Barbarian

Barbarian , 1 day ago

I would encourage you to read up on who the Luddites really were. In short, textile workers who were being forced into underpaid and very dangerous work making cheap shit. They broke some machines and wrote some threatening letters to try and achieve a ban on child labour and a minimum wage. Then the government responded with executions and penal transportation.

Barbarian , 1 day ago

Romania is a messy country for LGBTIQ people. Generally speaking, LGBQ are accepted (trans people absolutely not), but the government tried to pass a constitutional amendment a few years back to solidify marriage as strictly between a man and a woman. Thankfully, it failed because the general population shunned the referendum so that it couldn't get the required 50% turnout for it to be valid.

Positive steps are few and far between, but thankfully it isn't backsliding.

Barbarian , 1 day ago

My best guess is that these multiple countries dont want to commit to fighting against the "anti lgbtq movement".

For Romania, this is exactly the issue. The political situation is pretty crazy, we have a political party called AUR which is the worst reactionary tinfoil hat collection of crazies, very reminiscent of extreme US republicans. They are currently a fringe party, but growing. The mainstream socially conservative party (PSD, a socialist party... long story) don't want to lose voters to the crazies, so they have to portray themselves as anti-LGBT. An alliance of socially progressive and economically liberal parties (PNL, USR+) is currently in power, and want to concentrate on how amazing the economy is and freeze social issues because they're too divisive to win elections on.

TL;DR: Romanian politics are an absolute mess.

Barbarian , 2 days ago

Every software project, without exception, has a testing environment.

Some even have a separate production environment too.

Barbarian , 2 days ago

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/6eb244b5-8f00-4121-9399-8ffe148c08e1.jpeg

Barbarian , 2 days ago

I agree with everything you say here, but I thought the setup-payoff joke structure and the fact I intentionally swapped testing and production for comedic effect made it obvious enough. I guess Poe's law strikes again.

Barbarian , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Yup. As someone who's worked a little bit on GDPR compliance, it's not some magic wand you wave at your data. Any data they receive after the request is also not covered by that request. Also, only EU citizens and residents are legally entitled to make a request. A company may choose to comply with non-EU users, but that's purely their choice.

Comments that contain any info about where you live, your ethnicity, disabilities (cognitive or physical), gender, where you work, etc must be deleted as part of a forget request, so that might impact LLM training data.

Personally identifying information can be somewhat of a grey area in some situations as well. If I were to say I'm from New York, that'd be personally identifying. If I were to say I'm a fan of a sports team in New York, that's not (even if that implies my location). If I were to say I'm a fan of a New York sports team, my favourite pizza place is in New York, my favourite park is in New York, etc etc, that might arguably be identifying, even if each of the pieces by itself is not.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot one of the most important parts: it's not like there are any spot checks or anything. You'd need someone to actually lodge a formal complaint, with some kind of evidence they haven't done what they're supposed to, and the procedures are different for every EU country. They are normally very involved and complex. Essentially, you'd need to lawyer up and care enough to slowly and painfully shove it through the legal system.

Barbarian , 3 days ago

The original game that Monopoly is based on (The Landlord's Game) was a tool for teaching how bad landlords and owning land privately and permanently is. Monopoly is still a great tool to show how an early advantage leads to an ever-growing monopoly that will inevitably crush all the other players with no modifications necessary.

Barbarian , 3 days ago

They have leverage now. Previously the deal was Moldova provides food & utilities in exchange for Transnistria keeping the power plants running. Now that Moldova is linked up with the EU electrical grid, they're in a position to play hardball without the risk of Transnistria plunging the country into darkness.

Barbarian , 3 days ago

You can always refund it. Even if you've gone over the 2 hours for an auto-accept refund, if you explain the issues in the ticket Steam will always accept it in my experience.

Even got a refund for a game after 20 hours of game time due to them adding aggressive client-side anti-cheat.

Barbarian , 3 days ago

I saw a Penn Jillette interview a long time ago where he explained that quite a few other magicians fake their recorded stage performances. They'll perform a simpler trick, get the audience reactions, and then use camera trickery to make the trick look far more impressive for TV. This was in the context of him claiming that he absolutely doesn't do that.

Barbarian , 2 days ago

My completely uncorroborated gut feeling is that it's because each celebrity caught doing horrible shit causes a massive media frenzy, so even if (and I don't know if this is true) the numbers of horrible people are proportional to the overall population, there's a bias because each one is named and shamed unlike non-celebrities.

