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Valve has removed the arbitration clauses from Steam Subscriber Agreement

> > > Valve has updated the Steam Subscriber Agreement. The updates affect your legal rights, including how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved. Among other things, the new dispute resolution provisions in Section 10 require that all disputes and claims proceed in court and not in arbitration. Please review carefully. > >

For comparison, here is a Wayback Machine snapshot from yesterday: https://web.archive.org/web/20240925000911/https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber\_agreement/

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[Discussion] What is your phone wallpaper?
  • I use an animation from this live wallpaper app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.at2_software.terracollageapp&hl=en_US

    I believe it was just a one-time purchase for the full version of the app. The animations don't loop very well, but I'm not staring at my home screen long enough to see the loop that often, so it's not a big concern to me. They're pretty much all swirly, inky, starry sort of abstract animations, but there's a lot of color options so it's pretty easy to pick something that fits well with the rest of your phone's theme.

    The developer hasn't updated it for over a year now, so if the previews don't look like something you'd like, I wouldn't bother buying the full version since it's unlikely that any more will be added.

  • Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
  • Lemmy loves to shit on billionaires, until it's one they think they like.

  • LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking
  • Your TV doesn't need a screensaver. You can just... turn it off.

  • In order to pay import duties, these crazy fuckers are expecting me to enter my bank logon details into their website. What. The. Fuck.
  • You're trusting that a) they're not malicious and b) they have their shit together and c) even though they do have their shit together someone doesn't find a random exploit anyhow.

    You could say this about literally any solution short of hand-delivering cash in person.

  • In order to pay import duties, these crazy fuckers are expecting me to enter my bank logon details into their website. What. The. Fuck.
  • You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

    You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

    On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

    You're not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I'm not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.

  • In order to pay import duties, these crazy fuckers are expecting me to enter my bank logon details into their website. What. The. Fuck.
  • It's also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there's very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can't be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

    A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they'll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you're more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It's basically a modernized version of Western Union.

  • In order to pay import duties, these crazy fuckers are expecting me to enter my bank logon details into their website. What. The. Fuck.
  • That's unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don't have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don't have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

    Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you'd need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it's usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you're actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

    It's similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it's probably safe to enter your login details as long as you're not getting any certificate errors on the page.

    E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I'm not saying it's a good system, just saying that it's not inherently a scam.

  • A sacrifice for the greater good
  • My parents used to get so mad at me for poaching the batteries from all the remotes.

  • How do you eat kiwifruits?
  • Are you a goat?

  • OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning
  • The data used to configure it.

  • OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning
  • I don't understand why it's so hard to sandbox an LLM's configuration data from it's training data.

  • California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores.
  • We did this in Austin, and I hate it. It's probably fine if you go to the store and use your own totes, but my situation requires that I have to get my groceries delivered, so that isn't an option for me. And instead of plastic bags which I could crumple up to take up near-zero space and actually reuse, my house is filled with enormous paper bags that have already ripped before I got the groceries up the stairs in the first place and take up tons of space and have basically zero reuse value and go straight into the trash after one use. I used to reuse plastic shopping bags all the time; waste basket liners, collecting random odds and ends to throw away together, organizing and storing dozens of random cables and chargers, etc.

    I wish there was a better way to dispose of plastic bags. Because while I understand the reasonings for the ban, the result is majorly inconvenient and ironically results in more single-use products in my life.

  • Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.
  • Just more conservatives casually admitting that they can't win anything without rigging the vote.

  • Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.
  • It's against Reddit's ToS, but as far as I'm aware there's no law that says you can't pay to manipulate social media content.

  • My inbox has been all forearms for the past 24 hours thanks to this post, and it's absolutely hilarious.
  • Schrodinger's Freckle; observing the experiment affected the result.

  • Weaponizing ordinary devices violates international law, United Nations rights chief says
  • How is it “indiscriminate” if solely Hezbollah operatives were targeted?

    Because said operatives were often within exploding distance of civilians when the pagers were detonated. Shrapnel, even from a small explosion, can be deadly and has a fairly large range. Especially if you don't have line-of-sight to your target before detonating the device; you have no idea what or who is nearby when it goes off.

    "Explosive" and "targeted" generally don't go hand-in-hand.

  • Weaponizing ordinary devices violates international law, United Nations rights chief says
  • "Ordinary device" in this context means anything that does not immediately resemble an instrument of war.

  • Are those top tier Geoguessers that do crazy stuff like figure out a location from 4 pixels and a mcslurry contracted by the CIA?
  • You should check out Rainbolt's Geoguesser runs. He often narrates his thought process as he goes. He's looking at things like the angle of the sun and shadows to determine what hemisphere of the planet he's on, looks at the vegetation and soil types to further pinpoint his longitude, etc. He'll even take photos sent directly to him from viewers, and he'll find out exactly where the photo was taken, even if that image had never existed on the internet prior.

    Some of these guys are insanely talented at this. Rainbolt is probably the most entertaining and educational, IMO. Definitely worth checking out some of his videos.

  • God of War Ragnarok PC port suffers review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement
  • You can have actual concerns without abusing the review function, though. If you don't own and never planned to play the game and are "reviewing" it because something on the internet made you angry, then that just discredits the actual review platform as a whole.

