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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

    I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.


  • I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

    And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.







  • Basiaclly all DRM models have had variations of that problem. It, again, boils down to what the check is, when they do it, and how often they do it.

    For example:

    • Back in the day, Splinter Cell Conviction (and a few other ubi games) actually connected to a remote server for game logic. If you were running a cracked version and a blocker (I think peerguardian is what we used? Been a minute) then you would actually notice your game just completely hang when you went through certain doors and Sam wouldn’t start talking until you turned PG off.
    • Similarly, quite a few securom and even starforce games would add the DRM check as part of the fundamental gameplay loop so you were potentially checking dozens of times per SECOND. This was a rapid checksum or a value in memory but it was still very noticeable

    And Denuvo is kind of the worst of all worlds since it is an activation model which, potentially, involves phoning home to a server.

    To my knowledge, every single case of “Denuvo killed performance in mah gerhms!!” was either

    • Complete noise. Like, less than 5% difference which could just as easily be a case of having a different tab open in your browser
    • A case of a poor implementation where the checks were way too frequent

    I am not aware of anything that was fundamentally denuvo itself. I would love to know more if you can point to a documented example but everything I have seen that actually has numbers ends up being one of the above.


  • I am not going to say that I think Denuvo is good for gaming. I fully accept the importance of DRM for week one sales (which make a huge difference to publishers) and understand that activation models are incredibly useful for that but I also think activation model DRM is fundamentally shite because it renders games unplayable in order “Why is this random ass server plugged in in this closet?”.

    But I do think people overly attribute negative performance to denuvo. Implemented correctly, there are MAYBE a few checks per hour and that is system noise. The problem is that, for whatever reason, so many games end up adding the denuvo checks to critical path operations that either completely delay the loading of a new area or tank performance completely because it is checking a dozen times per minute. And that is 100% on Denuvo for not working properly with the studios they license their tools to.

    But for the ones who DO implement it sanely? It is barely noticeable to the end user… from a performance standpoint.

    Remember kids: Hate mother fuckers for what they actually do. Rather than going the “bitch eating crackers” route.













  • Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

    This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

    And… while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

    But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.


  • My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven’t looked super closely.

    I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that… mostly I don’t care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don’t mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.