It always amuses me when people pretend that RMTs did not exist until Oblivion. Even contemporary games like Neverwinter Nights had already been selling DLC campaigns/“campaigns”. Let alone the early digital distribution games (Strategy First can fuck themselves for the price they sold stuff at but…)
And that also ignores how many “dos” games would have a kill screen that was basically “Send a check to this PO Box and I’ll give you access to the FTP server with more missions”
There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.
Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).
Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.
What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).
The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.
Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?
All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.
The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.
The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.
You… should probably pay more attention to the news.
It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.
“Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.
We have decades of proof of chuds brigading and building up hate speech hellfests in these “just let capitalism decide” laissez-faire models.
Moderation free environments just turn places into kiwi farms.
Not off the top of my head. It was one of the various “tech” youtubers who will do everything ranging from “here is how to set up proxmox” to “I tried five twitter alternatives for a week” videos.
World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.
In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.
Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.
The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.
Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.
But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.
Really depends on your current tool so RTFM on that.
But when you are activating it in your account? There is a QR code you are supposed to scan. And there is almost always a button like “Having trouble?” or “Show TOTP Key” or whatever. Click that and you get a long alphanumeric string instead. Paste that into the TOTP field for Bitwarden (or Keepass or whatever) and it will generate codes for you.
Once or twice I have had to actually use my phone camera to decode the QR code so that I can manually type in the TOTP code/seed, but I think the last time I did that was in like 2020?
There is.
2FA. No, not the fucking “we’ll send you an SMS” bullshit that is increasingly used to just highlight an active phone number for spam purposes. Proper TOTP with the code backed up to a proper service (bare minimum, Bitwarden)
Someone can steal your password and even your email account (unless you TOTP that too…). They still can’t get into your account unless you are an idiot who gets tricked into providing the 2FA key.
In a perfect world? Have your TOTP credentials in one encrypted database/Bitwarden account and your passwords in another. In reality? Just use a trusted service. I used to be a big fan of Keepass but protecting that with a yubikey (or similar) is a huge mess.
The recent push for passkeys (?) is a nice-ish middle ground. People don’t need to understand how to paste a TOTP code into Bitwarden but they still need to approve a login. That said, I hate it since so much of it is dependent on a single device that can generally be opened by just applying REDACTED to the screen and doing REDACTED to narrow down the lock code significantly.
I mean… It would be nice if they put a nicer message there. But I mostly agree with that.
Look up how people social engineer their way into apple accounts and so forth. The more you put the burden on a (perpetually) underpaid CSR the easier it is to steal an account, Spin a sob story and then harass the CSR until they just reset your password so you will go away. Except there is no guarantee that is YOUR password and now we have yet another stolen account.
No other faction has any meaning at the scale of The Empire and the mess that is how The Republic/Rebels/New Republic/Whatever is portrayed as. That is why games like Empire at War more or less made a super crime syndicate that controls most of the other crime syndicates.
The Hutts are full of infighting and bickery. But even if they WERE united… they would still not be a significant threat in any Total War style campaign. I could see something treating the crime syndicates and smaller factions as akin to Rome (different families/sub-factions that are expected to take over the rest eventually) but that still doesn’t work when The Empire is the size of the entire super-faction as of Turn 1.
Star Wars as Terra Invicta would be fucking amazing and a really good fit because espionage, guerrila warfare, and insurrections are a thing. I could even see a case for Star Wars as Crusader Kings. But Star Wars as a Total War or a Europa Universalis just doesn’t work.
That is a horrible fit.
Star Wars has little to no concept of diplomacy or even trade. This was an issue for Total Warhammer but it is even moreso in Star Wars where every faction is more or less at war with every other faction at all times (Warhammer FB at least has uneaesy peace between the “order” factions).
Also, Star Wars has like two, MAYBE three, factions at any given time. With the third usually being some nonsense “Other” faction.
And just look at Napoleon and the more “gun” based Total Wars. The engine is very much designed for armies smashing into each other. You can sort of do line battles between muskets. But Star Wars is WW2 weaponry which needs cover to make any sense. Yes, the Jedi are great hero units but the majority of everything are shooting submachine guns at each other and fielding tanks.
Like, Men of War would be an awesome engine for Star Wars. That is built around street to street fighting and artillery on open battlefields. Total War just seems… real bad.
That said: Day one, mother fuckers.
This is actually a really bad idea.
At “best”, your server is a resistive heater. Aka “a space heater”. Except that your server also has hardware designed to convert power into negative temperature (you know… fans). So you are at a lower efficiency than the space heater in the corner.
Also? Computers aren’t meant to run all that hot for all that long. Yes, the safe margin for hardware is a lot higher than people would think. But if you want this to make a meaningful difference you are going to be running REAL hot for extended periods of time. Because you don’t need heating when it is warm outside. You need it when it is cold and you are already going to be fighting a low ambient temperature.
