I pay for a (local, non-english) newspaper. The reporting certainly isn't perfect, but:

- They seem less sensationalist, I guess because they don't depend on clicks to survive - They tell a more complete, less dumbed down story than free sources - They are more boring than free sources

If you want to be informed, the "pay for journalists" model is much better than "hope that advertisers or billionaires pay for you" model.

You can argue that being informed is pointless, but I would argue that independent people working to get informed and then questioning issues is a vital point in a democracy. One model for this is journalists, even if you're not actually reading it.

Local news is different, because it’s more relevant, and moreover we rely on journalists to uncover hidden problems.

I don’t really need to hear about an event or problem happening across the globe, although it could have an important lesson, but I really don’t need to hear about it in a misleading, sensationalist way.

If enough people agree with you, should pay to get your news in a non-misleading, non-sensationalist way.

Sensationalist and misleading news is caused by newspapers that need to appeal to advertising and rich backers. Paying for news is the solution to these issues.

In my experience, paid news sources are better than free ones already in these aspects. Not perfect, but a lot better.

If we have DRM with some private key, then I guess your idea is I download the game files and some private key and that allows me to run the game.

If I can send you the private key and the game and it allows you to run the game with no further inputs, then the DRM is trivially broken (even without open source).

If it does some online check, then if the source is open we can easily make a version that bypasses the online check.

If there is some check on the local PC (e.g. the key only works if some hardware ID is set correctly), we can easily find out what it checks, capture that information, package it, and make a new version of the launcher that uses this packaged data instead of the real machine data.

If you use a private key to go online and retrieve more data, having it be open source makes it trivial to capture that data, package it, and write a new version of the launcher that uses that packaged data.

Basically, DRM requires that there is something that is not easy to copy, and it being open source makes it a lot easier to copy.

How would you define it if:

- the DRM/delivery software is open source

- the game payload is sent to you encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave on your computer

- while the game runs all its memory is symmetrically encrypted (by your own CPU) using a key private to that secure enclave. It is only decrypted in the CPU's cache lines, which are flushed when the core runs anything other than the game (even OS code)

- the secure enclave refuses to switch to the context in which the CPU is allowed to use the decryption key unless a convolution-only (not overwriteable with arbitrary values) register inside itself had the correct value

- the convolution-only register is written with the "wrong" value, by your own computer's firmware, if you use a bootloader that is not trusted by the DRM system to disallow faking the register (ie, you need secure boot and a trusted OS)

That doesn't seem to fit in any of your models. There's no online check, you can't send someone else the key because it's held in hostile-to-you hardware, you can't bypass the local-PC check because it's entirely opaque to you (even the contents of RAM are encrypted). You can crack into a CPU itself I guess?

I don't think the mechanism of the DRM being open source helps with the copying AT ALL in this design.

This design is, by the way, quite realistic: most modern CPUs support MK-TME (encrypted RAM mediated by a TPM) and all Windows 11 PCs have a TPM. Companies just haven't gotten there yet.

I don't know about how secure enclaves work, so this may be a solution I'm not aware of. Thank you for explaining!

So I guess the whole game software, or at least a significant part, is loaded encrypted and runs encrypted. It's on the users hardware but the user can't access it.

The only thing I can think of: You say the game payload is encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave. This means the open source game launcher has to pass the public key to the server doing the encryption. Could you not supply a fake public key that goes to a virtual secure enclave? I guess the public key could be signed by intel or something, is that something that happens on current TPMs?

Would it even be possible to do this if the program had to run under Proton/Wine? The original subject here is the launcher running on Linux.

I do wander about the use of an open source launcher at this point though. As someone who prefers open source software, the idea of encrypted software running on my PC makes me uncomfortable, more than just closed source software.

The public key is in fact signed by Intel and uniquely serialized to the TPM.

If the game manufacturer requires TPM register values that match Windows, it will not run under Proton/Wine (or a Windows VM). If they allow TPM register values for Linux it will run under Linux too.

Thanks for teaching me something!

Thank goodness!

I know I shouldn't react this way, but this view that Mastodon can only be successful if it's the largest platform out there always gets under my skin. There are about a million active users of the fediverse, and I know plenty of us find it nice right now.

Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.

It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.

You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.

It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).

I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far

It is a more complex system than having a single central organization. Not every interest is well represented, so there may not be a lot of content for everyone.

I've never had a mastodon.social account, but I can understand the frustration of having technical issues. If you really wanted to join, like you said, you can just try joining on a different server or even software - with other social networks you generally don't get that choice.

But it looks like you gave it a try and made the rational choice that, for you, it's not worth that effort.

But just because it's not your thing, and it's not the biggest one out there, doesn't mean it failed or missed it's shot. Personally I think it's pretty amazing that an open source project, with no VC money or marketing department or big corporate tie in, has about a million active users, and has for a long time now.

