It’s odd that the article makes no mention at all of his @ElonJet account on Mastodon, which was spun up after the Twitter account was banned. I don’t see how it’s “moving” anywhere, especially given the Threads/Instagram account just got suspended: Sweeney posted about it on his Twitter, and Engadget updated their article.
Everyone knowing your identity? The drawbacks would far outweigh the benefits. However, there may be a path to the benefits of a Real ID sign-up system that mitigates the possible harms.
First of all, let’s get this out of the way - this “minimal harm” approach would only be feasible if the government could either reach some level of technical competency or farm out the task to heavily restricted private corporations that do have that competence. If we presume that’s the case (unlikely), the question becomes whether the people would be willing to accept it. If we presume the majority of citizens also want such a thing (a tall order to be sure, I certainly don’t want it), then the question becomes what sort of system would be able to maximize privacy, and thus safety, while still requiring your real identity to be involved in creating online accounts? What would that system look like?
We’d absolutely need a level of abstraction. The government knows who you are anyway, but the business entity you’re interfacing with would get a unique token from the government that is not your actual Real ID number but which is a hash generated from the business’s (salted) ID number and your own salted ID number (idk I’m not a cryptographer).
Signing up for an account would resemble using Google or Facebook to create an account; you’d be redirected to some third party Identity Verification System (IVS) which would handle identity verification and redirect you back to the account creation with the extra piece of information provided by the third party. You’d still pick a username, password, etc.; the government database would only be used to generate that unique token.
More specifically, the website or service would only be passed a token from the IVS, uniquely generated based on the company ID and the person’s ID, and the government database would only keep the token, not any of the data used to compute it. (That’s not counting China and other authoritarian states, of course - they’d definitely retain all that information and have a list of all the sites you have accounts with. This wouldn’t solve that problem.) This would make the IVS database virtually useless on its own, as an attacker who compromises the database has no way of knowing which token is associated with which website, and cannot derive it themselves unless they’ve also compromised one or more target websites at the same time. The cryptographic stuff would be rotated once it’s known that a breach has occurred, so such breaches would likely be limited to state actors or black-hat groups that hoard zero-days.
Now, what would all this accomplish? What would it make possible that currently isn’t outside of China?
What would this system not do? What doesn’t change compared to now?
Even in the grandest, best-possible-case scenario I can think of, it still comes down to “Can I trust my government to not take more information than they’re allowed to, and can I trust that they will not abuse the information they do obtain?” For many, I suspect the answer to both questions is no.
I’ll just go through my library and pick out the ones that I don’t think are very well-known or might have been missed by anyone who got into gaming more recently.
Demon Truck is a devilishly arcadey game, and at 90% off it is fifty cents so you are legally required to buy it right now. Once you play it for a few minutes, you’ll want the BANGER soundtrack too, which was done by Zircon, costs $3, and is worth every penny. Here’s a sample on YouTube if Bandcamp doesn’t work for you. Game is a 40 megabyte download. What are you waiting for?
Approaching Infinity - What if No Man’s Sky was a turn-based roguelike with retro tile-based sprite graphics? If that appeals to you, give it a look. The developer also has a more fantasy-oriented game called The Curse of Yendor.
Devil Daggers is worth trying if you enjoy fiendishly hard FPS games with pixel graphics.
Bots Are Stupid - it’s a tight platformer where you control the character by writing a script to control its actions down to the individual frame if necessary. It has a level creator as well. If you’ve ever seen tool-assisted speedruns (TAS), this game is basically creating a TAS for something like Super Meat Boy.
If you have PCVR, give Ancient Dungeon a look. It’s early access, but it already has that particular spark that tends to (and did) hook me, and it does a number of things phenomenally well, such as knife-throwing. In lists of top VR games, however, I rarely see it get a mention.
Distance is a racing game with where your car can jump, do flips, fly, stick to walls or the ceiling, and potentially get cut in half by the road hazards. It’s by the same developers and is the successor to the equally fun and completely free Nitronic Rush.
It’s not on sale, but at $5, Noitu Love 2: Devolution doesn’t need a sale to be well-worth the price.
Lastly, Timespinner is a pixel-art metroidvania with time travel. I thought it was pretty fun.
Sure, you can, but if one technology is both “good enough” and “works on everything” I can understand why the developer might only bother with that one. Proprietary, vendor-locked standards leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I would like to at least see XeSS implemented in addition to FSR2, as it’s another open standard. With any luck, pressure could be put on Nvidia to make DLSS vendor-agnostic as well, but they’ve proven over and over again that they really don’t care about gamers.
