Because they think they’re hot shit and have an ego the size of Jupiter. In their mind, they’re the catch and someone would have to be a (insert slur) to turn down such a gracious offer from the world’s most attractive “alpha male”.

It wouldn’t even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring cryptogtaphic attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the “easier” and “more secure” system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can’t use important websites without a commercial operating system.

It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.

The blogger in question doxxed the owner/maintainer of Archive.today who in return doxxed the blogger.

Did you actually read the two articles posted by the blogger? The archive.today owner wasn’t doxxed. No personally identifying information was provided; it only aggregates already-known info including a couple of fake aliases. The most it concludes is that the guy is Russian or operating out of Russia.

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

Using a reskinned Google Chrome protects you from malicious Chrome extensions how, exactly?

He also created JavaScript, IIRC.

Big no thanks /j

For localization, would -kun work? It wouldn’t be a correct translation, but the idea of the average citizen being conditioned into having that closeness and familiarity with Big Brother might make for an interesting take.

Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.

Is it? Or is it just a way to record which employees need mandatory cybersecurity “training” that tells them to use a 28 character password with at least one number, one upper case letter, one special character, no strings of 3 or more repeated characters, no strings of 3 or more incremental letters or numbers, and no strings of more than 5 of the same character class?

It’s not a glitch bug, it’s a feature.

Username checks out.

The decryption key for DVDs.

Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.

What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.

Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,

Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.

How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Agreed on both points.

If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.

People also shouldn’t be idolizing corporations. They’re not our friends; we’re only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we’re well acquainted with.

But you’re all rabid to hate on epic

If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.

There’s no denying that Valve’s contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.

What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don’t have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn’t make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.

Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney’s self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge “the Steam monopoly” by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.

I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:

… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …

The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.

I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.

I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.

what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.

They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.

what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.

It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.

Step 1: Make personal computing unaffordable.
Step 2: Rent “personal” computing as a service.
Step 3: Boil the frog by continuously restricting what people can do with the service.
Step 4: Wait for local computing to die.
Step 5: Stop LLMs from running on rented computers.

Hardware won’t last forever. Once they have full control over what people can do with computers, they have full control over the information people are exposed to. LLMs won’t help with that if the only ones that are accessible to the layman are sanitized and censored.

You would hope, but knowing how competent copilot is, it’s just going to turn out like this:

User:
I’m running out of space, can you help me clean up?

AI:
Sure thing, I can help with that. You have some programs that haven’t been opened since 2017. Would you like me to delete them?

User:
Yes

AI: OK, let me do that for you.

I apologize, but as an AI Agent, I am not allowed to delete files or uninstall programs automatically. You can remove them yourself, however. I have created the cleanup.txt file on your desktop, which you can run by renaming the file to cleanup.bat, right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”.

User:
Thank you, I did that but it only freed up a little bit of space. Can you find more?

Error processing request: 0xC3E9A005.
Unable to connect to copilot agent service:
The system can not find the module specified: “kernel32.dll”