• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • I wanted to thank you for creating and promoting an agnostic platform, like lemm.ee.

    I’d started exploring Lemmy on beehaw, but was confused and frustrated why I couldn’t do “simple things” like downvote (spammy) topics (especially, outside of beehaw channels) . Then beehaw started to do more and more defederations. Although, I respect the transparency the admins have in their communications, I’m not interested in their curated form of Lemmy. As an adult, I can make responsible decisions. Fortunately, the federated nature of Lemmy allows me to easy “pack-up my stuff” and go elsewhere.

    Thank you for providing me with a place to go!





  • Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

    Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

    With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

    This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

    You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.


  • Before we start to pat ourselves on the back: How does the number of murders in the U. S. compare to the rest of the world? This is really the only meaningful metric, otherwise it’s like a chain smoker congratulating themselves from dropping from 3 packs a day to 2.

    
    *"... there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." *
    
    *edit*: The link I posted referred to a high murder rate for U.S. Virgin Islands (not contential U.S.).  So, it's not relevant to the conversation. Thanks for calling me out on it. 
    






  • Thanks for the write-up and I too bought it before it was delisted (ie: paid < $7.00 for the deluxe edition)… and tbh, I felt I still paid too much.

    As you mentioned that campaigns are simple, but I was surprised (and amazingly board ) by how simple the campaigns were. (disclaimer : I did only play for about 2 hours before I got board and never came back). I was hoping for some sort of brawler type game, but the enemies are few but often respawn. I was hoping for something like Shadows of War, but was greatly disappointed. The campaigns were disconnected from each other and the objectives are simply: defeat this enemy, then destroy these targets… there is no real flexible or room for thought, outside of the prepared script you need to follow until the campaign ends.

    … and the controls, I found, are quite janky. I was iron man and I found that the movement never really “flowed” into each other, there was always a delay between animation… I really didn’t find it fun. It wasn’t a brawler, it really was a Pay-to-Win platform… even with all the pay gates removed.

    People often mention that Guardians of the Galaxy is better… and it is on my wish list, but I’m really suspicious (I hope they improved the controls).



  • Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.

    We would have liked to have kept all this “on-prem”. Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.

    The “force” that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don’t know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it’s not cost effective - I wasn’t involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization’s size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem “for free” (or at a deep, deep discount).

    This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for “on-prem” exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since “on-prem” exchange isn’t available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won’t integrate seamlessly into outlook).


  • Wow, 12 - you’re living the dream ;)

    Could you share your setup? I’m on Linux, but I’ve tried both Edge and Brave. Both only show 4 people.

    When a 5th person joins, I need to switch to the “group view” (?), which has a auditorium background and crude attempts by Teams to “crop” people from their background.

    It’s such a perfect summary of my Teams experience : you want something simple (ie: see 5+ people) and MS delivers the most useless feature… I cannot even call it half passed, cause I’m certain the “group view” took far more engineering effort than it would have taken to just show 5 or more people on the screen.





  • I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?

    If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.

    You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.

    My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”


  • I really think the “simple” approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of “value”.

    However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what’s broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the “what’s hot” algorithm would reduce/remove many of these “workarounds” (like the one you’re suggesting).

    (I’m just thinking out loud) but a better “what’s hot” would have each post weighted:

    1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
    2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
    3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of “what’s hot”.

    Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like “average number of comments per post” could be precalculated daily, but I think it’ll be “good enough” and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.