• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.

How about backing up that letter with some lobbyists?

Your guess is confirmed here.

There are plans to update the forum, including for better security (the main issue with changing the forum software is concern over reliably migrating all of the existing content). After emailing (admittedly not current best practice), the passwords are hashed and only the hash is stored.

...and later...

The forum has been updated to https, and passwords are no longer being sent by email.

Which raises the question of how old OP's screen shot is.

Also, no, the password would not necessarily still be stored in plain text on their end. The cleartext password used in that email might be only in memory, and discarded after sending the message. Depends on how the UBB forum software implemented it and how Larian's mail servers are set up.

EDIT: I just verified that this behavior has resurfaced since it was originally fixed. OP would do well to responsibly report it, rather than stirring up drama over a web forum account.

Highlights:

• Starfield's open world is made of procedural copypasta.
• Prey species can't or won't escape predators.
• Predators routinely wipe out their own food supply, yet somehow haven't gone extinct.

I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.

Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.

Then they should state that in the Terms of Use, where they grant themselves permission to terminate if the "Account has been inactive for more than six months." (Or better yet, remove the clause entirely.)

An email claim that they won't enforce that clause does not make it okay.

Unless they also refund the price paid for the game, this is theft (or fraud), and should be punished as such.

somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process

Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I'm reasonably certain this is just plain false.

More good news: There are lots of simpler hosts that are more deserving of your money than Jeff Bezos.

Cute. It would be funnier if it was correct.

Uh, Elon, did you just copy the X Window System logo?

Companies making mass market devices should be required by law to support them indefinitely, or until they publish the technical specs sufficient for community support and repair.

The upgrade cycle they're allowed to get away with today is not only a ridiculous drain on people's money, but also a shameful source of pollution and waste.

I think the OP of that post would have had a better reception if they had:

• Responsibly disclosed what they found, rather than using it to stir up drama on social media.
• Mentioned that it's just a web forum account, not connected to game accounts or anything else of value.
• Targeted the software vendor (https://www.ubbcentral.com/) instead of picking on one particular customer who used that software.
• Refrained from spreading misconceptions and unfounded assumptions about how the technology works.
• Responded to the reasonable follow-up questions, such as those that came when readers discovered that the problem was reported fixed three years ago.

People in that thread responded with skepticism and criticism to an irresponsible, misdirected, misleading, alarmist mess of a post. That's hardly surprising.

Selling online games and then shutting down the service should forfeit the right to interfere with reverse engineering projects. Maybe even require opening up the service specs so reverse engineering wouldn't be needed.

This seems like a step in the right direction. Much like language translation, doing it on-device is the only way to preserve people's data agency / privacy.

Epic cons:

Also:

• Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people's hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
• Epic's habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.

Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic's largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic's growth.

Steam pros:

Also:

• Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.

Steam cons:
Drm

Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don't think it's appropriate to list under "Steam cons". I'm not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it's trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)

The important thing about RISC-V is that it's a completely open CPU architecture that could be competitive with ARM. It's arguably the best chance we have at performant computing hardware that doesn't spy on us or become useless after just a few years. We need this.

Blocking its development would be a big win for certain corporations, and a loss to basically everyone else. The AutoTL;DR bot didn't capture that side of the issue, but a quote in the article does allude to it:

"It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."

Highlights:

The crash started apparently out-of-the-blue, hitting thousands of Argentinian users on a Debian-based distro called Huayra, and specifically on version 5 which was based on Debian 10.

Everybody seemed to crash while searching for images on Google.

Google's code was allocating 20000 variables in a single frame.

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Section 3: Disqualification from office for insurrection or rebellion

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

I started replacing my food storage containers with glass a few years ago. It's not only safer, but also nicer looking and easier to clean.

I didn't want my old plastic to go in the waste stream, so I use it for overflow dry goods, hardware storage, and household cleaning tasks.

I suspect Valve is truly refurbishing these, rather than blindly reselling returned units with a refurb label (as we sometimes see from certain retailers). Good for them!

Portable, Windows-free gaming just got more affordable. I love it.

In most places, there's money in enforcement, and power in disenfranchisement.

I don't know what Thailand-specific motives might be in play here, if any.

Buying it with your money.

He focuses on the visual aspects of the game, which are indeed wonderful and contribute a lot to immersion, but to me, a host of other elements contribute at least as much to making this game stand above the rest. The writing, acting, world richness, player agency, variety of story possibilities, battle mechanics, and sound design, for example. There's so much to love that even with all the bugs, it's still a lot fun.

Federated is a form of decentralized.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/24/407

Date	Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:42:06 -0700
From	Jonathan Corbet <>
Subject	Re: [PATCH] Documentation: fix formatting to make 's' happy

On Mon, 24 Nov 2014 09:54:17 +0200 (EET)
Tero Roponen  wrote:

> From: Maisa Roponen 
> 
> "That letter [the last s] is sad because all the others
> have those things [=] below them and it does not."
> 
> This patch fixes the tragedy so all the letters can
> be happy again.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Maisa Roponen 
> [The author being 4 years old needed some assistance]
> Signed-off-by: Tero Roponen 
> ---
> When I was reading the documentation, my 4-year-old
> niece wanted to see what I was doing. After telling her,
> she noticed that something was very wrong and asked
> me to fix it. Instead, I helped her fix it herself.

Please inform your niece that the patch has been applied and that the
lonely "s" need pine away no longer.

Thanks,

jon

It doesn't surprise me at all that people have become less willing to contribute to wikis, now that the likes of Fandom/Wikia and Fextralife are the dominant wiki hosts. Who wants to give away their free labour and time to profit corporations, and have their work mired in cesspools of obnoxious advertising, awkward javascript interfaces, and web tracking?

I think what we need are independent wiki hosts. For example, have a look at https://bg3.wiki/

Looks like Hans implemented a workaround in vkd3d-proton 2.10, using the open-source AMD vulkan driver on linux (RADV).

Device generated commands for compute

With NV_device_generated_commands_compute we can efficiently implement Starfield's use of ExecuteIndirect which hammers multi-dispatch COMPUTE + root parameter changes. Previously, we would rely on a very slow workaround.

NOTE: This feature is currently only enabled on RADV due to driver issues.

I don't imagine it will take long for this to make its way into a Proton experimental release. Folks with AMD graphics who are comfortable with linux might want to give it a try.

The fact that not accepting health insurance helps keep prices low says volumes about the US healthcare system.

Most of us over at !baldurs_gate_3@lemmy.world seem to agree that the author is either trolling or picked the wrong dump stat for an aspiring game critic.

I wrote a more detailed response over there.

We need something like this to be enshrined in the law of the land

I suspect that if we taught our people to value education, and made it easily available to them, we wouldn't need to enshrine this particular issue (or many others for that matter) in law.

My guess: The kids who used Discord for gaming grew up, and just went with the familiar thing when starting new communities and projects.

Also, Discord did heavy marketing early on, until it carved out a network effect. So here we are.

Hopefully we’ll stabilize around browsers and open standards.

I would love this, but I think it will require major privacy reform. The push toward apps comes overwhelmingly from a single source: surveillance capitalism.

Their native group VoIP calling looks to have a solid topology that could easily replace Jitsi in the near term, and eventually compete with larger scale conferencing services like Zoom. That's kind of exciting for those of us who care about open systems and privacy.

I wonder why they assume democracy is fueling the problems we face, rather than, say, late-stage capitalism or plain old corruption.

“Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, except for all the oth­ers.”

Hey OP: Please don't use ``` code fences (or 4-space indentation) for things that aren't computer code, unless you hate your readers.

Here's that text with word wrap enabled:

(Edit: Removed the text, because OP updated their copy to allow word wrap. Thanks!)

I don't like Epic's exclusivity deals.

I don't like Epic's invasive "telemetry" libraries.

I don't like Epic's client helping itself to whatever data it wants on my computer.

I don't like Epic's ethics.

I don't like Epic's leadership.

I don't like Epic's investors.

Come to think of it, I don't like anything about Epic. I won't be giving them my money or granting them access to my computer.

Valve, GOG, and Itch are far more deserving of my support.

It's possible that this is not about collecting money for third party app use, but instead about forcing people to use Reddit's apps (both mobile and web), which are designed for data extraction and tracking.

Open source inherently means you can compile the code locally,

Open Source means more than that. It is defined here:

https://opensource.org/osd/

If you use the phrase "open source" for things that don't meet those criteria, then without some clarifying context, you are misleading people.

for free.

Free Software is not the same as "software for free". It, too, has a specific meaning, defined here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

When the person to whom you replied wrote "free software", they were not using it in some casual sense to mean free-of-charge.

The interface is the best I know of, a lot like pre-Microsoft github. Especially important to me is that It doesn't intercept my browser's built-in shortcuts like github now does, or require javascript or bury things under submenus like gitlab does.

The promise of federation is appealing, too.

I plan to use it for new public projects, and might even move my old ones over.