Barbarian , 4 days ago

Tbf, blocking Romania wasn't about Russia, it was drumming up support amongst xenophobes for political gain.

EDIT: Tocmai am vazut numele tau :))

Barbarian , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

(going to reply in English for the benefit of other users)

Croatians don't have the same stigma in western Europe that we do. In the minds of German/Austrian/French/etc racists, the Polish, the Bulgarians and us Romanians are lazy, criminal welfare thieves.

Insofar as Russia is involved in the Schengen decision-making, they're likely just attempting to deepen existing fault lines and create more instability. In that context, I completely agree with the pro-Russian eurosceptic angle.

Barbarian , 10 days ago

If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be "Click the Firefox icon". Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.

App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.

Barbarian , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.

For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you've got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there's 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).

I'm a lazy ass who doesn't care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))

A quick Google shows that someone got sharex working on Linux: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6531

Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you're gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)

Barbarian , 14 days ago

Should be an option to allow/disallow non-instance users to vote. That'd be really useful here in sh.itjust.works for the Agora.

Barbarian , 22 days ago

Simple. You trade wool for a club, then use the club to take the bricks. Finally, use the club to take back your wool. Perfect economic system!

Barbarian , 22 days ago

If you're going to separate out mainland Portugal and its overseas territories like that, then technically slavery was never legal in England.

Barbarian , 21 days ago

I didn't mean to claim that the British Empire were the good guys. I was just pointing out the silliness of only looking at one very narrow fact to make a country look good, while ignoring the wider context.

Barbarian , 26 days ago

At least here in Romania, it’s the job of the accountant(s) to do the company’s taxes. If you’re self-employed or run a very small business (less than 10 employees) there are self-employed accountants who specialize in that and typically have 20-40 clients.

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

It’s actually not uncommon. Trauma and PTSD leave epigenetic changes in people. These can become hereditary through a combination of both nature and nurture. Unless treated, this leads to an intergenerational heightening of fight or flight responses and a host of other issues. This in turn predisposes people to do horrible things in the name of “survival” (in their minds), even when it’s not actually necessary.

In short, traumatized families are predisposed to inflict trauma unless treated.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

2 things can be true at the same time.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

It’s not easy, but it’s really not worth the massive gaping security vulnerability you are giving your users. One disgruntled employee giving out the keys to the castle or one programmer plugging in an infected USB, and every user now has a persistent malicious rootkit. The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

I’m sorry to disappoint, but with rootkits, that is very real. With that level of permissions, it can rewrite HDD/SSD drivers to install malware on boot.

There’s even malware that can rewrite BIOS/UEFI, in which case the whole motherboard has to go in the bin. That’s much less likely due to the complexity though, but it does exist.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Outside of monitoring individual packets outside of your computer (as in, man in the middle yourself with a spare computer and hoping the malware phones home right when you’re looking) there’s no way of knowing.

Once ring 0 is compromised, nothing your computer says can be trusted. A compromised OS can lie to anti-malware scanners, hide things from the installed software list and process manager, and just generally not show you what it doesnt want to show you. “Just remediate” does not work with rootkits.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Please don’t walk away from this feeling dumb. Most IT professionals aren’t aware of the scale of the issue outside of sysadmin and cybersecurity. I’ve met programmers who shrug at the most egregious vulnerabilities, and vendors who want us to put dangerous stuff on our servers. Security just isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.

Unrelated, but I wish you the best of luck with your studies!

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Glad to hear it!

Just as another thing to add to your notes, in ordinary circumstances, it’s practically impossible for non-government actors to get rootkits on modern machines with the latest security patches (EDIT: I’m talking remotely. Physical access is a whole other thing). To work your way up from ring 3 (untrusted programs) all the way to ring 0 (kernel), you’d need to chain together multiple zero day vulnerabilities which take incredibly talented cybersec researchers years to discover, keep hidden and then exploit. And all that is basically one-use, because those vulnerabilities will be patched afterwards.

This is why anti-cheat rootkits are so dangerous. If you can exploit the anti-cheat software, you can skip all that incredibly difficult work and go straight to ring 0.

EDIT: Oh, and as an added note, generally speaking if you have physical access to the machine, you own the machine. There is no defence possible against somebody physically being able to plug a USB stick in and boot from whatever OS they want and bypass any defences they want.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Actually, that’s not the real reason patents are public. The reason is to allow everyone to freely use the patent after the expiry.

