreement you have here, please chill out a bit
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
City Life@beehaw.org•L.A. Council Committee Approves Step toward Eliminating Parking Requirements
1·7 months agoWhat about changing the parking requirements to be vehicle agnostic? Require construction projects to have parking for X people, rather than X cars, and consider the requirement met if it’s a mix of bicycle parking, cargo bicycle parking, and car parking.
this is already how most parking mandates work (they’re not for X amount of cars, they’re obliged to have a set ratio of parking spaces to people), and changing it in this manner would almost certainly lead to no change because Los Angeles is extremely car-dependent and sprawling, and bicycling is only useful with actual pro-bike infrastructure which largely doesn’t exist.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
World News@beehaw.org•Air Canada flight attendants reach ‘tentative’ deal with airline to end strike
9·8 months agoof note, CUPE leadership was willing to go to jail over the strike. for a sense of what they struck over, see these two articles from Spring Magazine, and CUPE’s “Unpaid Work Won’t Fly” page
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Science@beehaw.org•Humpback Whales Blow Bubble ‘Smoke’ Rings to Communicate With Humans
8·9 months agothe relevant paper here:
Humpback Whales Blow Poloidal Vortex Bubble Rings.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto
Space@beehaw.org•The Vera C. Rubin Observatory observatory's first images are stunning — and just the start
3·10 months agofor more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery
Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.
As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.
It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.
The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.























see also the coverage this has gotten in NPR: