You can’t really measure the proportion of players that would buy the game were they not able to pirate it, which makes it easy for CEOs to imagine every incidence of piracy as a lost sale. Who’s going to convince them they put the cart before the horse? It absolves them of direct responsibility for almost any shortcoming possible

I don’t know anything about the origin of the new use of ‘cap’. No one was saying ‘based’ in proto-internet culture before Lil B’s music videos around 2010-2011. This guy blew up quick and he used the word in his nickname. It was his version of BRRRR for Gucci, FLOCKA, etc. That’s just a fact.

It absolutely was repopularised by Lil B, I was there for it. My understanding at the time was that it was a reclamation of the word from an original slang meaning of being strung out on crack. Lil B was celebrated ironically by the 4channers that later propagated the right wing appropriation of the term. I always interpreted that to refer to being strung out on ‘the red pill’ i.e. being unapologetically fascist.

Kinda sorta required if you want to stream assets from storage, an approach taken by many modern games. Might not be absolutely necessary depending on your setup / game settings. BG3 also said SSD required but there’s a “Slow HDD Mode” in the settings anyway, which I believe just shifts more of the streaming burden to RAM/VRAM. If you played on a HDD without enabling it, I guess you’d expect to see inconsistent pop-in as individual assets try to stream in faster than your storage can read. But playing with it enabled might also cause performance drop if your RAM/VRAM was already close to full utilization with the setting disabled

Upon looking to this further I’m not sure if it actually works as I understood it to, due to the way group services are handled currently in Mastodon. Clearly there is some sort of flag in Activitypub on group accounts to indicate to other apps that it is a group account, because e.g. https://lemmy.ml/c/climatejustice@chirp.social works and you can follow it but the same link substituting /c/ for /u/ does not work. And for normal user accounts, the inverse is true.

However, aside from that flag, my understanding is they are essentially just user accounts that boost any posts from followers that mention the account handle, which causes the boosted post to show in the feed for all followers of the account. Since that account isn’t actually posting the posts that it boosts, I guess it makes sense that activity wouldn’t be visible in Lemmy, where boosts don’t exist. Following this logic no posts would be displayed, and that’s what is observed. Initially I thought this was because no one on the instance had followed the group yet, because e.g. https://lemmy.world/c/BlackMastodon@chirp.social does show posts while https://lemmy.ml/c/BlackMastodon@chirp.social does not. The same group on a.gup.pe also shows more posts on https://lemmy.ml/c/BlackMastodon@a.gup.pe.

It’s hard for me to make sense of what’s going on here (especially as I don’t microblog or use Mastodon personally) because clearly the Mastodon content is federating through the lemmy instance, but I’ve only been able to observe a subset of it and I haven’t been able to figure out the parameters that have caused some posts to be visible in Lemmy but not others.

Only the shortcut to the app was preinstalled on the build I put together a couple of months ago. When I tried to open it, it had to download and install first. Also, if you press Win+G to open the Game Bar and click the settings gear, under Notifications you can select “Hide notifications when I’m playing a fullscreen game”. Edit: or just turn off the Xbox app notifications if you don’t use it

I think “communities” term is used on Mastodon in reference to what are “instances” on Lemmy. I’m talking about communities as they apply to Lemmy - in Mastodon I think they’re generally called a “group” account. You subscribe to them in Lemmy mostly the same as how you’d subscribe to a Lemmy community on a different instance. e.g. go to your.lemmy.instance/c/groupname@their.mastodon.instance and subscribe. Or just search for the Mastodon group on the Lemmy communities page, making sure the filters are set to “All”. To find a Mastodon user page is the same, just /u/ instead of /c/. You just can’t follow or subscribe to the user pages because that’s not currently a feature in Lemmy, but you can for groups/communities

Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you’ve been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn’t change what data is collected, just whether the videos you’ve watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.

