Having apps that do what users want but try to hide it from reviewers really highlights the absurdity of letting Apple decide what software you’re allowed to run.

The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words “Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure.” But when she looked up “no link between coffee and hypertension”, the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: “Caffeine doesn’t have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure”.

On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.

Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They’ll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they’ll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it’s inevitable.

Well, he’s not wrong that it’s “super hard” to see any benefit of Denuvo for anyone other than the beneficial owners of Denuvo Software Solutions. Gamers might have a better than average ability to suspend disbelief, but that “new study” was pushing it a bit far.

Windows users have regrets

Mac users have stockholm syndrome

Linux users have a computer

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

I had that problem when I used whatsapp five years ago. Amazing that they still haven’t fixed it.

Non-google android is the way to go unless you’re looking to be even more adventurous. Which phone you should look for depends which of the OS options you prefer. No pixel means no grapheneOS. LineageOS is the one I chose, runs on quite a few mostly older phones. There are many others.

The “you’d have to prove to someone that you’re an adult” is where we disagree. I was talking about parents setting a “user is a child” flag on the devices they let their kids use. They already know who their children are, no proof is necessary. The device can then send an http header to websites for example indicating that it’s a child user. That part could be mandated and standardized by law. It’s 99% of the problems solved (in legal theory; obviously not every website and app in the world will choose to participate in any of these schemes) with 1% of the dangers.

So long as they don’t go overboard with misguided efforts to make it impossible for children to defeat the thing, it seems fine. It’s dismaying that all the proposals end up with all these ridiculously dysfunctional ideas instead.

When I hear about “device-based verification” what comes to mind is a device that can be put into some kind of child safety mode, by parents who want to give their children phones or whatever. The device then “knows” whether or not its user is a child without any kind of biometrics or identification.

It has some problems and could case a lot of harm if it’s badly designed, but it’s the only method that seems close to workable in any conceivable form. Why is it never even talked about in these discussions?

Did this highly scientific study contemplate the possibility that this is in part the result of people feeling like they’re more justified in turning to piracy if a game is burdened with Denuvo?

Spoiler: It does not, so far as I can tell at first glance. It appears that the model is constructed entirely from DRM-crippled games that got cracked, and then then the estimate of how much revenue would be lost by going DRM-free from the start is extrapolated from that based on the assumption that it makes no difference. Maybe it’s true, but the acknowledgement that it “can and often does cause problems, and some developers have chosen to avoid Denuvo altogether because it had such a negative impact on how well their game would run” sort of suggests otherwise.

https://abs.freemyip.com:84/share/_5WuM4QF — be careful following strange links you found on lemmy, but this appears to be the pdf.

Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

You seem to have javascript disabled. Please note that many of the page functionalities won’t work as expected without javascript enabled.

Fortunately, the page did its job just fine and was able to tell me to use javascript blocking without needing javascript to do it.

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

This helps protect our community.

Ah, so it’s not you coming up with the stupid excuse that they have legit reasons to think the user might be a nefarious “bot”, you’re just passing along the stupid excuse as you interpret it from the meaningless message direct from Google. That explains where you got the idea that “viewbots” had anything to do with it, I guess.

It’s not just you. I’m tired of the whole team of people who are always standing by to bring out similar excuses any time someone decides that in their quest to stop invidious from existing — or whatever google is actually aiming at — it’s acceptable to just mass-block all the VPN users as collateral damage.

I suspect the VPN was used to bot

There are plenty of sources, including even in this thread, indicating that that this is not the problem. Quit making excuses for them.

deleted by creator

… but you know, it’s not difficult to think of possibilities. They could have a shiny new line of business providing hosting, spam detection, admin, support, moderation, and other services for whatever new and improved flavour of fedi instances they can create in accordance with all the principles they used to talk about. They could use their marketing team, their money and connections, to become the provider of choice for corporations, governments, and NGOs who don’t yet realize that they need their own instance.

Would’ve been worth a try. Instead, after so much fanfare, they ran a small mastodon instance for a little while and then cancelled the project. I suppose it’s likely that the same kind of fate will befall the new ad tracking stuff before too long.