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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but only if you’re weighing it against an assumed future where we’re going to die out tomorrow. That’s a low bar for hopeful, and certainly not “100% positive”.

    I have a hard time seeing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or even worse, All Tomorrows, as “hopeful”. I’d honestly rather just die.

    Plus, not all sci-fi involves humans, and not all sci-fi is in the future. There’s scifi with no humans in it, there’s scifi set in the past or in an alternate present, and none of those qualify as “hopeful by default” in the way he defines it any more than any other fiction does.






  • Most things should be behind Authelia. It’s hard to know how to help without knowing what exactly you’re doing with it but generally speaking Authelia means you can have SSO+2FA for every app, even apps that don’t provide it by default.

    It also means that if you have users, you don’t need them to store a bunch of passwords.

    One big thing to keep in mind is that anything with its own login system may be more involved to get working behind Authelia, like Nextcloud.


  • That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

    What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

    Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.




  • Out of curiosity, who do you see as the LGBTQ+ characters? I can think of a few, but outside of mirror universe eps no one is actually established as queer. It’s all subtext, or implied.

    Then there’s the big lesbian kiss with Jadzia, and that’s awesome, but immediately after they decide that they shouldn’t be doing this and they go their separate ways, and Jadzia never to my knowledge expresses her attraction to a woman again. Even in that case, it’s unique because said woman used to be a man. It’s not Jadzia just being attracted to a woman on her own merits.

    What’s big about new Trek is that the characters are actually queer in the text, not just subtext. I’m a big fan of reading Garak and Bashir as queer, but they’re fundamentally not good representation because as far as the story itself is concerned, they’re two straight men. It’s only through the actors’ performances that the queer implications shine through.


  • There is a standard naming convention, and it predates the creation of Discovery. Voyager is VOY, and Enterprise is ENT. No one calls Voyager “STV”, as that would cause confusion with Star Trek V, the movie. If you’ve ever used Memory Alpha or participated in a fan community like Daystrom you’ll know that this has been standard for a long time. By extension, Discovery is DIS, Picard is PIC, and Prodigy is PRO.

    DSC is a special case because it’s used internally by the production (even shows up in the show itself once or twice) so some people have taken to using it, but it’s not consistent with the other naming schemes we use so it’s not standard. In fact, when it came out that Voyager was referred to internally as VGR, basically no one switched because everyone was so used to calling it VOY.


  • This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

    But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

    Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

    Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

    All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.



  • I can understand the concern with the ethics of AI art and plagiarism, but you’re painting with a broad brush when you say that computer engineering can’t be art.

    Without considering AI, you can certainly make art through code. Math can be beautiful. Shaders in particular are a ripe avenue for programmatically generating art.

    There are a lot of artists out there creating art through code, and there have been for significantly longer than the AI fad has been around. The act of creating the art is simply in writing the code, rather than in picking up a paintbrush. I doubt you accuse people who paint in Photoshop of “letting the computer paint for them”, even if they use filters or something like the bucket fill tool. That’s code creating art right there. But someone still had to input creativity, and writing code to create art that looks good requires creativity and effort and is absolutely art.

    AI art has different problems with it, but “programming isn’t art” isn’t one of those reasons.


  • Why would a random browser extension take it upon itself to snoop on your traffic to ensure that the websites you’re using can’t be used for illegal things, and then intentionally break it if it detects something it thinks it’s illegitimate? That’s a huge breach of privacy. It’s just malware at that point. It’s not like a court of law would hold your browser extensions responsible for your piracy. That’s like blaming a cup holder because the car was used in a robbery.

    No, I think this is just a bug. Especially since people have reported that the extension breaks other websites too.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt's true.
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    10 months ago

    If they were regulating Instagram and Facebook, I’d actually be happier about it. It’s not like the US is some bastion of digital privacy, and TikTok is bad because the data use is unregulated. Our own wholesome homegrown data brokers spy on us just as much, and they too do who knows what with the data.

    American data brokers are no better, and are happy to sell data to foreign powers. Biden had to make an executive order about it recently. Blatant privacy invasion has become a standard practice in the tech industry, and there are a million different companies trading your information around. That’s the real issue at play here, and TikTok is just one of many fish in the sea. My data might even be more valuable to American companies than Chinese ones, because the American ones stand to exploit me for more profit. Or they’ll sell it to government (s), which… Yeah.

    And of course TikTok could be sold. That’s exactly what I was talking about with strongarming—sell your platform to a corporation in our jurisdiction, or else we cut you off from a huge part of your userbase. It’s not really an option, it’s an ultimatum. It’d be one thing if we regulated the use of that data, but we don’t really—we don’t have meaningful data privacy laws here, at least not that apply in this circumstance. We’re being spied on just as badly. Forcing them to move here would just mean American agencies and companies would have more control over the platform, and more access to the data it generates, neither of which they’ve built much trust in their ability to do ethically.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt's true.
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    10 months ago

    As much as I don’t like TikTok, I don’t like the idea of the government censoring arbitrary apps under vague notions of “national security”.

    It would be one thing if they were passing legislation about surveillance in apps, but it’s clearly not about that or 99% of American apps would be under the chopping block (they’re selling data to arbitrary buyers, so the data can be obtained by “foreign adversaries” anyway). Instead, they’re just handing the executive power to strongarm any app into American control, or lose the huge American market.

    I feel like proponents of this are getting too distracted by their hatred of TikTok, and this nonsense about third spaces isn’t helping. TikTok is just the beginning, and a convenient one because it’s such a hot topic right now.

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/congress-should-give-unconstitutional-tiktok-bans


  • I tend to prefer the latter, but I totally get that feeling where signals seem like they “should” be better. I just find in practice that references are a little easier to work with in some cases.

    You can easily solve the owner dying issue by just using is_instance_valid() before attempting to call anything on the owner reference.

    That said, you can probably simplify your signal code if you connected the bullet killed_enemy signal directly to the player’s on-hit handler. It seems like the weapon on-kill handler is redundant? But I don’t know the details of your implementation, I just know that there’s often ways to simplify chains like this.

    I find that signals are great in some use cases, and less good in other use cases.



  • It’s hard to say given that this is brand new, but tighter integration with Godot is a boon. They’re offering on-demand server access, with instances running Godot for access to the high-level network API. Steam is built around either P2P or dedicated servers, not on-demand cloud servers like this. In theory you might be able to set something like this up with the Steam API, but you’d need a devops team to set up and maintain it. They’re offering API support+cloud from the same company, which if they’re any good is potentially valuable to customers. Even if you just use their code, that’s a head start.

    Looks like they also support P2P, but it seems like their big offering is their server architecture.

    Who knows how well they can deliver on those promises. A more concrete offering is that if you use the Steam API, you’re locked to Steam, while in theory this works wherever Godot works.