FSR2 splits the market the least since it can run on any GPU, unlike DLSS which wouldn’t be able to run on the console versions (so they’d have to add and optimize for FSR2 anyway; extra work for little benefit).
Signal accounts are based on your phone number, so if you’re messaging a number that has an account with Signal, the app could see that and would send the message through Signal’s protocols to that Signal account instead of with the SMS protocol which is not encrypted.
The furby doesn’t need to connect to the internet directly, the app on your phone already will. I expect its permissions list to look as invasive as Play Services, or Facebook.
Unfortunately that setting seems to be broken in Jerboa, at least for me. I have it set to Subscribed but the app still opens in local view every time. Website works correctly, though.
That’s not very nice.
If photography is art, so is AI image generation. If one can see something in the natural world they had no part in creating, and get an idea, a spark of creativity, and then choose a camera, choose the angle, choose the framing, set the configurable aspects of the camera such as shutter speed, exposure time, what type of film, what lens to put on, and produce a photograph, perhaps several, perhaps even a dozen attempts to get it just right, and the final result can be placed in a gallery alongside paintings and sculptures and Jackson Pollocks without a single modern art snob batting an eye, how then is that any different from someone with the same spark of creativity tuning a prompt for a model they’ve become deeply familiar with, seeking to bring the inspiration in their mind’s eye into the real world where others can see and experience it too?
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating for those who haven’t - photography was not initially considered a form of art. But photographers didn’t seem to care too much, and neither did the layperson, so here we are again, having the same old argument about another new art form made possible through a technology that invokes Clarke’s law.
Mandatory:
Nice to haves:
WINE Is Not an Emulator 😉
Seriously, that’s what the acronym means, because it’s not an emulator, it’s a compatibility layer.
There’s also Proton for Steam games, or even non-steam games, though it’s a little more complicated to set up in the later case.
Oblivion’s excellent with mods, though I’m unfamiliar with modding Bethesda games on Linux.
That anyone ever acted like that is so insane to me, it doesn’t even feel like it happened on the same planet. Among my middle/high school circle of friends through the 00’s, not a single one of us would have ever given shit to anyone, male or female, for playing video games. To us, every new gamer we met was a potential new friend who spoke our favorite language. Then we graduate, go out into the world, look around on the internet, and hear stories that there exist complete fuckwads on this green earth trying to keep girls out of gaming?? Like… what??
You’re on the Beehaw instance, like me, so you would be able to interact with that specific federated community at https://beehaw.org/c/stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml.
If it helps you mentally decode the meaning of that URL, the community (the /c/ part of the URL) is named stallmanwasright, it’s hosted on lemmy.ml, and you interact with it through beehaw.org, which is where your account is that lets you subscribe, comment, etc.
You can decode the other URL /u/noodlejetski@masto.ai gave you the same way. The community they sent is named kbinmeta, is hosted on kbin.social, and accessed through beehaw.org. Once you understand how it works, it’s pretty simple.
There had to have been people in marketing that knew this would happen and were overruled by bean-counting executives. The top card of each generation outdoes the top of the previous gen, but for a couple of generations it’s been increasing in price in almost lock-step with the performance increase. Often the newer card will have worse VRAM than the previous generation’s equal-performing card because you’re looking at an older top-spec card vs a newer midrange, and the midrange cards always have less VRAM. With AAA games now starting to really want more VRAM in order to have better visuals, the older cards wind up actually being the better option long-term.
There are a few videos from Machine Thinking that focus on the early or past days of industrial technology, particularly things such as precision, screws, lathes, etc. I can recommend these in particular:
Another thing to look at would be infographics, especially from Animagraffs by Jacob O’Neil. They’ve got a few gems that cover some of what you’re asking about, such as pistons:
For something a little closer to a full-blown free course or series, there’s this Basics of Mechanical Engineering playlist put together by John Bedford Solomon, but it doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason as to the order, so skip around a bit, or look more specifically at any of the channels it selects videos from.
Lastly, the top videos from US Auto Industry on YouTube (sort by popular) are some old but phenomenal educational content on some of the basics of cars, with videos about differential steering, transmission, suspension, and hydraulics.
Happy learning!
I also had no idea, since mods for prior games had basically nothing, but wow, the Nexus page has a lot.
It’s a very small soundtrack, but Demon Truck has absolute banger music. Definitely one of my favorites.