Spyke

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games

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We’re Suing Minecraft in a Class Action Lawsuit

For the benefit of people that can't watch this horrible video:

This is really about them being able to change the already extremely vague terms of service and you having no recourse other than voiding your purchase if you don't like it. There is some focus on a gun thing early on, but it's just an example where they flip-flopped multiple times over the years based on vague wording in the ToS that was changed after the fact. Commercial modded server owners were the main ones that had to make changes because of that rule, often taking guns away from players that had them, but it's generally enforced very inconsistently.

But the main thing they're focusing on in the lawsuit is the mass deletion of legitimately bought Minecraft copies when they stopped Mojang account migration in 2023 (everyone that didn't migrate then no longer owns Minecraft according to Microsoft; no refunds). That, too, was effectively a one-sided ToS change. And to make matters worse, the old ToS had an explicit clause that you could keep playing the game in singleplayer even without agreeing to any new ToS.

This lawsuit is being done in Sweden. I don't know if this kind of ToS/contract validity has actually been tested there before.

I think this is the first time I ever watched a video at 0.5 speed. "this was done due to retention purposes for the video to maximize spread potential". Yeeeaaaah. No. Checked reddit, it's downvoted to the negatives over form. Checked a different place that would be all over this, entire topic is discussing the form and there's not one mention of what it's about because nobody got that far. The exact kind of person that might take time out of their day to join a class action is not going to watch this garbage. I think it's good to have this tested, but I straight up don't trust this guy. Supposedly maximizing views while getting zero information through to anyone is not going to help the cause.

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What isn't illegal but should be?

Requiring agreement to some unspecified ever-changing terms of service in order to use the product you just bought, especially when use of such products is required in the modern world. Google and Apple in particular are more or less able to trivially deny any non-technical person access to smartphones and many things associated with them like access to mobile banking. Microsoft is heading that way with Windows requiring MS accounts, too, though they're not completely there yet.

games

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Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital

The new owners are so trustworthy that they weren't even transparent about who they are. In the comments of the original announcement they defend that with:

This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.

I can't say I find that statement to be particularly trustworthy given it's coming from an NFT bro.

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To what extent, if at all, would have CrowdStrike's faulty update have been easier to deal with with an immutable distro?

Realistically, immutability wouldn't have made a difference. Definition updates like this are generally not considered part of the provisioned OS (since they change somewhere around hourly) and would go into /var or the like, which is mutable persistent state on nearly every otherwise immutable OS. Snapshots like Timeshift are more likely to help.

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France and Germany, in joint collaboration, have developed a Google Docs alternative - and its awesome! (Netherlands are currently onboarded)

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Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

Self-hostable, but it seems like an absolute behemoth of an application if their "non-production-use-only" docker-compose file is to be believed, and I couldn't find any production-ready deployment instructions on a quick skim. No obvious signs of federation and I didn't see anything on their roadmap, not sure it would make a lot of sense for this though.

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hexbear.net comically loses its domain name

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(It's a joke/reference, I guess it's not 100% known though. My bad.)

I really do hate "I know what I have so you are going to pay whatever number I set" capitalism though, which is what they do here. These registrars figured out a loophole around the redemption grace period and are, from the start, set up to make you lose the domain and then spend significant money on a completely unfair auction where they have the power to plant fake bids, rather than paying the usual static redemption fees that aren't that excessive.

linux

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NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog

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All GPUs released since they came out with the RTX 2000+ line are supported and all new GPUs will most likely have support, especially with this announcement saying they're committed to it. There's a support list on their GitHub and it includes all the weird little things you'd be worried about. Even silly little laptop chips like the new RTX 500 are on it.

I think the only reason they limited GPU support is because the older ones physically don't have the hardware for this approach; they switched to their newer RISC-V "GSP" processors with the RTX line. In the new open module, all of their proprietary "secret sauce" was shoved off to firmware running on that new GSP. Previously, their proprietary kernel module loaded all of that same secret sauce as a gigantic obfuscated blob running on your normal CPU instead. The Windows side of their driver has also been moving towards using the GSP, they even advertised it boosts performance or whatever, and I can believe it.

That said, with this new stuff, the official Nvidia userland portions providing Vulkan/OpenGL/CUDA support and the like are still proprietary. It's still worse than AMD in that regard. But at least it's possible to replace those bits, and Mesa/NVK are working on getting Vulkan up and running (with NVK supposedly getting pretty damn good, and Mesa's OpenGL-on-Vulkan is pretty good too so that's free).

linux

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Bitnami Ends Free, Stable Images — Users Forced to Migrate or Pay

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These containers are/were for self-hosting. VMWare previously owned Bitnami, it was their attempt to make it easier to self-host rather than paying a cloud provider, which should directly benefit them because VMWare got its money from businesses that self-host + self-host people growing up learning free homelab ESXi and wanting to apply that at work. It helps a lot if there's well-maintained solutions for deploying popular stuff.

Then Broadcom bought VMWare for a ridiculous price and is doing none of that.

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Encrypted backups to the cloud

Borg or the like with 'hardcoded' plaintext/regularly full-disk-encrypted key is acceptable. Someone that has your unencrypted private key sitting on your server has almost certainly already obtained access to the entire set of data you're backing up, with the backup key itself only meaningfully guarding access to older backups.

The more important thing is to securely keep extra copies in case the server fails. I keep mine in a group in my password manager, one per repo.

games

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In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller

I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.