You've repeated the part that the parent poster claimed to understand ("I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability"), but skipped over the part they didn't understand ("wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance?") with the statement that insurance is a parasite.

Can you explain more why insurance is a parasite? Maybe a state-run insurance would be better?

Subsidies (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong) typically either get paid when farming supplies (tractors, seeds, fertilizer, land etc.) are bought or when the final product is sold. So they are paid when things go well for the farmer, but not (or less so) when the farmer has a bad year.

I feel like the risk of bad years would be better managed by paying farmers when bad years happen. You know, like insurance.

Fair! My comment was probably more dramatic than it needed to be, but I was trying to paint a picture as it kinda irks me when a lot people act like farmers are 'welfare queens' just taking money and living the good life. Not that OP did that, but it makes subsidies a 'dirty word.'

Subsidies is a hugely loaded term that would take more than a few comments to even begin to cover, but yes, they do cover those things that you mentioned, but a lot more than that. Heck they even sometimes pay farmers not to grow things at all - we used to get a check not to grow tobacco. I was a child then, I don't remember all the details.

Importantly, subsidies already include a federal crop insurance program that the government pays most of. That would cover most reasons for loss of crops. But there's also payments when say, you had a great year, but prices crashed through no fault of your own. And separate payments for say, farm animals catching disease and dying, or natural disasters. And separate payments for things like the messy situation COVID created. And a lot, lot more.

My comment was mainly with the lens of 'get rid of subsidies and buy your own insurance', and well, we see how well that works with health insurance. "Oh sorry Mr Smith, those cicadas were underground when you bought the farm, pre-existing condition, denied."

I see your point a bit better. I definitely agree that insurance can be terrible. I will say that with US health insurance you've pretty much picked the worst possible insurance to compare it to.

Farmers typically have more knowledge and more budget for good advisors than consumer health insurance buyers. There are all kinds of business insurance, and I think these are not usually considered as horrible as health insurance. Also, with good insurance you've got a partner who is very invested in understanding the risks you're taking and letting you know (in the form of how much you have to pay).

Some subsidies are probably a good idea, especially where you want to encourage behaviors that would not naturally be encouraged by the market (e.g. getting farmers to not grow crops that you don't want them to grow, or do things that are good for the environment but not legally required).

Sometimes it's probably neutral, where the food is cheaper in the supermarket but taxes are higher and in the end it's just the consumer paying anyway. My guess is that this usually isn't the most efficient way to get money from consumers to farmers.

And sometimes subsidies are actively harmful, like when they encourage growing crops beyond what the market requires.

In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.

Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.

> That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! But in any story not about this car accident people generally cast them as the useless.

This story isn't evidence that IRBs are always useless, but also it's not an example of them being useful. The thing this story shows is they are sometimes useless.

Yeah, that's reasonable.

I don't know what this particular author has against LLMs, but a lot of people are bothered by the very intense, robots.txt ignorming, scraping of their sites.

The website being blocked by the scrapers would be a positive outcome.

I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.

Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.

I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.

There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.

I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".

For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"

I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.

By the same logic that the man goes around the squirrel, I go all around the world every day.

> Why would snorting be so much worse than just swallowing the pill? The goal is to get the chemicals in the blood.

When a pill is swallowed it is gradually released into the bloodstream. Some drugs are also partially degraded by the digestive system, meaning you don't get 100% into the bloodstream. For some drugs, as much as 90% or more can be destroyed in the stomach, but this is accounted for in the dosing. Your stomach contents also go through your liver, which does first-pass metabolism depending on the drug and can reduce overall concentrations.

When someone snorts a drug, it bypasses all of that. It has easy access to the brain. It spikes the concentration the brain sees far in excess of what you would get from taking the drug orally.

This spike is where the damage is amplified. A sudden spike to very high values can overwhelm the brain's protection systems, for example.

Dopamine degradation produces neurotoxic metabolites. The brain is normally decent at cleaning these up, but when you consume drugs that spill that dopamine out at excess rates and disrupt its storage in vesicles then you can also overwhelm the brain's ability to clean up safely.

The sudden spike also causes rapid downregulation of the affected receptors, leading to deeper withdrawal effects that can last for a long time.

The sudden spike is also more euphoric. Combine that with the deeper withdrawal and it's why taking a pill through the nose is far more addictive than taking it orally.

> George W. Bush, for example, is alleged to have taken cocaine

And basically any big name in the financial industry has almost certainly used loads of cocaine. They’re mostly not suffering any horrible consequences.

But of course there’s a world of difference between cocaine use and addiction. An addict might start their day with a line, every day, but that’s far from typical use.

It's not really worse, but you can get a lot more in your bloodstream a lot quicker, so you've got to be careful with the dose.

Snorting will also shoot your tolerance through the roof, so taking it orally will no longer be as effective. Definitely not a road I recommend going down

I think that’s a good argument against using cocaine.