Ah yes Orban that champion of personal freedoms and heroic warrior against government overreach

works fine for me too

I think it’s worth making this clear:

A loving, caring parental home as judged by the child

If a child feels loved and cared for then they’ll likely grow up well adjusted.

If the parents say they gave their child a loving and caring upbringing but the child disagrees, then I think that suggests something wasn’t quite right.

install synaptic and your basically there man

What’s my basically there man? (Or should I say who is my basically there man?) I don’t think I’ve installed this. Is it like the Linux version of Bonzi Buddy?

</ smart arse little shit >

This actually made me laugh out loud, it’s so fucking irredeemably awful 😂

I don’t think you can have spreadsheets with multiple “sub sheets” (can’t think of an unambiguous name for them - basically the equivalent of browser tabs)

Pretty sure there’s no way to have graphical charts either.

I catch myself too often thinking that this is what it’d be like to be mauled to death in the jungle by a tiger.

Me: “Oh aren’t you a cute little kitty hey?”
Tiger: *pounces*
Me: “Blurrgh oof gosh your fur is sooo soft!!”
*violently mauls with paw*
Me: “Oh wow such huge toe beans!!”
*continues violently mauling and biting*
Me: *happy gurgling sound of blood filling up my trachea*

It basically means dodging legal restrictions on investigation by using illegal (or at least inadmissible) means to obtain evidence, and once the police have it, they look for legal ways to get that same information.

So everywhere “has it”, the question is whether they use it. I don’t know if there’s reason to believe that EU police forces use such methods more or less than their US counterparts.

My cat did pretend once to eat some crisps I’d given her. She was sat on a chair looking at me pleadingly, so I put a couple in front of her and after a sniff she “accidentally” knocked them on to the floor whilst pretending to eat them.

I am a bit of a worrier I guess, & overthink things too much. It’s definitely not a crime to send requests to people just after playing online together, actually I think I should probably do it more.

I also like to get friend requests from randos, it helps you get more involved in the game, especially co-op games like DRG. Plus it’s not like there’s a limit to how many friends you can add.

Before writing this post, I realised I’d given away my DOB - first by saying my age, and then when they correctly guessed my star-sign (!), I told them the day & month. That made me worry that maybe I need to be more careful and so posted this here.

I do already have a discord account & if that’s all they want to use, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Only if it’s something weird they want me to install, like Team Viewer or some shit 😅

I hadn’t heard of that one, a kind of social engineering attack. Definitely something to keep in mind!

as a result I don’t add randos

This is generally my attitude, and it sucks really that ignoring random friend requests is usually the sensible thing to do. Anyway so far this person does seem to be genuine and hasn’t tried to get me to add a load of their friends or anything like that.

conceal your IP in non peer to peer games based on the settings under “Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking”

Good tip thanks! Here’s the Steam page about it. The upshot seems to be that Steam itself won’t reveal your IP to others, but games might depending on how multiplayer is implemented.

“Steam doesn’t share your IP address with other players. Whenever peer-to-peer networking is needed, for example in a voice chat, that communication is always relayed. However, we don’t control what games using peer-to-peer connectivity do.”

“If a game uses our newest networking APIs (ISteamNetworkingSockets and ISteamNetworkingMessages), the traffic can be relayed using Steam Datagram Relay (SDR), Valve’s worldwide backbone and network of relays, and you can decide when to allow an app to share your IP address. Under Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking, there is an option that controls when your IP address is revealed”

and crucially regarding the default setting, “Default. This will not share your IP address, unless it appears necessary to avoid excessive ping times.”

They do appear to be an actual human yes, and one who does enjoy playing online games (because we play together and they are getting on with the game just like every other player). I’ve just looked at their account - thanks for the tip - and while they don’t have loads of games, all appear pretty normal paid-for things, and all are kinda similar in appeal - e.g. The Forest, 7 Days to Die. Actually there are a couple of what could have been giveaways/freebies - but all those have zero hours on.

So that does look very normal lol

Yeah I am talking with them, they do seem legit so hopefully I’m just being paranoid/overly cautious.

The reason I thought I’d post here is to make sure I’ve not missed something obvious and to understand what the risks are. I guess “something shady” would be asking me to do something weird like install unknown software, or asking lots of personal questions out of the blue.

Hey don’t be so quick to dismiss it! The article says that apparently Elon Musk has promised “Real-time, high-quality shows and video games at scale, customized to the individual, next year.”

Next year man! He promised it!! It’s gonna be like, just any game you dream of will be instantly created, exactly matching what you imagined and with fantastic world-building and beautifully complex interwoven story-lines!!! It’s gonna be amazing bro!!!

if the number you registered with eventually gets recycled to someone who then uses it for Signal, will that affect your account?

a machine capable of running Wasteland 2

Is there even such a machine on God’s good earth? It’s definitely a good game, but absolutely blighted by instability & CTDs last time I tried it a few years ago.

Where do I purchase whatever this guy was smoking?

I wonder what difference it makes when the user isn’t using English. They don’t mention that they aren’t considering this and don’t mention it on their How it Works page, but they do in the paper’s abstract: “Finally, our focus on English-language prompts overlooks the additional biases that may emerge in other languages.”

They do also reference a study by another team that does show differences in bias based on input language which concludes, “Our experiments on several LLMs show that incorporating perspectives from diverse languages can in fact improve robustness; retrieving multilingual documents best improves response consistency and decreases geopolitical bias”

The subject of how and what type of bias is captured by LLMs is a pretty interesting subject that’s definitely worthy of analysis. Personally I do feel they should more prominently highlight that they’re just looking at English language interactions; it feels a bit sensationalist/click-baity at the moment and I don’t think they can reasonably imply that LLMs are inherently biased towards “male, white, and Western” values just yet.