Heroic Games Launcher doesn’t change the code in the game executable itself, so yes, it is still an issue when using Heroic.

One catch is that Epic’s mystery code is allowed to execute on your computer.

Note that I don’t mean just their launcher. Often, if not always, the games themselves are linked with Epic code, ostensibly for license checks and/or integration with Epic services. This gives them the ability to snoop on stored data, installed/executing processes, biometrics, etc.

Running those free games with an alternative launcher does not protect against this.

It’s not just a theoretical concern, either. Epic has already been caught copying Steam files, collecting friends play history, and scanning running processes.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/developing-epic-games-launcher-appears-to-collect-your-steam-friends-play-history-up2-valve-responds-see-threadmarks.105385/

https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/comments/wakewr/epic_games_spyware_vs_steam_vs_as_comparision_ea/

https://www.pcgamesn.com/epic-launcher-spyware

I don’t trust them, their CEO, or Tencent (which owns a significant chunk of Epic), so I don’t run games that come from them.

Tencent owns a substantial portion of the company, and therefore has substantial access and influence. Nitpicking about the percentages is irrelevant.

Let’s be careful how we phrase things here. JavaScript form submission and navigation are choices, not needs.

Also, progressive enhancement / graceful degradation exists. When competent developers (or bosses) want script effects on our sites, we can include them and make the sites continue to function with scripts disabled. It might require more work, but it is absolutely possible.

Framing the script-based approaches to these things as if they were needs contributes to the problem, IMHO.

(I am referring to the vast majority of web sites, of course, not special-purpose web applications like games.)

Web developers are complicit in browser fingerprinting, by insisting that sites require JavaScript (or WASM).

All of us are complicit in browser fingerprinting, because we tolerate this script dependence.

IMHO, a web site being allowed to execute arbitrary code on visitors’ hardware should be an anomaly. The vast majority of them could be built to deliver the same information without requiring that inherently dangerous permission.

It’s important not to get caught up in the “constantly upgrade everything” hype, even though it gets the spotlight a lot more than solid midrange gaming gear. As far as I’m concerned, four years is nothing; a gaming system that can’t hold up for that long would have been a poor system even on day one.

Glad you’re still enjoying your Steam Deck. I would be surprised if you don’t get another four years out of it. :)

False.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250407190559/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2475407-no-the-dire-wolf-has-not-been-brought-back-from-extinction/

And Colossal claims it has turned grey wolves into dire wolves by making just 20 gene edits?

That is the claim. In fact, 5 of those 20 changes are based on mutations known to produce light coats in grey wolves, Shapiro told New Scientist. Only 15 are based on the dire wolf genome directly and are intended to alter the animals’ size, musculature and ear shape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_Rights_Network

https://girightshotline.org/en/about/

I bought an empty stainless steel bottle and fill it myself. :) It doesn’t take long for that to be cheaper than buying plastic bottled water.

Does it sound to anyone else like the video’s narrator used a pitch shifter on his voice? I wonder if he’s aware that a pitch transformation like that can be trivially reversed.

Let’s not forget that stainless steel drinking bottles exist, and some booze can be bought in ceramic bottles, so we do have safer alternatives for transporting/holding beverages. There are fewer options for carbonated drinks, of course.

The use of “self-hosting” is a little confusing here. To be clear, he wasn’t self-hosting his video. It was published on YouTube, and the guidelines and procedures in question are Google’s.

Edit: I’m not defending Google’s actions. It’s just that the title gave the impression that a video he had self-hosted was somehow subject to “community guidelines”, which didn’t make sense.

Edit 2: Ten downvotes in less than an hour, on a clarification comment? Wow. I’m disappointed to see that level of targeted negativity here. What rotten behavior. :(

As Lemmy is federated but not fully decentralised, continuation of communities hosted on a dead instance is not currently possible. (Compare this to Matrix, where a room can carry on even if its original homeserver dies, so long as at least one other homeserver participates in it.)

So that is indeed still a problem here, although not as severe, because I think the posts in those communities will still be available on instances that participated in them. Such communities would be forever frozen, though; carrying on from where they left off would require migrating to (or creating) communities on still-running instances.

Lemmy does allow you to export your own data and import it into another instance. That includes settings, subscriptions, and links to saved posts/comments. So I guess maybe you could save your own posts, export your data, and import it elsewhere to keep links to what you wrote on the dying instance. I have not tested this to be sure.

If you put a SIM into a phone that has power and cell access, then an association between the SIM and the phone’s IMEI will be recorded somewhere.

If your identity is linked to that SIM, then it’s only one more step to link your identity to the phone, of course. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s unsafe for you.

1. The GTX 1070 was in the upper tier of gaming GPUs when it was released, categorized as high-end on Wikipedia. Most people wouldn’t be able to justify the cost of its kind of performance until years later, even if the next thing didn’t happen…
2. About half that long ago, GPU prices tripled, and prices are still absurdly elevated today even adjusting for high inflation. This has significantly delayed a lot of peoples’ normal upgrade cycles, so your 9-year-old GPU is effectively more like a 4-year-old GPU with respect to affordable upgrade path.
3. Back when that card was new, running a first-person game at 60fps 1080p was mainstream and not particularly impressive. That level of performance is mediocre-to-weak today.

(And by the way, the other GPU they mention is only 5 years old.)

With all these things considered, I don’t view the quoted performance as anything special. It’s not particularly bad, but not particularly good either. Certainly not “very friendly”, or newsworthy.

I haven’t been following Reddit events since I left a couple years ago, but if there have been recent ban waves for bad behaviour, it wouldn’t surprise me to see corresponding upticks in it here.

I wish more of us spoke up against rudeness, confidently incorrect ignorance, combativeness, tribalism, brigading, and other such stuff when it rears its head here. If all of us participated in moderation, I suspect it would be more effective and make our mods’ lives easier.

That’s supposed to be very friendly? I think someone might be a bit out of touch.

I might have upvoted this post if it contained even a basic summary, rather than just a link to someone’s video.

The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.

It’s also behind a third-party captcha service, which can fingerprint your browser, and collect a history of which articles you read and what pages you come from to view them.