CoderKat

joined 1 year ago
[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

Naw, I still use Google. With an ad blocker, I find it to provide the best results by far (though the ad blocker is important, because they get misleading ads sometimes). It's superior when searching for descriptions (e.g., you can't remember a movie title and have to describe it) and local results. Plus I use Maps heavily (it's superior to its competitors) and that integrates into Google.

I just frankly don't care that much about tracking my searches or the likes. I see it as the cost of getting a quality product for free. The only reason I even have the ad blocker is frankly because their ads are terrible. They don't do enough to curate their ads, so scams sometimes slip in. I also think it's very scummy that you can search, e.g., "pizza hut" and get an ad for Dominos above the Pizza Hut result.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

The whole CSAM issue is why I'd never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It's an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I'd like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand "oh, you're just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you're good", my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn't trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn't handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago

Reddit definitely has better features. It's not even a competition. The reason we're here is because of the Reddit administration and because of future potential. Eg, the apps are so new right now that Reddit's official app is better. But in a couple of months, that won't be the case anymore.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.

 

I just finished Horizon Burning Shores (I know, a bit late) and wanted to discuss it!

FULL SPOILERS FOR THE DLC

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

So, random thoughts in no particular order:

  1. The Horus fight was fantastic and a long time coming. I think we were all waiting for a chance to finally fight a Horus and it didn't disappoint. The initial sneaking past the invincible and very hard hitting tentacles set things up great. Seeing the whole thing rise up had me giddy! And then it just goes on and on and really makes us work for it (I would have been disappointed if a Horus -- even an ancient and rusty one -- was too easy).

  2. I liked Seyka and also liked that there was a romance option (but it also made it clear that saving the world is the priority). It's just nice for Aloy to have someone she can relate to in that way.

  3. I wish there were more machines. It kinda felt like the bilegut was the only new machine. The waterwing feels nearly identical to the Sunwing. The stingspawn don't feel like standalone enemies (more like a part of the bilegut). The Horus is great, but it's only a one off boss enemy. I was hoping for some fresh new enemies to make exploration more interesting.

  4. Exploration sometimes felt a little disappointing. I enjoyed how absolutely gorgeous the game is. It is fantastic world building. But so much of the map just doesn't have anything actually there. It looks pretty, but besides machines and generic items, there is nothing to collect. I feel like a few more side quests were needed and for a several more buildings to actually have some kinda lore to them. As an aside, I don't understand why datapoints are so hard to find. I scoured every inch of the map and found fewer than half of the world datapoints

  5. Overall I liked the villain. It was good to have a single villain to focus on so that he could be built up more. I felt a bit bad for him when I learned his wife cheated with his best friend and that was the start of his rampant paranoia. But then I learned he was literally brainwashing people (plus the whole radiation space ship thing) and it was back to "yup, he's gotta die".

  6. I'm really glad this DLC takes place after the base game and takes advantage of this. Waaaay too many games these days are seemingly afraid to make DLC require beating the game. I guess they want to make the DLC more accessible? Putting the DLC after the story let it utilize the threat of Nemesis as well as carefully incorporate flying.

  7. I do kinda wish there were more returning character interactions. It was nice to chat with Sylens for a bit, though.

  8. I really liked Pangea World! It was a fantastic setting. Full of interesting old world sights, lots of potential for stealth, it was compact and had lots of depth, and I always like theme park levels in general.

  9. I kinda think Nova, Walter's AI, was a bit underused. A thousand year old AI from off world? I would have soooo many questions. But instead she almost immediately asks you to kill her and you do. Wish we could have sent her to live freely with Gaia so that she could lore dump us in the third game. And a bit more lore dumping in this DLC, for that matter.

  10. The Heaven¢ sanctuary was really neat. Stepping into that place and seeing all the gigantic posters of Walter's face was quite a moment. It was when we really started to learn what Walter was like. I felt bad for those Quen. To them, the ancestors are like gods. But they seem to know the ancestors are dead. Finding out an ancestor is alive and witnessing their god-like technology has to be seriously convincing. And those Quen thought they had a chance at a better life. A world where they wouldn't be constantly fighting against horrifying machines to survive. Only to find out it's a sham. Oof.

  11. Some of the new abilities are neat. Though a bunch are so forgettable that I don't remember what most of them are. I loved the grapple critical strike and used that a ton. I also found the valor ability that berserks all nearby enemies to be very fun for dealing with large groups.

