Melody Fwygon

Beehaw alt of @melody@lemmy.one

@fwygon on discord

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  • 71 Comments
Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jul 10, 2023

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[transgirl moment]

OMGGG jhbendlvckhedjohfvajodfhvaleRDKHFILU I FUCKING WISH THIS WERE TRUE!

[/transgirl moment]

But alas, it is not true, and the schools are not providing free surgeries. But Trump sure does like to lie about shit. This is why we should NEVER EVER LET HIM WITHIN 9875093847592798728752347527093847805 MILES OF BEING IN THE OVAL OFFICE

TL;DR: Never Vote Trump. Anyone who does is foolishly ignoring his lying.


Firefox is open source. It’s not going anywhere; even if Mozilla Co. goes broke and closes down the Mozilla Foundation.


Most reasonable consumers won’t go for this. it’s a greed play.

Give me mice that I own; not mice to rent.


Disgusting. Utterly disgusting. This idea belongs in the garbage bin.


Linux must achieve 100% compatibility. Otherwise the doubters will not shut up.


https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10397#issuecomment-2218346384

Looks like there’s several causes.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766

I don’t know how soon Tubular or NewPipe can fix their app; but it seems like a few simple changes will do.


I should point out that this isn’t always “Google is trying to block adblockers” again!

Google can, will, and does simply change how the YouTube watch pages look, feel and operate behind the scenes quite regularly.

Thankfully we have people like those at the FreeTube, NewPipe and yt-dlp projects to sift through those changes and update the code to cope with the new output.


Freetube does work; it simply requires you switch to the Invidious API or have “Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure” enabled. (which honestly you always should have this setting ON).

Personally; I refuse to change my preferred API; so the “Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure” just works.

also yt-dlp does work but you need to upgrade to latest nightly/build.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]


YT-DLP fixed already; I use it locally in conjunction with MPC-HC.

yt-dlp -U or yt-dlp -U nightly

Or download latest nightly.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]


In general; I strongly don’t recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.

If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org


They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)

It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.


It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.

It’s not that we didn’t provide the AI with rules. It’s not that the AI isn’t trying not to harm people. It’s that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.

…Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn’t as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a “Minimally Viable Product” they’re hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.

Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations…but they’ve done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.


13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?

That’s pocket change to Google.

Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.


Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.

Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they’re never going to be worthy of buying Valve.


This is pretty clearly a company practiced at “riding the waves” of what’s popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it’s development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of ‘scam and run’ operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a ‘minimally viable product’ that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they’re in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets ‘caught’ intentionally and then fired…or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they ‘negotiated’ when they were ‘hired’.


The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.

If ‘1984’ alarms you; so too should current works like ‘Ready, Player One’ or ‘Ender’s Game’ and it’s associated sequels.

Extremism in general tends to not work. I don’t pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.




This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person’s post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that “Following” induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.

The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess “like” the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.



You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you’ve not tried this, please do not write it off.

If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there’s several guides and videos out there that might help you if you’re inclined to learn.

If not; you’re also free to continue consuming as you do.


Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I’ve balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.

Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they’re turning a neat profit off of you; and you’re refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.

Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.


To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.

SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.


I genuinely won’t even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.


SearXNG is probably at the very core of Kagi; with a bunch of extra code and UI on top of it. Bangs work as well as lenses, including external bangs. If you can dream of an engine; you can use it with SearXNG; creating an engine with it is documented well.

I promise any single thing Kagi can do that SearXNG can’t or won’t; won’t matter. SearXNG is superior to Kagi in every way by cost, and by being free, open source, and functionally all you need.


The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I’m not getting cruft.

SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.





Google killing more features like this makes me absolutely certain that they have no fucking idea what they’re doing over there.

But this isn’t a shock; they’ve been dumbing down the “Assistant” by slowly removing useful features ever since Siri pulled down the Assistant’s Google colored skirts and panties and spanked it with her capabilities. Heck even Alexa joined in on the hazing, smiling smugly as she accumulates ability after ability, and being a literal voice powered “Buy it now!~” button.

I haven’t used Google Assistant since like Android 7; where they were STILL removing features and adding more useless ones. Genuinely I can’t understand why the layoffs had to cause these reductions in functionality unless they were also hiring 3rd world Mechanical Turks to transcribe and do all the work.

Even more frustrating is that the Assistant hasn’t changed much besides bleeding off features every year, when they could’ve been working to correctly integrate AI into the Assistant, which would’ve made her 1000x more intelligent and useful.

I still remember how unhelpful Assistant is if you don’t give her exactly the right command with exactly the right wording. Unlike Siri or Alexa, there’s absolutely minimal effort to ensure smooth Natural Language Processing happens when it benefits the user.



Personally I would expect 2 or 3. Most likely 3, so they can appeal to sensibilities and say they plugged up the executive power loophole until an act of Congress modifies the constitution thusly.