My understanding is that isn’t correct - in Lemmy you currently can follow Mastodon communities, but not users (following users on any fediverse platform including Lemmy itself just isn’t a part of Lemmy yet). I believe it’s planned to be implemented, but this is one thing differentiating Lemmy and Kbin - you can currently follow Mastodon users in Kbin, and in that case I think it’s just the same way you’d follow another Kbin user. To find their user page it would just be kbin.social/u/user@their.mastodon.instance instead of kbin.social/u/user, so I assume it would be similar for Lemmy once implemented

Quality won’t increase relative to official methods because it’s already more or less at parity with them. If the file you watch is tagged as a WEB-DL, in most cases it’s identical to the file you’d be streaming via official methods in terms of quality. It’s just remuxed into an open container format like .mkv (the video and audio streams are losslessly copied into a file format which can be shared)

Paying a portion later means more cash can flow through the business and provide utility today. Your post implies that every business operating this way is effectively insolvent without access to credit, but even if your employer has the money to pay for the raw materials today, it generally isn’t in their best interest to do so

I stopped using it because it was kinda shitty. Some page elements in my webapps just didn’t display or work correctly. Firefox is the more polished experience now. But it is kinda nice not having to morally justify your choice of browser, too.

I get it, so I installed the extension and browsed with it today. My feedback is that I feel like blocking individual words like Elon or Bezos would be required to make this meaningful at all. I still saw a bunch of stuff about them that the filter didn’t catch because they are so ubiquitous that you don’t need to say their full name to communicate who you’re talking about.

At the same time, while I almost always don’t care and don’t want to hear about a piece of Elon news, it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in Twitter developments, but I think the filter will block most if not all links/info about Twitter since it’s intrinsically linked to Elon’s persona.

At the end of the day I think it’s a cool idea, but I don’t think you can effectively block these guys via this method without blocking any mention of any platform they’re associated with, which isn’t really what I want.

I can’t scrobble my music to last.fm on iOS without some janky workaround. The “almost same level of control” part of what you said relies on an assumption that only the set of use cases explicitly determined by Apple as ones that “matter” are worth supporting. That it’s more important to prevent the user from explicitly allowing a scrobbling app permission to read the music player app’s now playing notification than for the device to be able to perform this simple function.

This point of difference doesnt have any meaningful impact on collection of my data. It just stops the device from being able to do the function I want. So that what, I can sleep easier knowing that Apple designed a slick interface to point out data vectors which were already implied to be collected? It used to feel like a smartphone with training wheels, now they’ve just locked up the handlebars so that it’s easier to go straight.

My mother also got the smallpox vaccine and had a permanent scar from it. I pointed it out as a small child and she told me about it, I asked my dad and he had one too. I thought it was cool, like a rite of passage where one day I’d be old enough to get my own permanent vaccine scar. But then they had to go and eradicate smallpox, saving countless lives. Bummer, dude.

I’m talking about the WHO’s recommendations in their capacity as an advisory body on public health following their analysis of IARC research, not the research itself. Many of the studies do make substantial corrections for the participant candidates. I don’t think that’s necessarily translated through to the recommendations, which should be given in the context of existing public health outcomes.

The WHO agrees that two thirds of adults in countries like USA and Aus are overweight. They agree that obesity is an extreme risk factor for cancer. They agree that non-nutritive sweeteners confer at least a short term benefit to weight loss. They agree that the cancer risk associated with those products is comparatively insignificant. So they should be careful not to potentially mislead media and the the public about that specific causal relationship. It has directly resulted in the misleading headline of this post.

I didn’t, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub

That second one sums up my logic pretty well:

The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.

Generally people that engage with products marketed as “diet” options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.

Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169

In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).

Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you’d want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren’t asked to do anything they don’t already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.

It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

I can’t really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn’t there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they’d just explain this stuff properly so we didn’t have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals

The main factor to consider in making an ultrathin phone in 2023 has nothing to do with the battery. It’s the requirement for a certain level of build quality to be suitable for end consumers. At some point we just need to develop new materials, because we can’t make it any more ultrathin without it also becoming ultrafragile using the materials available.

It hasn’t really been a focus since we realised back around the iPhone 5 that making these sweeping compromises for thinness was yielding diminishing returns and causing other problems. Today that’s still the thinnest mainline iPhone, only the SE and 12 Mini are thinner. 13 mini is thicker, and there is no 14 mini.