Do it.
Not just with your SO. Do it with your family, your pets, your close friends. Get as touchy with them as both feel comfortable with, spend time with them, tell them that you like their company. (Yes, even to the pets. They might not understand what you say but they’re quite good at detecting your emotions.)

Reddit as a whole has a huge botting problem. And it isn’t exactly new, although it got worse past ChatGPT.

Yup. And that’s specially great as the boy is just 15, so he’s starting his career really early.

My sides went into orbit!

The way that the Github comment is phrased, it implies that the link contains additional info that hackermondev didn’t mention. It doesn’t - instead it contains a subset of that info, missing critical bits:

1. That Zendesk initially dismissed hackermondev’s report.
2. That the “third parties” in question were Zendesk’s clients.

Both pieces of info were omitted to back up a lie present in the text, that the bug hunter would have “violated key ethical principles”. He didn’t - as he noticed that Zendesk gives no flying fucks about the security issue, and that remediation was unlikely, he warned the people affected by the issue, so they can protect themselves against it.

Zendesk is not just being irresponsible - it’s also being manipulative, and doubling down instead of doing the right thing (“we incorrectly dismissed that report. It was our bad. Here’s your 2k.”) They have no grounds to talk about ethical principles.

“Luanti” is a wordplay on the Finnish word luonti (“creation”) and the programming language Minetest Luanti employs for games and mods, Lua.

In other words it’s the result of mashing Finnish and Portuguese words together. (Lua language is the word for “Moon”. Cue to the logo.)

Intended pronunciation is probably around ['luɐ̯n.ti], although the diphthong doesn’t exist in Finnish. I think that you can get close enough of that in English by saying “Loo an tea”.

Now, if you can only convince some Lemmy users to not say “play minetest luanti lol” once others ask something about Minecraft, even contextually unrelated… some at least have the decency to point out a specific Minetest→Luanti modpack. Plenty don’t even.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Luanti, and I have quite a few things against Microsoft. My issue is exactly what the blog editors are highlighting - it is not a libre Minecraft clone dammit, it’s its own thing. And in certain aspects it might become an even bigger thing, as a platform for voxel games in general.

And overall I think that it’s a good sign that the project is getting its own name instead of being named after something else.

But are they competent enough for that?

Fuck - you’re right, they aren’t.

Nevermind my conjecture then, it’s probably as you said.

Right, because a hacker getting vengeance for those abuses totally isn’t the narrative people would prefer.

Maybe, in the short term. But as people feel like the vengeance was successful, the topic gets its emotional conclusion. Then the focus shifts from how that leak popped up to the contents of the leak:

• code and map editors for really old (more than a decade old) games
• tidbits of info that might excite people about new games

Of course, I might be 100% wrong, and the leak might be actually the result of someone getting undue access to that content, or some insider getting pissed and leaking the info that they had at hand. I just think that Nintendo+GF+TPC are scummy enough to forge being leaked for their own benefit.

As I mentioned in another thread, about the same topic:

First Zendesk dismissed the report. Then as hackermondev (the hunter) contacted Zendesk’s customers, the issue “magically” becomes relevant again, so they reopen the report and boss the hunter around to not disclose it with the affected parties.

Hackermondev did the morally right thing - from his PoV it was clear that Zendesk wasn’t giving a flying fuck, so he contacted the affected parties.

All this “ackshyually it falls outside the scope of the hunt” boils down to a “not our problem lol”. When you know that your services/goods have a flaw caused by a third party not doing the right thing (mail servers not dropping spoofed mails), and you can reasonably solve the flaw through your craft, not doing so is irresponsible. Doubly true if it the flaw is related to security, as in this case.

I’m glad that Zendesk likely lost way more than the 2k that they would’ve paid hackermondev for the hunt. And also that hackermondev got many times over that value from the affected companies.

It does! And it would be damn great fuel for the ROMHacks that Nintendo has a burning hate against.

