My chosen name, Tess, was literally picked from a variable name from de-obfuscated Minecraft code over a decade ago. It said Tesselator tess = ... or something like that. And I thought “that sounds neat”. Some time after, I found out it’s also a real name used by real people in the real world.

To add to what you’re saying: To be fair, most of the lawsuit I don’t really agree with, but maybe it’s just laying it on thick.

Part of the argument is them trying to separate the Steam “Store” from the Steam “Gaming Platform”, and in many ways that’s obviously not possible. But they say that because of Steam’s monopolistic-ish position, publishers can’t not be on the “gaming platform”, because it’s where most people want their games, or else they’ll lose out of a large chunk of money. (And without it, these games likely would not be made in the first place.) Thus Steam can force these unfair terms on developers.

There was also this portion on discounts that was quite revealing:

20. For example, Valve has set up visibility in its Steam Store to focus on games that are nominally “on sale” to gamers. Knowing that the best way to reach their audience is through discounting, game publishers must artificially inflate their list prices so they have headroom for discounting. But the “sale” price is not consistently available, and therefore some gamers pay an artificially inflated list price for the game. These supracompetitive prices increase Valve’s cut, force gamers to overpay, and prevent publishers from setting the most efficient game prices they could in the first place. Even worse, these supracompetitive prices are transmitted across the broader market by the contractual restraints discussed above.

They’re admitting to inflating games’ prices, so they can then offer a fake discount that’s closer to the actual price they actually wanted the game to be. And then they complain when Valve doesn’t let them list a game on sale for an extended period of time, just so they can essentially scam people. (Probably, once again, standard in the industry and elsewhere, but I feel like that’s gotta be banned by EU pro-consumer laws.)

This is true! Vintage Story does it, for example. They’re doing okay from what I can tell, but it’s more of an exception. It’s pretty clear that they are losing out on potential customers. Notably, you also lose out on regional pricing, which is pretty difficult to set up yourself. If you’re creating games for a living, you don’t have much of a choice about whether you put your game on Steam.

That probably counts as a privileged page, as in something uBlock Origin can’t access or modify.

Mozilla has probably been running another “experiment”, meaning not every user is affected. In the past they claimed it’s not advertisements because they are “continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox”. (Bullshit.) If you go to Settings > Home, you disable anything you don’t want to see, or just set your home page to a blank page, period.

JavaScript is already sandboxed. You can only execute functions where there is an actual API defined by the browser to do so, for example Date.getTime(). There is / should be no way to get, say, your device ID. (With the exception of unpatched exploits that allow executing arbitrary code. But keep in mind browsers are likely one of the if not the most security tested software.)

What you linked to here appears to specific to Google Tag Manager in a way that I don’t fully understand, but is not related to how websites usually execute JavaScript code.

Can you link to a source that confirms this information can be collected with JavaScript (with browser comparison, ideally)? That seems outrageous if it was actually possible.

What is meant by “sensitive information” here? Browsers can’t just willy-nilly access your local files or something like that. The one thing I can think of is using JavaScript to collect information that can be used to identify you. (Is that “sensitive”? I’d put that in “identifying information”.) My honest suggestion is to keep using NoScript and just allow as few domains as possible. The next best option is to stop using websites that break without JavaScript when there’s no reason why they’d need it.

I can imagine there being a plugin that spoofs some common ways that allow sites to identify you cross-sessions / browser / websites without your consent, but blocking JavaScript (by default) is likely one of the best ways to reduce the amount of information collected about you. When you do find such a plugin, check out one of the “browser fingerprint” testing sites to see how unique your fingerprint is.

(That is, if I even understood the request properly in regards to the “sensitive information” bit.)

How about dashing (and other cool Celeste features), thigh highs (with pride variants), having cute moths around, …?

Can I interest you in the Create: Estrogen mod? (some assembly required)

I think this sounds like we’re generally in agreement? I might just put less weight on “the canon”.

like what you mentioned with Xenia, the old Linux Mascot.