    Reviews should be an actual review, not a tweet reply. If you haven't actually played the game, don't review it.

  • I don't fileshare because I "can't afford" content, I do it because they refuse to make content available for my platform.
  • I feel like "I'm making a personal choice to pirate because my deliberately-crafted use-case scenario is not being specifically catered to" is a worse argument than "I can't afford it".

    distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen

    This is like an F1 racer getting angry at 7-Eleven for not offering fuel that works for his supercar. You're not being treated as a second-class citizen; you've created a situation in which you are above first-class citizens, because you're using what is, these days, niche and specialized hardware that is far outside of the norm, but for some reason you're still shopping at the gas station the rest of us peons go to.

  • yeule - 'dazies' (Official Music Video)
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    Michael Moschen performs THE TRIANGLE

    This 16 year old video randomly showed up in my recommendations tonight. This is one of the coolest juggling routines I've ever seen.

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    Tips/Tools for sharpening a recurved blade?

    Hey guys! I've just recently gotten into collecting pocket knives, and I wanna make sure I'm taking proper care of them. My last two purchases have been karambits, both with fairly steep recurved blades, whose edges I'd like to be able to maintain.

    I know that normal sharpening stones aren't going to allow me enough contact with the blade to actually put an edge on it, so I've picked up a Smith's DRET sharpener and have been practicing on an old dull knife with a stiletto blade, just to try to get some basics down. I'm getting better with it, but I'm struggling to get an even, consistent edge. Even without any special optics, I can see with my own eyes that I've got wildly uneven angles.

    Granted, I'm practicing with a very low-quality knife that was already in pretty rough shape. I've managed to get the edge from "literally unable to break the skin with 20 pounds of pressure and aggressive sawing motions on my forearm" to "can cut through paper with about half of the blade before bunching up", though it's come at a cost of scratching the absolute hell out of the rest of the blade (which is just me being sloppy).

    I figure that once I'm able to get competent enough with sharpening a normal blade shape that I'll move on to testing with a donor karambit. I picked up a super cheap, mall-ninja-ass karambit on Amazon because the reviews were all poor and said that the knife arrived completely dull, so I figured this would be perfect to practice sharpening. Unfortunately, it arrived with a surprisingly sharp edge, so I'm gonna have to abuse this knife for a bit before I can even practice anything on it.

    Just curious what sort of tools y'all recommend for dealing with recurved blades, or any techniques I could try to incorporate into my practicing. Thanks!

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    Reate Exo-K: Acceptable account of rattle?

    Hey guys! This might be a bit of a longshot since I don't think this knife is too popular, so I don't expect a lot of people to have experience with it. I recently purchased a Reate Exo-K, and I absolutely love it. It's in no way a practical or useful knife, it's dangerous to the user and its own self, and it's illegal to carry in a lot of places. But it's fun, and that's what matters to me.

    I often will idly flip the knife open and closed while working, and from the beginning there was always a little amount of rattle when deploying it. After having it for about a week or so, it feels like all the pivot points have gotten a bit looser, which I think is to be expected after breaking it in a little.

    But now it's beginning to feel like there's more play going side-to-side with the arm, causing more rattle than before. While held in the normal reverse grip, it tightens right back up and there's virtually no play, so I'm not worried about it falling apart on me while I'm actually trying to cut something with it, but I'm worried that the arm may come apart somehow during deployment. Since a flipping motion is required to open this, I worry that I may end up launching a razor sharp blade in a random direction at considerable speed, which... isn't good.

    For what it's worth, this is how much space I'm getting between the arm and the handle when in the open position. That much space exists while the lock is engaged. I'm not sure if this is typical for the Exo-K, or if this is an excessive gap.

    Compared to the trainer, there's a significantly larger gap and louder rattle. But they're made from very different materials, so I won't know how much I can reliably compare the two.

    Just curious to know if anyone else has had this happen with theirs and is normal, or if I should reach out to Reate for a warranty claim.

    4
    TIL about Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment considered by some to be an "information hazard" - a concept or idea that can cause you harm by you simply knowing/understanding it

    > > > Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare. > >

    > > > While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many LessWrong users, LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who panicked upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the basilisk on the site being banned for five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Yudkowsky himself. Even after the post's discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a simplified, derivative version of Pascal's wager. > >

    Found out about this after stumbling upon this Kyle Hill video on the subject. It reminds me a little bit of "The Game".

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    Helldivers II enlists The Viper Commandos Warbond on June 13
    blog.playstation.com Helldivers II enlists The Viper Commandos Warbond on June 13

    Don't poke the Viper in the jungle unless you're ready for the venom.

    Helldivers II enlists The Viper Commandos Warbond on June 13

    > > > Don't poke the Viper in the jungle unless you're ready for the venom. > >

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    Chrystabell & David Lynch - Sublime Eternal Love

    > > > From the upcoming album “Cellophane Memories”by Chrystabell and David Lynch out on Sacred Bones Records on August 2, 2024. > >

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    Chozo Chozo @fedia.io

    Hail Satan.

    Kbin Sharkey

    Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin's development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

    Posts 9
    Comments 1K