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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Since arbitrations are charged a fee per customer someone figured out that you can do an effective “class action” against valve by having many people submit the same arbitration claim against valve and costing them so much through the arbitration fees that it it was almost impossible for them to cone out on top regardless of the outcome of the arbitration (iirc).

    It’s not even that they’d have to pay for it; usually the filing party has to pay. Valve tried to be the good guys and while they did push for arbitration they said that they’d pay your arbitration fee for you, basically allowing you to file a legal complaint against them at their expense.

    And then some fucking legal company figured out it’s a neat loophole on how to bleed them through arbitration where the point isn’t really the result but the costly process. Guess that’ll teach Valve to try to be better than others. :|




  • That’s just the reality of doing business on the Internet.

    That’s just not true. You can absolutely get by on the internet remaining pretty much anonymous, as it is. Very few services need (and verify) your personal data; when they do it’s basically always when it’s government-mandated, and it’s for things that have a “physical” equivalent.

    i.e. creating a bank account online requires your actual ID, but so it would if you tried to do it “offline” in a physical bank (and you largely have a choice on whether or not you do it online).

    Then you have stuff like online shopping and such where most people probably use their actual personal information but you don’t have to and it’s generally not checked.

    This is an unprecedented change, where suddenly for access to a free service someone needs to ask for and validate some very private details. And it fucking sucks.

    While Australia’s new legislation is ham-fisted and poorly thought out, the intent isn’t wrong and there’s broad consensus for it (77% approval in Australia). We need to do something about the uncontrolled exploitation, manipulation and endangerment of minors by social media services.

    That’s the issue though; I agree that something needs to be done, but you need to do it more or less correctly on the first try or you’ll probably make it even worse.




  • The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit.

    It also killed a lot of other genuinely useful extensions.

    And if security is their main concern they should have spent resources on making sure the extensions they themselves redistribute are safe, not on killing a huge chunk of extensions. Sorry but you’ll have a very hard time convincing anyone that getting rid of ad blockers wasn’t their primary motive.

    But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.

    It completely changed how they do this, and made it way less effective and more limited. All completely unnecessary from a security standpoint.


  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.

    You absolutely can patent “math” (well, more like physics) IRL. What matters though is that the invention actually has to be novel and non-obvious, and IMO it should also be harder to patent if it’s in a segment like software where costs of development, iteration and “research” are generally extremely cheap. Like, it should have a way higher bar for the “novelness”.

    And I would not allow any kind of software design patent (use copyright or trademark to protect that).







  • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlGNOME 47.beta Released
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    4 months ago

    I may understand “opinionated” differently from you, but the main issue is that when you do want to change something, you can’t. Or it’s some unsupported hack, or (best case) you flip some hidden configuration variable (that will probably break with the next release).

    KDE is well configured from the get go as well, you don’t have to change anything and it will work well. But if you do decide that you don’t like some of their defaults, you can tweak many aspects of it.


  • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlGNOME 47.beta Released
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    4 months ago

    It wouldn’t really be an issue if you didn’t need an extension for every single basic functionality…

    Because of how stupidly opinionated Gnome is I switched to KDE a year or so ago and have been extremely happy with it. And what do you know I don’t even need any extensions, because sane stuff like tray icons are builtin.

    I do use an extension for distributing windows in custom areas though, and it didn’t even break throughout the (I believe) 2 large updates there were since I started using it.


  • That’s technically true, but the apps “everyone” has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don’t really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it’s a shitty experience.




  • This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.

    That’s not how it works. It just means the company owns the code for all intents and purposes, which also means that if they tell you that you can release it under a FOSS license / contribute to someone else’s project, you can absolutely do that (they effectively grant you the license to use “their” code that you wrote under a FOSS license somewhere else).


  • That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:

    Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).

    It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.