Spyke

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Apple joins opposition to encrypted message app scanning

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I actually don’t think this has anything to do with standing up for their users but is a simple cost/benefit analysis: building compromised E2E-communication that is still reasonably secure against bad actors is much more difficult (if not impossible) than building robust E2E-communication. Apple just doesn’t want to lose business users over headlines like „iOS messaging used by Chinese spies to steal US trade secrets“, while headlines about how difficult it is for government agencies to unlock iPhones probably drive sales. Nothing morally or ethical here, only profits.

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Reddit is going to remove mods of private communities unless they reopen — ‘This is a courtesy notice to let you know that you will lose moderator status in the community by end of week.’

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Just removing all mods isn’t really the answer. Mods have a purpose, removing them all will lead to chaos in some subs. The John Oliver pictures aren’t just malicious compliance, they are also a taste of things to come without mods. Maybe Automod can remove some of the worst stuff, but excessively posting flowers in a sub for cars is just as detrimental and is totally at the whim of the mods to follow up on this. Since this is all about money, I cannot see a professional moderation team in the books. Additionally professionalized content moderation is much more complicated for Reddit than it is for other companies like Facebook. They just have to check against their “community guidelines”, but Reddit has a lot of cases, where something useful in one sub can be despised in another. I’d like to know what the endgame is.

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Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out

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Twitter‘s real world relevance is highly overvalued. Journalists who practically live there instead of doing journalist stuff elevating its cultural impact manifold. Mastodon shows how much of this impact is lost, if there aren’t enough promoters. The grassroots picture Twitter painted of itself wasn’t ever close to true, it was just a single-way microphone for narcissists. Reddit‘s cultural value is highly underrated in comparison and I believe a good alternative can catch enough nexus posters who will keep good content coming. As with every FOSS project the biggest enemies of success are the people within. Lemmy (as Mastodon) has a lot of difficulties with fracturing due to its federated nature and the differentiation between kbin and Lemmy is already divisive for the community. I hope the more technical minded audience of Reddit is able to overcome these barriers for entry and find a new home here.

wefwef

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wefwef has become my favorite app already!

I have very mixed opinions about PWAs. Philosophically I love them (remember the Ubuntu phone? That would have been my iOS alternative!). But in practice most aren’t done very well and feel like a browser bookmark that has been opened from the home screen. But wefwef feels outright native, totally impressive!

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Huge New York landlord admits Fridays in the office are 'dead forever' — and Mondays are 'touch-and-go'

There are two actors who are really against WFH: on the hand hand highest echelons of management who know they probably have these buildings as part of their balance sheet and need its valuation to stay high, to borrow against. And on the other hand banks and investors who financed buildings like this and have them on their balance sheet and need its valuation to stay high to leverage against. These guys use manipulative media to make this a moral judgement call of work ethics and propagate theses ideas of „working hard = working from the office“ to middle management who are generally just regurgitating these statements. The results will be devastating, since companies acting in their or their banks‘ short term valuation interest will in turn bleed the most crucial talent left and right. I am working in and around IT and every developer or admin who is really, really good either has better WFH conditions than the rest or has a new job by now already. Everyone else comes to the office. This commercial real estate bubble needs to pop fast and WFH and voluntary hybrid models (not everyone has the office space at home or wants to WFH, some capacity should be reserved for them) become the norm, so companies can focus on their business again.

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[Rumor] A Spanish Studio has received Switch 2 Development Kits Rumor - Nintendo

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What makes the switch genius level of engineering is the Switch System Software microkernel architecture. When the switch plays a game, it doesn’t have bloated tasks running in the background to render some ads in some shop app you probably won’t visit while playing, but only plays the game. This approach is totally mandatory to get anything to run on the switch’s ancient hardware, but it is also so beautiful and rare to see today from a technical point of view. Where Xbox and PlayStation are directly derived from a multi-purpose desktop PC, the switch is more closely related with consoles and handhelds of the past.

Therefore a lot of flashy UI elements pulling information from the Internet or animating with some “expensive” (in a performance sense) effects aren’t really feasible, since these would hog up system resources the switch doesn’t have to spare and isn’t even designed to be able to spare. I hope when Nintendo updates the switch they keep this philosophy alive and this would very probably lead to another clean UI.

mlemapp

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PSA: Mlem is not open-source

Genuine questions: what are your fears about these definitions? Are the mlem developers using community contributions unfairly and gaining money off of other people‘s work under that license? Is the current definition worse than Apollo + Reddit (both proprietary as far as I know) for the consumer?

totk

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Still on 1.1.1 gang

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I wouldn’t word it that strongly, but I totally get what you mean. While I love the core gameplay loop and world much, much more than botw (I was one of the very few heretics who were just lukewarm on botw, instead of seeing it as game of the millennium; while I really love totk and get why people are raving about it), I feel like Nintendo did just one virtual currency too many. Needing to collect and exchange like three or four different zonai stuff to upgrade the battery and buying building materials and fabricating premades. While still needing the shrines and korok seeds, to upgrade health and stamina, collectible currency like the poes and obviously rubies, feel like a very imbalanced in game economy, which in turn makes the grind so bad, it’s unbearable sometimes. Even though each currency in and of itself is fairly easy to grind in my opinion, just not everything at once. At the same time totk gives the illusion of a fairly creative game, where grinding isn’t even warranted. Just let me build stuff!

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Zuck is the last person I would trust for managing an alternative to Twitter

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Additionally: While spez’s reasoning isn’t sound on the matter, it IS true, that user generated content is highly valuable to AI firms. With ChatGPT out the door, we shouldn’t expect anything to be written after a date a few years back to be written by a human. But this means these data sources aren’t “clear” from generating a feedback loop: If every conversation is potentially three chat bots in a trenchcoat the fourth chat bot learning from that could be of a reduced quality. Therefore every AI firm (of which Facebook is regrettably one) needs to think about how to farm user generated content. I don’t think Zuck wants to be in the cloud business of hosting instances, at least not primarily. On the one hand he is a reliable business partner for regimes all around the world and “moderating” federated instances is a way to keep this business, on the other hand this will help Facebook to gain access to user generated conversation, and more important: potentially block competitor’s access in the future.

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The Cycle: Frontier to shut down on 2023-09-27

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DayZ, PUBG and Tarkov gave a lot of devs the illusion they could compete in a live service multiplayer market if their games was just good enough. But these examples aren’t really that economically viable to support in the long run (DayZ hasn’t ever pulled their highs of twitch viewership in the actual game) or have been outstandingly innovative. Even established publishers and studios struggle getting a live service game off the ground and supporting it long time. The truth is: only very few have time for more than one of theses games and that market is highly saturated. While a singleplayer-first game has a long tail and can be bought, promoted and updated as demand and popularity cycles (No Man‘s Sky, Skyrim, Hitman 3, etc.) live service games need to capture all of their audiences attention all the time to stay economically viable. I don’t know how so many devs and even established publishers could jump on that band waggon. Suddenly you aren’t just competing with another similar game, but with every game all the time and additionally every other medium that takes time to consume away from your game.