Summary:

• Gen10 is on the works
• Switch 2’s internal codename is Ounces
• GF and ILCA are co-producing a MP battle-focused game, codenamed Synapse
• source code for HG/SS and B2/W2, plus map editor for R/S/E were leaked

Conjecture: I wouldn’t be surprised if the TeraLeak in question wasn’t planned out by Nintendo and Game Freak, to distract people from the fact that Nintendo is trying to harass a competitor out of the market and suing emulators back and right.

What “should be done” is irrelevant - what matters is what “is done”. And plenty servers don’t enforce SPF, DKIM and DMARC. (In fact not even Google and Yahoo did it, before February of this year.)

And, when you know that your product has a flaw caused by a third party not doing the right thing, and you can reasonably solve it through your craft, not solving it is being irresponsible. Doubly true if it the flaw is related to security, as in this case.

Let us learn with Nanni: when Ea-nāṣir sold him shitty copper, instead of producing shitty armour, weapons and tools that might endanger Nanni’s customers, Nanni complained with Ea-nāṣir. Nanni is responsible, Zendesk isn’t. [Sorry, I couldn’t resist.]

[EDIT: can you muppets stop downvoting the comment above? Dave is right, Moonrise is trying to start a discussion, there’s nothing wrong with it.]

What a corporation of muppets! First dismissing the report as “not our problem lol”, then as the hunter contacts affected companies the bug “magically” becomes relevant: they reopen the report, and then boss him around to not disclose it with the affected parties.

I bet that they lost way, way more than the US$2000 that they would’ve paid to the bug hunter. Also, I’m happy that hackermondev got many times that value from the affected companies.

O LibreOffice Draw edita PDFs. Não é perfeito, complexo ou cheio de recursos, mas é gratuito, e talvez seja o suficiente para o teu caso de uso.

It needs to work and be reliable

True that. And it needs to offer a better service than Google; “our services are federated so please use them!” is not enough to encourage the shift, I think.

Borrowings sometimes do displace native words, even ones with a similar meaning. English for example has plenty of pairs like owndom/property, blee/colour, selfhood/identity, where the native word is mostly gone.

Plus it’s possible that Common Slavic didn’t have a word for the specific type of pigeon that was being called “columba”. Latin itself made a big distinction between those columbae and the wood pigeons, called “palumbes”

If that’s correct, my bet would be on some pigeon/dove found near the Mediterranean coast. Potentially rock doves; note how the native range (dark red) is considerably far away from the Slavic urheimat.

Then later on semantic widening can easily make the word for a specific type of pigeon become a generic word for pigeons.

Regarding when this would happen, it would be:

• earliest: around 500~600, when the Eastern Roman writers start talking about the Sklabenoi/Sclaveni (i.e. Slavs), showing some contact between Latin/Romance and Slavic speakers.
• latest: around 1000, as Common Slavic was already fragmenting. Going past that you’d have a hard time with loanwords consistently finding their way into most/all descendants.

For reference that would be roughly when Late Latin splits into the Romance languages, traditionally dated around 600~800.

About Holzer’s hypothesis: frankly I think that the Temematic hypothesis is worth exploring, but most things relying on Temematic can be easily explained without it, thus being a bit more parsimonious. I’m not too informed on specific Slavic developments though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

A third possibility would be that OCS and other Slavic languages got it from Greek instead. I find it implausible because Greek shifted /u/→/y/→/i/, so the second vowel would be something like *ę or *ь (front) instead of *ǫ (back).

The video can be summarised into three main points:

1. Advertisement offering Google a perverse incentive to make its search results worse, so the search ad results look comparatively better.
2. Search engine optimisation.
3. Generative AI integration with Google enshittifying the platform.

I’ll focus on #2. Federated search might alleviate the problem.

It’s counter-productive to optimise a page for multiple search engines, running different algorithms; it might perform better on [let’s say] Google, but worse on [let’s say] Bing, or vice versa, since they run different algos that prioritise different things. As such, almost all SEO is made for Google results.

