Bookwyrm is a Fediverse alternative to Goodreads. :)

The array of different disabilities is so vast - a controller which works for one player may not work for another.

I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.

California it is. WARN act.

I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.

I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.

Decimal time exists, thanks to the French Revolution.

There are 100 decimal seconds in a decimal minute, 100 minutes in a decimal hour, and 10 hours in a decimal day. Each second is slightly shorter than a SI second.

Revenue, not profit.

In other words - Twitter would lose even more money. And they’d lose it to people that can take it straight from their bank accounts. 6% of it, to start with.

So $0.48 of every blue checkmark would go straight to the EU.

I got banned from there too because I used to go on /r/4chan back in 2011. I was an edgy teenager back then.

They apparently fetched every comment that had ever been made to that subreddit and banned everyone. It happened in like 2015-2016, long after I stopped going on any subreddit like that.

I got one for saying we should destroy a bridge in Königsberg in the name of Euler.

This is a reference to a famous problem in graph theory. This problem has been ruined since they built an extra bridge. It was an obvious joke in context, to an audience that would understand the joke.

Unfortunately, Reddit’s so-called “Anti-Evil Operations” team doesn’t look at context and said I was inciting terrorism.

I use KDE Neon as my daily driver (LTS Ubuntu + latest KDE, which is the desktop environment the Steam Deck uses).

I haven’t had many issues. For context:

• I have to remote in to my work computer from home. I do that with Parsec, which I have via a Flatpak. Parsec has no issues and works identically to Windows.

• I also have to use a specific VPN. This VPN requires a separate program on Windows, but in KDE it’s baked into the OS.

• Zoom is also a Flatpak. It has a few bugs that don’t exist on Windows - namely Zoom likes to steal window focus whenever the host joins or someone shares their screen.

• I also installed Flatpak Steam. I had to use Flatseal to give it more access than it had by default, but that was easy enough. You can go through your OS package manager but since KDE Neon is built on Ubuntu LTS those packages don’t get updated frequently.

• Most games run fine. Performance is usually a little worse than Windows, but I can still generally hit 60 - just with more dips than Windows has. Satisfactory and Jedi Survivor are the only games where I have seen noticeable issues compared to Windows. Baldur’s Gate runs fine.

• Some games are borked. These are usually games that rely on anti-cheat or intrusive DRM.

• Running Windows programs can be tricky. Wine isn’t intuitive to use. I usually use Bottles, but sometimes Bottles doesn’t get the job done and I have to fall back to Lutris. Lutris is hard to use but generally pulls through. These are all Flatpaks.

I maintain a Windows installation on an old 2 TB NTFS hard drive. Linux gets my 4 TB SSD, but I’ve symlinked my documents folders to the NTFS drive so I can share things on Windows and Linux.

Sometimes I need to boot into Windows. Generally this is if I’m having issues connecting to my work computer on Parsec (these issues happened on Windows as well), in which case I need to fall back to RDP to go check on my work computer. My employer blocks me doing that from Linux, so I do it from Windows instead.

Otherwise, I usually boot into Windows to play Satisfactory, because it doesn’t run well on Proton. Satisfactory’s Vulkan renderer seems to implode on Proton as well for some reason; it causes flickering on X and crashes Wayland entirely. The DX12 renderer works but it just isn’t as fast as it is on native Windows.

That said, I rarely boot into Windows. Maybe once every 2-3 months? But not beyond that.

Could be any number of reasons.

My money is on 4chan/8chan/whatever today’s derivative is. I used to be super active with them back in the day when I was young, racist, and stupid.

This sort of stuff matches their target profile:

• Visible - Reddit has shone a spotlight on Lemmy recently, and Lemmy.world specifically has gotten called out as the most promising of all the Lemmy instances

• Vulnerable - the tooling to stop large-scale attacks doesn’t exist. Users aren’t “locked in” to the threadiverse yet. People generally aren’t expecting it.

• “Lulzy” - attacking a large Lemmy community would cause a lot of panic in the wider threadiverse community. The 4chan/8chan trolls thrive on panic; they think people freaking out is funny. The more panic they cause, the funnier it is.

The methods line up, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were behind the DDOS as well. DDOS is the simplest tool they use, and when that stops being funny they escalate.

CSAM, gore, scat, torture are all stuff they have in their arsenal, ready to spam. They go out and look for the stuff, build up folders of it to use on their victims. That stuff causes panic, and that’s what they thrive on. They want to see the biggest response they can. Scat is just gross, usually a good opener. CSAM is good because it gets operators in legal trouble. Gore and torture makes people leave a site in droves.

Channers aren’t dumb, either. They know how to use technology. If something is open source, that just gives them something to study and look for attack surfaces. Someone will make a custom-built tool to exploit a vulnerability and it will run until the vulnerability is patched. I had dozens of random tools back in the day that were intended for one-off attacks, plus stuff in the toolbelt like Low Orbit Ion Cannon (DDOS) and Cain and Abel (password cracking).

I should reiterate that it has been many years since I was part of that crowd - well over a decade at this point. Things are undoubtedly different. (I refuse to call these guys “Anonymous” - that name was butchered a long time ago when people started speaking on places like Twitter “on behalf of Anonymous”. I’m not using the names they call themselves either.)

When I was a channer, one of the big targets was Reddit. Channers hated Reddit, because Reddit would steal stuff from 4chan and repost it. Reddit was just an inferior version of 4chan, but they were so smug about things and they were a bunch of prudes to boot. So Reddit was a relatively popular target until finally they got better at stopping large attacks.

I have to imagine that a lot of channers dislike Reddit still. Lemmy is seen as the new Reddit - and worse, it’s run by commies.

Channers that do this stuff are Nazis. They just are. (Why do you think they chose the number 8 when 4chan got sick of them? It’s not because it’s 4 times 2.) They’re extremely open about being Nazis, with jokes about gas chambers and everything. You get the hardcore tankies as well, but the tankies are generally so far gone as to be essentially indistinguishable from Nazis themselves.

The fact that Lemmy is left-leaning makes it another reasonable target. Nazis hate commies, although they will accept tankies (to an extent). This is probably why Lemmy.ml wasn’t targeted despite being the historic “main” Lemmy instance (full of tankies). Lemmy.world is left-leaning but still highly visible, so it’d be a good target. If Lemm.ee keeps growing, that’s probably the next target on the list.

This is all baseless speculation. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are both also reasonable sources. Hexbear is notorious for being disruptive in the same way 4chan was back in the day, but supposedly they’re better nowadays (not that I necessarily believe that).

But I’m reminded of the stuff I did as a dumb kid, before I knew better. It matches with how they act. I’m not saying it’s explicitly 4chan/8chan/888chan/whatever, but the way it’s coordinated certainly smells familiar.

My brain thought I was on !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone for a second

Any time you make something, you have a copyright on it.

You have a copyright on the comment you just made, for example. And I have a copyright on this reply. It just magically happens once you create the work.

You can give your copyright away (for example, allowing Lemmy to publish your work on other instances or show it to others). You can also sell your copyright; when a publisher buys a book from an author, they actually buy the copyright to the words the author wrote (and thus the author loses their copyright over the work).

This goes beyond just words - pictures and whatnot have the same inherent copyright.

So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.

Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.

This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.

Courts have been blocking them consistently. They’ve been a touch more aggressive, but Congress needs to pass more aggressive laws. Many of these companies are vertically integrated, not horizontally - and the laws aren’t really equipped to deal with that.

Google does the same.

I don’t use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn’t take “no” for an answer; it’s a constant nag.

Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn’t even let you paste without formatting.