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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 30th, 2023

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  • If a company does something bad, you can sue to fix it.

    Suing sets legal precedent and forces all companies to abide by the ruling, more or less.

    But now if a company tricks you out of your right to sue by putting arbitration clauses in everything, then you can’t sue. You can only have a (hopefully) impartial third part tell the company to stop doing something specifically to you. The company is still free to keep doing the thing to everyone else, and their arbitration doesn’t affect any other companies also doing bad things.

    There are other issues too.




  • They can be good quality, yeah. But I’m more worried about having to basically present a digital-equivalent of a driver’s license if I want to sign up for Netflix, or watch porn, or order food. And if ID system routes every request to a central location first, then you get stuck with de-facto tracking on everything you ever do, no matter how good the company’s privacy record is. That’s what I meant by creepy.



  • At my last job, the fire system kept calling the fire department with false positives so often that they told us to fix it or the city was going to start fining the company LOTS of money. One of the dumbass HR people asked if we could just disable the fire system to prevent it from making false positives. The very patient fireman had to explain that no, we could not intentionally disable fire safety equipment in a populated building, and the company had to actually fix the broken detector.

    The elevators also broke down a lot, one time with my intern inside. I called the fire department to get her out, and my boss’s boss said I should have waited longer before calling the fire department, for some reason. I forget why.

    I never signed an NDA, and I think I’d be fine telling you the name of this global company. But to be safe, I won’t. I’ll just say that most of the people here have probably interacted with customer service run by this company before. I AM CERTAIN OF IT.


  • Same. Pass phrases seem like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t live in a world where people should be reusing and memorizing strong passwords. We live in a world with frequent user data theft and scams to glean your login info. Just last week, I started getting random login attempts from around the world for a Microsoft account I haven’t used in over a decade. No idea when or how that info got leaked.

    And people aren’t equipped to memorize a different passphrase for all 30 of their accounts.

    So, we should do what we always do: Get machines to make the issue easier for us to manage. Right now, that means password managers with a strong master password and secure storage.

    In the future, maybe we’ll have some kind of creepy central government ID based password-less login method. Who knows?

    Edit: Besides, most services require ThIrTeEn dIgIt lOnG PaSsWoRdS WiTh fIvE SpEcIaL ChArAcTeRs aNd sIx nOn-cOnSeCuTiVe dIgItS Of pI ThAt dOeSn’t mAtCh aNy kNoWn dAtE Or eVeNt oR SpEcIaL StRiNg oF NuMbErS. It’s just too annoying, and I’d have to memorize all the special characters in addition to the phrase.



  • Sad to see this fork of SC Controller is now archived. It provides an Appimage version, and also worked with my PS4 controller. Credit to Kozec, the original creator.

    https://www.patreon.com/kozec

    https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller

    There was also Qjoypad, but I haven’t used it in a while.

    Basically, the game is reading the raw controller input as well as the translated virtual controller input. I’ve run into that a lot before on other games. The fix I found is usually to try another mapper, or to disable the controller in the game and map the controller to keyboard and mouse. It’s annoying.

    With luck, you -might- have luck with closing the game and setting up the controller mapper, then start the game. If the mapping program provides an Xinput option, try toggling that and see if it helps.

    Good luck.

    EDIT: Did Kozec stop developing the app? I used to support them on Patreon before I lost my job. There haven’t been any official updates in a while. Sad day. :(




  • God, I only use Ublock Origin on Firefox. No TOR, VPNs, or anything like that.

    Despite that, there are a handful of Google-related websites like Virustotal that now permanently trap me in repeating captchas. Youtube will occasionally decide to block my IP entirely for a week.

    Let me tell you, this shit doesn’t make me more inclined to disable ad blocking. Instead, I’ve starting finding alternatives and using a sandboxed vanilla Chromium for problem pages.



  • Don’t be fooled. The real issue here is that Nintendo is trying to use this case as a wedge to eventually outlaw or effectively ban all emulation software because they think it somehow massively affects their bottom line, or they want to have a scapegoat for weak profits.

    I’ve never once in my life had a Gamecube, for example. I never will. So if I wanted to pirate Gamecube games and play them on my computer, it is literally victimless, and has zero negative affect on Nintendo’s profits. In fact, I might love the games and decide to buy official merch. Same with the Swtich. I haven’t pirated either, but you get the idea.

    Even if you can somehow prove how many people pirated a game over the years, that tells you absolutely nothing about lost potential profits, because people that pirate probably never had the money to buy your hardware and games to begin with.

    This is all just corporate propaganda.