And, in an environment where no search engine dominates the market, and the search engines use different algos, SEO goes away.

The problem with that is people don’t want to use multiple search engines - they want to use one, that they believe to bring the best results on. (That’s why we have a problem called Google on first place.) If only there was some way for those search engines to coexist, and to benefit from each other… well, that’s basically federation, right?

How I see it working:

• each instance crawls the web separately, focusing on the pages that it wants to
• each instance has its own ranking algorithm
• each pair of instances may opt to federate with each other or not
• each instance can relay search queries to each other, if they’re federated
• as a user inputs a search query, based on keywords and/or user preferences, the instance might decide if it should service the user with local results (from that instance), with results from a federated instance, or a mix of both.

I believe that this system would make SEO really hard to do; in practice you’d be better focusing on good content. It would also lead to a situation where different search engines want to specialise, but still keep each other alive - as they benefit from their peers.

Yeah, the peaks themselves and the quick (~2m) drop after them are not the big deal. The big deal is to slowly bleed users. It’s really problematic in the long term; by no means “MASTADON IS DOOMED!”, but more like “Mastodon, you need to step your game up.”

I wasn’t aware of the connection with the band - thanks for the info! Still, people are bound to associate “mastodon” first and foremost with the critter.

Either way, back in 2008 I bet people were making fun of Twitter for being named after bird sounds, so.

I don’t remember but you’re likely correct. There’s a difference though - Twitter didn’t need to capitalise on every single tiny advantage, Mastodon does it, and while the role of branding might be small it still gives you (or your competitors) some edge.

A model that explains well half of the data is as useful as a coin toss. But let’s roll with it, and pretend that we got two superimposed Gartner cycles here.

The trough would be reached after a sharp drop after the peak, and based on the first peak it would be ~2 months long. That would explain only the period between 2023-07 and 2023-09; the rest of what I’ve pointed out in red is clearly something else, the nearest of what they look like would be a sick version of the “slope of enlightenment” - going down instead of up.

Yeah, the model doesn’t work.

A better way to approach this is to consider three things:

• The main selling point is federation.
• Federation is only perceived as useful for your typical user when a competitor abuses power.
• Mastodon has the drawbacks already mentioned all the time, not just when the competitors fuck it up.

Once you notice those things, it gets really easy to explain what’s happening:

• the peaks are caused by Musk’s acquisition of Reddit and Threads being released (as it brought a lot of discussion about federation up)
• overexcitable people take 1~2 months to realise that Mastodon is not just “Twitter minus Musk”.
• the drawbacks are always there, so Mastodon slowly bleeds users, while only gathering new ones when Musk/Zuckenberg/etc. do something shitty.

By analysing the data this way, not just we’re describing it better, but we can also see where Mastodon needs to improve:

• It needs killer features that are clearly visible for everyone, regardless of federation or “Musk pissed off users”
• It needs to be promoted better. Even among non-Twitter/Bluesky/Threads users.
• Federation itself needs to be promoted better, with simple words, showing why leaving Twitter for yet another walled garden won’t solve shite in the long run.

What I’m saying also partially applies to the “Fediverse link aggregators”, like Lemmy. Lemmy does show some tendency to bleed users, but in smaller degree than Mastodon; but it’s in a better position because there’s only one big competitor, and it keeps fucking it up over and over.

Context for other users - the user above is likely referring to the Gartner cycle:

As anyone here can see, it looks nothing like that pattern that I’ve highlighted.

If the success condition for Mastodon is “to become a long-term viable and attractive alternative to corporate-owned microblogging”, then improvements of the platform are necessary.

To be clear on my opinion in this matter: I want to see Mastodon to succeed, I want to see X and Threads closing down, and IDGAF about Bluesky. However I’m not too eager to engage in wishful belief and pretend that everything is fine - because acknowledging the problem is always the first step to solve it.