Yeah I think Trump is doomed. I don’t think the SCOTUS will touch such a toxic decision with a ten foot pole.

Of course this is just a stupid delay tactic by his defense attorneys.

I do think the current judge can simply refuse to wait. I don’t know if they will or not. The SCOTUS can also simply refuse to make any ruling and just challenge the defense to appeal the case up to them after the current judge rules.


Beehaw doesn’t ban you for having an opinion loudly.

What it does address typically is when users are horrifically disrespectful or rude…which usually the OP was not.

I guess they just reached their limit of patience.


Unless there’s some kind of bug where Discord enables the in-app setting without actually having the permissions to access contacts

That’s the bug exactly. It’s kind of a UI glitch; but I found out through Samsung bungling my permissions preferences through a One UI (OTA System) update, that it actually does enable the in-app setting by accident and that this is going to access your contacts if the permission is presently GRANTED, but not throw up a prompt asking for permission if the permission is already DENIED.


The bug is definitely known; and a fix is probably being worked on.

But I will say that it does in fact turn on the setting.


What’s true is that primary sources don’t count towards notability, so if an article mostly just uses primary sources it’s likely to get deleted.

Which is absolutely absurd. Counting secondary sources and deciding if something is “Notable” from that is completely arbitrary. Furthermore, there’s legitimate reason for secondary sources not to exist on the topic; and the Notability guidelines of the local WikiProject on Roads, which probably contained the people leaving, should have been taken under advisement as notable roads don’t always have secondary sourcing due to lack of local newspapers or publications.

Specifically a highway may be notable because it never appears in the news… often because it rarely if ever sees auto accidents. A source is a source, and I think attacking primary sources and excluding them is problematic if the source in question never was causing issues with NPOV.

Now if someone can prove that a website from the DOT is actually doing some weird POV pushing or is legitimately not behaving like a neutral source; then sure, challenge that citation for that article and get it struck.

But it’s otherwise a waste of time to pretend that roads and highways aren’t notable and not of encyclopedic interest for good reason.


As an on and off Recent Changes Patroller; I view my job simply:

  • Prevent Spam
  • Prevent Vandalism
  • Prevent Misinformation
  • Ensure that any reliable source is cited for edits, to keep editors honest and informational.

Per Wikipedia’s “Be Bold” guideline; I generally rollback things that I find to be not contributing…and I allow other editors to do the same…“Be Bold” back to me by challenging my decisions. 99% of people who aren’t pedaling obvious Spam, Vandalism or Misinformation I will simply let be.

Less than 1% of my actions are “Be Bold” style interpretations. I usually stick to what I can reasonably know is just junk or incorrectly contributed.

So it boggles my mind that any sysops with years of experience on EnWiki are being that pedantic about Notability, Sources and “Original Research”. Genuinely; I don’t consider pointing a fact out about a specific map to be such research…it’s a fact, and that fact can be backed by even more maps, going back in time. Roads and Highways may not be extremely exciting; but they definitely are important and DO in fact meet GN guidelines. Primary Sources themselves are fine too; genuinely you should need a damn good reason to challenge a source; be it primary or secondary.

At least a citation about how a primary source might not be found to be reliable.

It looks like as editors flee the ridiculous bureaucracy, they only make it worse to prevent more work from being created…which is counterproductive and makes people consider things like this or long-term wikibreaks. >_>


Nope. You have to use Android to get a decent ad-blocker.

In all seriousness; iOS REQUIRES you to use DNS level or VPN level ad-blocking typically. I think the only notable exception is that some browser apps might allow extensions. iOS still requires you use Safari browser engine though AFAIK.


Most anti-cheat software can’t do much on the client side. Really all it can do is look around at it’s environment where it’s allowed to look and see what’s going on.

Most Cheat Software will run on a higher privilege level than the game; whether that’s as an “Administrative” user or as “root” or “SYSTEM” in a context where it’s running as an important driver.

In any case, the only thing the Anti-Cheat can reliably do on the client side is watch. If it’s cleverly designed enough, it will simply log snippets of events and ship them off for later analysis on a server side system. This will probably be a different server than the one you’re playing on, and it won’t be sending that data until after the match has ended properly.

Sometimes it might not even send data unless the AC server asks it to do so; which it might frequently do as a part of it’s authorization granting routine. Even when it has the data there may not be immediate processing.

Others have also mentioned that visible action may be delayed for random time periods as well; in order to prevent players from catching on to what behaviors they need to avoid to get caught, or to prevent cheats from getting more sophisticated before deeper analysis could reveal a way to patch the flaw or check to ensure cheating isn’t happening.

Since cheat software can often be privileged, it also has the luxury of lying to the server. So clever ways to ensure that a lying client will be caught will probably be implemented and responses checked to ensure they fit within some reasonable bounds of sanity.