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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • It could be a genuine mistake by the original writer, but I expect a textbook to have higher proofreading standards. Especially if this is a grade-school textbook (it looks like one), where you can’t reasonably expect the student to reference other sources to verify the contents, then I would expect the textbook publisher to put a lot more effort in to catching this sort of thing. And I don’t mean someone reading over it for typos, I mean someone who knows the field the book is written about, who can proofread for accuracy not just grammar. Genuine mistake or not, this is completely inexcusable.


    • Decreased performance, as DRM is often hooked deep into event loops and adds non-negligible overhead.
    • Decreased privacy, as DRM often requires pinging an external server constantly.
    • Decreased security, as DRM is a black-box blob intentionally meant to be difficult to peer in to, and has been the target of attacks such as code execution vulnerabilities before.
    • If you own a game but don’t have an active internet connection, DRM may prevent you from playing the game.
    • If you own a game but have multiple computers, DRM may force you to buy multiple licenses when you’re only using one copy at a time (c.f., a physical CD with the game on it).
    • Eventually, a DRM company is going to go out of business or stop supporting old versions of their software; if you want to play an old game that had that DRM, you won’t be able to even if you own the game.
    • &c.

    DRM exists to "protect’ the software developer, i.e. protect profits by making sure every copy has been paid for and to force people to buy multiple copies in certain cases. DRM never has and never will be for your (the consumer’s) benefit.





  • What a weird take. You’re allowed to pay for whatever you’d like. Personally, I can’t afford to pay for any JetBrains product, even if I wanted to.

    Not only are there alternatives which may be better overall or better suited to someone’s needs, that wasn’t even my point. My point was more that it is only temporarily free, and so the parent commenter’s comment of “it’s free” should be taken with a grain of salt if you’re considering the product.

    Moreover, we’re in the Open Source community: Fleet is neither free nor open source, and pointing that out here is relevant.



  • In hindsight, yes. But there was no indiciation ahead of time that this situation would happen or was likely to happen. In fact, there was no more reason to believe a free ccTLD was any more likely than a paid ccTLD to cause a problem. The problem arises because a ccTLD’s host country can choose to remove any domain it wants, paid or not. One could argue that using a ccTLD at all was a mistake, but you’d have to look at precedent for ccTLD’s country’s doing this and see if it happens often or not.


  • You’ve come in to a three year old thread only to not say a single true thing.

    China is a socialist country, and has been for a while now. The only reason you think any inkling of capitalism being present somehow means they aren’t socialist is because you aren’t using the right framework to look at the situation. You think it must be either-or, when a socialist country can take advantage of aspects of a capitalist system. There is no class of capitalists, and there is no reliance on or subservience to investors. It doesn’t have the characteristics of capitalism: it is not an economic system based on private property. The use of a market economy also doesn’t make it not socialist: the basic economic system is socialist, and a socialist market economy plays a role in the allocation of resources and distribution[1].

    There are other political parties in China, and they’re permitted. The fantasy that only one party is permitted to exist is just that, a fantasy. From what I can tell there are currently at least 8 political parties, and there have been many others in the near past. Also, the fact that most people support one party is not evidence that people are forced to support it; it’s evidence that that party serves the needs and desires of its people. People support the party because it benefits them.

    Your comment just reads as ignorance. If you are actually curious about China, and aren’t just going to sling talking points you’ve heard from Western sources, there are plenty of resources to help you learn about it. If you don’t bother to put in the effort, then don’t try to offer up what you think must be true.


    1. Boer, R. (2021). “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. ↩︎



  • They’re lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn’t control what ads the network uses, but they’ve literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

    I’ve set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).





  • There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

    Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.

    Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

    Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

    In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.




  • might look tempting, but another totalitarian authority would have to swoop into the power vacuum created by dedollar-efforts.

    Why is this a given?

    is this for community meant for tankies??

    You don’t have to be a “tankie” to see that harm of maintaining dollar hegemony, or to see the potential value in alternative currencies gaining support. And using “tankie” here is just meaningless; you’d add as much value saying “is this community meant for wokies??”.


  • They’ll also happily call one time use, or repeated occasional use of “more innocent” drugs like cannabis, “X use disorder”. You can be fully functioning, an occasional cannabis smoker, whose symptoms are both unrelated to cannabis use in theory and are confirmed unrelated by stopping usage and not getting symptom relief and yet they’ll call your occasional use “cannabis use disorder”. And there’s no recourse; you can’t have a diagnosis taken off your record. And of course in a situation where it’s your word against theirs, yours won’t be taken seriously, especially if you have a “drug use disorder”! Just like with non-mental health care, the patient being incentivized to lie to their healthcare provider is a horrible situation to be in, and leads to worse outcomes in general. It’s also infuriating that being honest about occasional responsible cannabis use means you automatically can not get prescribed several classes of drugs (some of which I have issues with on principle but that’s not the point): you can’t be prescribed stimulants, you can’t be prescribed benzodiazepines, you can’t be prescribed narcotic painkillers[1].


    1. This isn’t law, it’s just operating standards at most places. Especially if you’re poor and are recieving government-provided mental health treatment where they have very strict, uniform standards for acceptable treatment by their providers. ↩︎


  • I’m not sure why people use anything other than Windows Defender. It literally shares signature databases with most of the large AVs, it doesn’t have any anti-features or isn’t itself malware/adware/spyware like commercial AVs, it’s tightly integrated but also easy to turn on or off (ever tried to uninstall an AV?), and no commercial AV is going to catch anything Windows Defender won’t. It’s also free and has no need to make money as a product in itself, and so there’s no motivation for bad behavior.

    The only features some commercial AVs have that Windows Defender doesn’t are things like DNS blocking or browser addons (which there are plenty of non-commercial/profit-motive-driven options for: uBlock origin, pi-hole/adguard home, etc).