I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.

But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.

Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.

I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.

And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).

Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

I mean… I don’t really disagree in this specific context.

I assume Fortnite has kernel level/rootkit anti-cheat. And Epic make massive amounts of cash from all the goku skins people buy. Unless they have the resources to test at least the major distros and keep aware of possible hacks/bypasses on that side it is just begging for exploits. And it is big enough that the moment one is identified EVERYBODY is grabbing an ubuntu live CD to get some goku dollars.

I still think it is shit that they don’t directly support Linux with the EGS (especially since they distribute Unreal Engine and marketplace stuff via that). But for their “more revenue than the GDP of a small nation” live game? I get it.

A buddy who works on one of the popular live games made the comparison to pokemon cards. Everyone thinks it is a great idea to show them off at school. Until the kid trips, they get scattered on the floor, and it is a god damned feeding frenzy of every single kid losing their minds to scramble and fight over that dog eared pikachu card.

It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:

1. GOOD voice acting
2. Significant “choice” and branching narratives
3. Plenty of content that players will “never” see.

Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.

And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.

The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.

And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.

A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.

My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.

So… exactly what we already have except instead of c/linux@lemmy.world it is c/linux@lemmy.worldANDlemmy.zip?

Again, how does that work if c/linux is “the same” on every instance?

Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point… what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.

There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.

Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).

Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.

What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).

The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.

Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?

Please don’t conflate tankies with leftist thought. They are not leftists. They are fascists with strong ties toward fascist regimes that are “known” to actively usurp elections around the globe.

A good metric is: a very hardline Communist might have an argument for why effectively slavery is ethical because social and economic planning requires people to engage in jobs they actively do not want to do. I personally consider that the reason that Communism can never work at scale but that is a discussion that needs to be had.

A tankie will just justify anything that China or Russia do. Usually with an attempt to deflect by pointing out something the US or, increasingly, certain EU countries did.

But, regardless: There is another issue with your “just let everyone taolk it out” nonsense. Because the ml moderation team(s) and admin staff have increasingly been using mass bans and false claims of xenophiobia to shut down anything that is not tankie bullshit. So there is no discussion. Just one sided propaganda in some of the largest communities on lemmy.

To expand on the moderation strategy a bit. A LOT of people who aren’t increasingly of one nationality and ethnicity have a lot of problems with ResetEra’s moderation strategy. The mods and admins are known for using a heavy hand and outright mockery against anyone who they disagree with and the remaining community stumble over each other to be part of the “cool crowd”.

But you can also very easily see why the vast majority of leftists and PC gamers and… Asian people left. Because they have a policy to only edit user posts when they contain actively dangerous/illegal statements. So you can see when someone catches a permaban because they dsiagreed with an admin or joked about the corporate interests behind brexit. And you can see the discussion of the remaining users on why that was so fucked… up until the thread gets permanently locked.

With the model ml (and certain other more "world"ly instances…) use… you don’t. You just see comment branches disappear the moment anyone pushes back on some propaganda. And if a user pisses off the admins, they get banned straight up. Often with some comment about how they are racist or xenophobic in the modlog with all of their comments removed but NOT in the modlog. And that is a problem because, unless you were actively following along with that discussion, you never see anything other than MAYBE “wow, a lot of really racist people disagree with this very smart discussion on why Chinese Taipei was always a part of China and is totally not a sovereign-ish nation called Taiwan”

All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.

The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.

The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.

You… should probably pay more attention to the news.

It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.

“Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.

We have decades of proof of chuds brigading and building up hate speech hellfests in these “just let capitalism decide” laissez-faire models.

Moderation free environments just turn places into kiwi farms.

Not off the top of my head. It was one of the various “tech” youtubers who will do everything ranging from “here is how to set up proxmox” to “I tried five twitter alternatives for a week” videos.

World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.

In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.

Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.

The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.

Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.

But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.