To be fair, trans Xenia was sanctioned by the original artist, but my worry was along the lines of, if cathodegaytube was a “strong believer” in the Prime Egg Directive, would it have discouraged them from re-imagining this character? I don’t personally think how recent a character was created or whether it was abandoned has any relevance.

I subscribe to the idea that art is up to the viewer to interpret how they want. “Death of the author” I think it’s called. If someone looks at Felix, and sees an egg in him that has yet to crack, then that’s a valid interpretation of the art, to that person. Just as if someone were to look at a character and interpret them as trans, whether they are canonically cis or it’s left open (Spider Gwen comes to mind). I experienced a sad ending to a story? Well, too bad, author, my headcanon’s now that everything works out after all!

There may be problematic ways of doing that, and it’s in no way okay to assert one’s interpretation as the only truth. But fundamentally, that’s part of the freedom you get with art.

Would Bridget have become canonically trans if that freedom was taken away from people? (And heck, does it include the author?) Would Xenia have been reborn as a popular now-trans Linux mascot?

So there’s gotta be wiggle room in both situations. Fictional characters breaking the Prime Egg Directive, because of artists’ freedom of expression; and real people seeing fictional characters differently from the author and others, because of freedom of interpretation.

For a more concrete example, this post: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22944727

I found this comic really heckin’ funny. Then I checked the comments. “Egg Prime Directive” Was I… supposed to be in agreement that the comic is problematic? I can’t really, no matter how I tried to twist it in my head. (Props to the mod for leaving the post up even though they criticized it though.)

Of course, nobody should do this to a real person, but this is a representation of something the artist has felt. We see comics of characters being ridiculous, or doing the impossible, and stories that involve violence or all manner of bad things. You wouldn’t take this to mean that you can or should do that in real life, right?

People can rightfully inform others to tell them not to behave like that themselves. But I worry that if they’re too blunt (figuratively) shouting “Prime Egg Directive!”, there will be people that feel discouraged about expressing themselves artistically like this, or making light of their own past in certain ways. And again, I’ve legit felt anxious myself at times when this came up before, and even now when I’m trying to talk about it.

The comments are worth a giggle but the AI voice ruins it. Also horrible choice of music.

Presumably this is because a block is different from the content being removed. It simply means the servers stop communicating with each other regarding new communities, posts and comments. This could allow the instance to be unblocked and the old content to continue existing – say for example when an instance has been acting badly, but it gets fixed some time later.

Blocked instances should probably not show up in search, but if you have a direct link to an old post, perhaps this should still be available? Not being able to block a community when its instance is already blocked makes sense, and probably doesn’t matter if you mostly check for new content, but I can see it being a bother when its shows up in other situations. One could call this a bug, or an oversight, but I suppose it depends on what the intended result is.

Yeah, it should not be part of the text just like line numbers shouldn’t be part of the code on a code hosting site, yet it can be visible, no? Later it does recommend using $ to distinguish command and output. Is it now okay for a beginner to be confused about what it means?

Is providing a number of commands to use that require user input really that bad? When people start tinkering with the command line, first of all they shouldn’t trust just anything on the website blindly, which at the very least requires a basic understanding of how to enter commands, and respond to the terminal asking for input. The following “bad” example…

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt install python3.9

…is instead turned into this single command with even more confusing syntax for beginners:

sudo apt update && \
  sudo apt install --yes software-properties-common && \
  sudo add-apt-repository --yes ppa:deadsnakes/ppa && \
  sudo apt install --yes python3.9

Sure, it’s convenient, but if you just throw blocks of code at people to run, are they really learning anything?

A better approach would be to have a quick tutorial on how to use the terminal and what the $ and # symbols mean (though they could be CSS decorators that can’t be copied), what sudo is and warning people about running untrusted commands on their system. Then you just link to that at the top saying something along the lines of “if you’re unfamiliar with running commands, and the following seems confusing, check this quick summary”, behind a question mark icon connected to each block of commands, or similar.

There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.