The tradeoff is supposed to be the inventor gets exclusive use for a decade in exchange for detailing exactly how the thing works for everyone else.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Khorne is honourable and honest. Khorne will never stab you in the back or lie to you. He’d stab you in the front, shouting obscenities in your face.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Funnily enough, median income actually went up quite a bit here in Romania over the last year. Mainly because of successful union action.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Ranching and fishing, yes. But considering that worldwide more than 70% of agriculture is used to support ranching, it definitely seems that ranching is reducing the amount of food worldwide, not increasing it.

Edit: Also should mention, generally when climate activists talk about drastically cutting down or outright ending ranching, that’s for the developed world, where healthy alternatives exist. Nobody sane is talking about going and taking the dairy cows off of Indian villagers who depend on it for survival.

Also, we have destroyed the global aquaculture with overfishing.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Absolutely. I think it’s better to refute than to ignore (within reason) for people reading through the thread. Not for the benefit of the troll.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

The best use case for purchasing FOSS software is contractor work, specific modules for existing platforms and/or FOSS projects. I’ve done that myself in the past. The client pays for the custom software, it’s written, and then they gets to do absolutely whatever they want with it. If the client wants to publish it, they’re well within their rights. Most of the time it’s too entangled with their internal company workflow to be useful to anyone else though.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Only if the users on that server treat it like a death sentence.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

According to a quick Google search (I’m no expert on copyright law), a sufficiently original email is automatically copyrighted. What constitutes “sufficiently original” seems to be pretty arbitrary.

So I guess if you post a short story, that’s automatically copyrighted. Commenting “this” is not. And then there’s a huge grey zone in the middle.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

It can reliably copy the simple things in it’s training data from stackoverflow.

But at that point, why not just go to stackoverflow instead?

Barbarian , 2 months ago

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

• Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Barbarian , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

“It takes a village to raise a child” is an old expression for a reason. Historically (EDIT: And today in most of the world), parents wouldn’t take care of their kids 24/7. They would have parents, siblings, neighbours and friends to help share the load.

The idea that parents and parents alone do 100% of everything to raise a child is a very modern western thing.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

For the families who can afford it, daycare is the replacement.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

I don’t know the details of this app, but if it’s specifically US streets and notes on households there, then GDPR does not apply, as they’re not mapping EU households. GDPR is only invoked if the personal information of Europeans is at risk.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

That was a loophole to the original GDPR. That’s now against the law in the EU, but bringing cases against all these sites is time consuming.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrcbH0ge2WE&t=825s

So… beans and jeans are the way forward for humanity?

Barbarian , 2 months ago

even at the cost of our own privileges

I agree with everything you’ve said except for this. With worldwide growing inequality, it’s very clear where those resources are going. The people making less if the janitors get a pay bump isn’t the middle managers. It’s the owners, by a very tiny amount. If you don’t have a share of the company, you’re not affected by other people making more or spending less.

Funnily enough though, another winner in that scenario are small local business owners. More local income means more customers.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

Absolutely. Linux AMD drivers are rock solid due to them actually participating in the ecosystem and pushing the drivers directly to the kernel team in a proper open source format.

Barbarian , 4 months ago

Completely agree that there are a ton of ways around client-side anti-cheat. There have even been cases where pros have been caught with mice with in-built macros that spoofs themselves as a kb+mouse combo in in-person tournament settings where the computers are completely controlled and the players can’t install anything.

I was answering specifically the point about mechanical skill in MOBAs.

Barbarian , 4 months ago

The heroes are vastly different from one another, and are very different in terms of skill ceiling and floor. Meepo and Invoker are considered the two most mechanically demanding heroes, and should never be played by a new player.

Contrast this with Bristleback, whose gameplay consists of right-clicking an enemy and spamming W, then turning around and running away if they fight back too hard. There’s also Sven, whose gameplay consists of using a stun ability, right-clicking an enemy, and they’re probably dead. Axe, whose gameplay consists of running in and hoping people are stupid enough to hit you, and using your taunt ability to force them to do it if they aren’t.

Finally, there’s Sniper. You right-click enemies. That’s about it. He has a slow and a long-range nuke spell, but if you’ve right-clicked an enemy you’re at least helping.

Of course, higher skilled matches change things drastically and more complex teamwork and ability use is needed at those levels, but for a new player, these heroes are all very simple and straightforward to use.