some cables can lose some signal strength after a few years of usage

Roughly how many years are you thinking about? I’ve been using the same 10m ethernet cable for more than 20 years. And my expectation was that only physical wear would damage it (eg. rolling and unrolling it to deploy in a different place; possibly closing a door on it accidentally… that kind of thing).

Pretty much the same for me. I’ve seen many posts and comments complaining about those kinds of things from .ml and .world; but close to zero of the actual behaviour that people complain about.

Yeah, I agree that OP’s attitude is unappealing. But it’s not like OP is an official spokesperson or ambassador for Linux or anything like that. It’s just a person giving their opinion. And in any large group of people there’s always going to be some that you don’t agree with. (and often they are the loudest most visible ones…)

There are poisons that can be absorbed through skin by contact.

Hmm. I’ve always thought that bananas released the most ethylene; and that they can be used to ripen other fruit (or ripen themselves faster if you put them in a bag or something). … But this seems to suggest it is apples that should be used for that - unless there’s a significant difference between ‘produced’ and ‘released’.

In any case, I guess it’s something I might revisit and reassess.

if you are getting “punched down” (aka offended) by a joke posted on lemmy, by a random guy, you should realize that it is simply not that deep

I think you’ve misunderstood what punching down means. It has nothing to do with being offended. It’s about the relationship between the person telling the joke and the subject of the joke. For example, it’s generally fine for anyone to make jokes mocking rich people; but its not ok to make jokes mocking poor people unless you yourself are very obviously a poor person.

Probably anyone who ever gotten any pressure about handling last-names after marriage might care. It’s definitely something that some people care about, and some people cop flack for their decision.

The joke is just a joke, but the problem is that this joke punches down. That’s generally poor form.

shit

It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?

I think the answer is fairly clear. Lemmy’s topics & votes system funnels condenses the user-base to focus on particular things at particular times. The total number of users may be smaller than Mastodon, but basically everyone on lemmy is looking at the top posts on the front page first, and then exploring to other stuff later; whereas on Mastodon everyone is just doing their own thing.

Focusing people on one topic means that there will be discussion at that topic at that time; and discussion leads to people checking back to read and reply to responses…

I routinely use both Mastodon and Lemmy. I see a lot more varied content on Mastodon, but it is more fleeting. i.e. very little discussion, and fairly short window of interaction with posts. Lemmy has a lot less ‘stuff’, but a lot more conversation.

I think the difference is interesting, but it definitely isn’t something we should use to say which platform is doing better or anything like that.

I’d suggest “nothing” for the time being.

There are a lot of different people around here, and different people get angry about different things. So there’s always going to be a lot of different bad things said about a large instance like lemmy.world. But whether or not those things are actually a real problem is for you to decide.

You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.

But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.

So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.

You’ve pretty much got it. It’s bad, but it’s not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn’t work… but only by luck. It’s possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.

I’m not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn’t have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can’t be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG’s script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.

Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it’s a bit low-effort.

Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn’t the only thing that can cause something to not work.

Huh. That’s interesting.

Earlier you were saying that you reckon people are oversensitive about use of ‘dude’. You took the angle that it can be ungendered, and so people shouldn’t be oversensitive about its use. But now you mention ‘race-swapping’ and trans women. Apparently it is you who is oversensitive. You are upset about the way people express themselves in cases where it has no practical impact on you. You could just ignore it completely, with no cost and no impact, but for some reason you rail against it instead. It’s interesting what riles some people up.

It’s pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don’t like about GOG are not really GOG’s fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.

You game doesn’t work on Steam? Then you’d better fix it immediately, because that’s where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn’t work on GOG… well… maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don’t have a GOG version, because you don’t want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)

So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.

Steam’s recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they’ve been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I’m in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility… and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version… it just could be nicer… Maybe it’s not a good use of GOG’s resources to go for that.

(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x * it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)

My computer has a problem where occasionally it will become completely unresponsive. (Mouse cursor doesn’t move. Keys have no apparently effect. Whatever app is running freezes. I think its a hardware problem with the graphics card, but I don’t know what. Logs at the time it freezes say “the GPU has fallen off the bus”.)

Anyway… I recently learnt about Magic SysRq. And I’ve been able to shutdown the computer from this unresponsive state with SysRq, R E I S U O. Where as I understand it, the “E” tells processes the end nicely if they can; and then the “I” just ends them by force.

(At this point, I’m realising that the E is SIGTERM, not SIGINT - so that screws up the relevance of my story; but I figure I’ll keep going anyway.)

The point is, I’ve been using key combo with a nice pause between each key, thinking there was some chance that processes might be ending gracefully. But when I tried it while the computer wasn’t frozen, the computer was able to inform me that the E and I commands were disabled. (I don’t know why.) So even though I wanted to give a nice “please end” signal, in the end that just wasn’t happening.

Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.

GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.

I guess I misread that and responded too quickly, Miles.

when I talk about it
it carries on
reasons only knew

Idk sounds about right to me, 8%-8%. What do you expect, 8% of people carry so 50% of people have a gun on them at any given time? No, more like 8% of people have one at any given time, therefore 8% chance. Your figures seem off to me considering there are none, “nuh uh” isn’t a rebuttal.

I’m saying that if 8% of people carry guns and there are 20 such people at a particular location, then the probability that someone in the group has a gun would be 1-(1-0.08)^20 which is around 80%. For 1 person, it’s 8%, for 2 people it’s 15%, and so on.

But whatever. I can see you are firmly in the camp of ‘we need good people with guns to stop bad people with guns’ - a view that basically only exists where gun-violence is endemic.