The reason this works for larger data centers and specialized installations is that they are designed with this in mind. You generally either have direct water cooling of the racks (plural) or you have “water cooling” of the server room itself. With the water then being recirculated amongst the radiators in the building itself. And… those are quite often borderline “scams” because they don’t actually keep the building all that warm in the winter (as discovered during The Pandemic when the lack of body heat from human beings caused issues for a lot of hybrid office/data centers) and they mean more HVAC costs to keep the building cool during the summer.
Which gets to the other aspect. Are you going to change all your fan and cooling settings on a weekly (or even daily) basis? Because maybe you want to get right up to thermal throttling during the winter because the ambient temperature means that heat will “dissipate” fast. But during the summer or even a warm winter day? You are turning your server room into the kind of inferno that even Tom Cruise has someone else deal with.
Don’t get me wrong. Having a chonky and inefficient PC is great for late night gaming in the winter when you should have gone to sleep hours ago and your zone is already set for the “nobody but the cat is in there” setting. But, even at the datacenter level, it is not a good replacement for HVAC. And, as a lot of us will attest: Summer is when you grab the Steam Deck or go downstairs and use the xbox.
Honestly? No
The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.
But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn’t fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah…
Which… is kind of message boards. Reddit was “successful” because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different “cultures” and so forth.
That said: I can’t help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media… ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can’t get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said “Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let’s actually make a good town hall site” and… we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more “Wait, what are you trying to say?” kind of comments.
And… I am not sure what “lemmy” can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the… terrorist threats. But unless “lemmy” can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit… it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won’t be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.
Still REALLY curious what Year Zero would even be
Shooting my shot: A direct sequel to DOOM 2 (well, 64 I guess?) where The Doom Guy becomes The Doom Slayer and begins the weird hell timeline warping.
Sort of like how you made some bullshit up so you could complain about someone you clearly have a personal vendetta against?
Actually, nvidia recently announced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Basically the idea is that you take an “off the shelf” LLM and then feed your local instance sensitive corporate data. It can then use that information in its responses.
So you really are “teaching” it every time you do a code review of the AI’s merge request and say “Well… that function doesn’t exist” or “you didn’t use useful variable names” and so forth. Which… is a lot more than I can say about a lot of even senior or principle engineers I have worked with over the years who are very much making mistakes that would get an intern assigned to sorting crayons.
Which, again, gets back to the idea of having less busywork. Less grunt work. Less charlie work. Instead, focus on developers who can actually contribute to a team and design meetings.
And the model I learned early in my career that I bring to every firm is to have interns be a reward for talented engineers and not a punishment for people who weren’t paying attention in Nose Goes. Teaching a kid to write a bunch of utility functions does nothing they didn’t learn (or not learn) in undergrad but it is a necessary evil… that an AI can do.
Instead, the people who are good at their jobs and contributing to the overall product? They probably have ideas they want to work on but don’t have the cycles to flesh out. That is where interns come into play. They work with those devs and other staff and learn what it means to actually be part of a team. They get to work on really cool projects and their mentors get to ALSO work on really cool projects but maybe focus more on the REALLY interesting parts and less on the specific implementation.
And result is that your interns are now actually developers who are worth a damn.
Also: One of the most important things to teach a kid is that they owe the company nothing. If they aren’t getting the raise they feel they deserve then they need to be updating their linkedin and interviewing elsewhere. That is good for the worker. And that also means that the companies that spend a lot of money training up grunts? They will lose them to the companies who are desperate for people who can lead projects and contribute to designs but haven’t been wasting money on writing unit tests.
So… you would rather “So yeah, if you want to find out what Roman Alexander did after he was abducted by this ship, send me ten bucks”? over purely optional RMTs?
First, Oblivion was very much NOT “AAA”. I know that term has grown to basically mean “anything from a major publisher or that looks pretty” but, for the era, that was games like Medal of Honor (with god damned Steven Spielberg) which tried to “transcend” gaming.
Second: Everyone who even knows what Myst is are either arguing over the definition of “fantasy” or grabbing socks full of nickles to beat you to death right now. You… got some time.
But you more or less keyed in on the reality of it. In the early 2000s, games media was still primarily console based. In large part because most of the PC mags had already gone out of business or went from “Hey, just in case this article on DOOM 2 wasn’t good enough, here is Kerri Hoskins in her panties” to “When you finish wanking to all the girls in this magazine you might want to try out Warcraft”
Its why people think Halo invented combined arms gameplay or… almost the entirety of Nintendo’s “innovative gameplay” even to this day. Release a game with light survival mechanics and aimless progression in the late 2010s and EVERYBODY forgets the entirety of the Eurojank Genre.
And Oblivion is probably the first console game that had RMTs.