  12. I like that we got a smidge of progress against Nemesis, in the form of Walter's notes where he lists 21st century arms companies that may be useful against Nemesis. I was kinda expecting the DLC to dance around Nemesis, leaving it entirely for the third game. Was good to get some teases. Similar for Walter's notes giving the first person perspective of just how Nemesis killed some of the Zeniths and how terrified he is.

  13. Perhaps I'm too used to other games where anything that looks interesting probably contains something. But this DLC is just chock full of buildings that look interesting but in fact have nothing. Can't be entered, nothing on top (I checked a bunch), nothing around them. In a way, this is probably just a sign of how great their world design is such that downtown LA is actually full of unique towers, but does feel a bit oddly disappointing when most of them are just for looks.

Overall I'd give the DLC an 8/10. I enjoyed the story and setting a lot, but it felt empty at times and I really wish there was another machine type or two.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it's extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It's not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven't read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Barriers are relative. Everything that makes it slightly harder will stop a large chunk of bots, since bots aren't able to easily adapt like humans can. Plenty of very basic bots are in fact stopped by lack of emails.

But yeah, email verification is heavily more so that you can verify they have access to the email, and thus the email is safe to use for things like password resetting. Without it, webmasters can get swamped with complaints about people getting locked out of accounts or the likes because they signed up with the wrong email.

In theory, you can also go further by only allowing email providers that have anti bot mechanisms, but it's difficult to maintain that and it will always exclude some legitimate users.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

You can't aggregate them internally, anyway. You need to be able to know if someone already voted on something.

I think activitypub needs to be extended so that the likes and reduces only need to be sent to the host of the content, with federation then being told just the aggregate number. Then the only servers that need to know identity of votes are the host server (necessary to ensure nobody can multi vote) and optionally the server the user voted on (could just relay the information to the host server and not store it locally, but then it'd be harder to tell what you've already upvoted -- could use local storage but I think lots of people use social media on multiple devices).

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sometimes reporting technically covers the last one. But usually not. Not all subs have rules against bigotry, trolling, dog whistles, general assholery, etc. I strongly hold it's important that downvoting is an option to deal with these kinda things. It's a way to show everyone that the comment isn't acceptable.

Plus even when reporting is an option, it may not be fast enough. Can't really automate removals, either, as people will abuse that.

Arguably "disagree but acceptable" should just not upvote. In a certain sense, that's already a middle option.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They've had one layoff, but have they had second layoff? -- Merry (or Pipin? Idk the difference)

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"has anyone from my server interacted or searched for the post by it's URL" is misleading. I struggled with this yesterday. Turns out you have to search in a very specific way.

In both kbin and Lemmy, you can't just go to the community's URL (which is utterly bizarre). You must search the full magazine name. In Lemmy, you weirdly need the ! in front when searching it to find it. In kbin, you don't need that, but you do need to search the magazine in the "neutral" search mode, not magazine search mode (lol wut?). Actually, in Lemmy you also have to use the "normal" search field and not the community search field.

And of course, both have a discovery issue. People want to be able to search a partial string like "hobby" without having to know what instance their community might be on or if the full name might be things like "hobby_discuss", etc. They should not need a separate tool to do this search. That's just a barrier to entry.

Anyway the whole thing is a usability barrier that needs to change. It also makes smaller instances actively harder to use, which is a bad incentive. We don't want people to experience small instances as "buggy" (even if it's working as intended).

Anyone currently trying to create a sub should have an account on every major instance and subscribe to their new sub to ensure it shows up in the search. And yes, that is just completely silly (and unscalable beyond the biggest instances).

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think GDPR necessarily applies here, but I am not a lawyer. Quoting https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/:

Article 3.1 states that the GDPR applies to organizations that are based in the EU even if the data are being stored or used outside of the EU. Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)

I'm not sure just what the definition of an organization is, so perhaps any server hosted within the EU is covered by the GDPR, but for servers outside of the EU that don't have ads (which seems like all servers currently), I don't think this would count. The example on the linked site about "goods and services" includes stuff like looking for ads tailored at European countries, so I suspect that simply serving traffic from Europe isn't enough.

The website also mentions the GDPR applies to "professional or commercial activity". There's also apparently an exception for under 250 employees. I don't even know how that works when something is entirely managed by volunteers like this currently is.

At any rate, I suspect we're a long way off from having to worry about the GDPR.

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