Auster

Surprised it took so long.

Still, hiccups every now and then could be good to make people look for backup instances

Just tried opening the home page and appears active for me. Maybe routing issues for specific regions?

I’m not its target audience (not much of movies fan), but considering I made sheets for similar uses for music and games, it makes me think:

• couldn’t it be fully offline? More reassurance of no data collection and it should keep being useful virtually forever, specially if physical media and DRM-free movies and series get traction.
• instead of an LLM, why not a local database with a tag or like/dislike system, with the system having a bit of randomness for suggestions to have an algorithm?
• in line with the first point, if an LLM is a must, why not have a local one trained specifically on movies and series?

So… What about autistic people sounding like LLMs before LLMs were a thing?

Iirc the maintainer of the wiki has a sister group in Steam’s forums, so people could ask him to migrate the wiki.

Maybe can ask also on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works?

There’s also games without DRM on Steam if you’d rather not spend more that what’s been gifted. As Steam itself doesn’t track those, there’s those two wikis keep track of it if you want:
https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

Just read the article. The arguments given feel like they could easily be used to push more anti-privacy laws, and considering how pushy they are, I feel inclined to think that’s the case. Also using Twitter as the target, they can induce people to cause noise for the subject.

About Lemmy not being much better, if that’s not a bother to you, I’d suggest looking for another instance. Or if the ban was in a remote instance, to look for communities in other instances (or even make your own communities if you’d be willing to moderate).

And if Lemmy the environment overall attracts some problematic crowds, maybe check Friendica, Mbin and/or PieFed? Latter two are to my knowledge fully compatible with Lemmy communities, and apparently Friendica is too, albeit organized a bit differently.

Since I joined in here, I could tell certain instances could be problematic, but also that ActivityPub allows for a great deal of alternatives and oxygenating the social environment. So while packing your things to find a better place can be annoying, it’s still the best option, I think, given the nature of the protocol.

I’m out of the loop. Reddit’s global rules prohibit sales? If that’s the case, it’s weird to say this, but even Facebook is more reasonable. Sales aren’t illegal in most places of the world, and in an user-fed website, I’d expect at least some to be interested in doing sales.

Sounds quite dystopian, setting a precedent for either (or both) the host being considered accomplice for any wrongdoings of any third parties, and/or inducing hosting companies to become informal polices. And it comes in quite a curious time, when the EU is trying to push for chat control, some US states are trying to push for AI surveillance cameras, Brazil passed a law that requires apps to do facial recognition, GrapheneOS is being targeted by French news media, and all those using potential crimes and cherry-picking cases to justify.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues

Here is where I suggested to ask too.

Unsure if it went anywhere, but maybe also suggest on their issues/suggestions tracker? If it’s on Github, usually the Issues tab is used for the latter too.

Cynical as I have become in recent years, I can’t help but to think it’d be due to a VM seldom carrying interesting data for data brokers - your real machine is usually where the “good stuff” is.

Depending on what you work on, maybe there’s an alternative FOSS or at least paid DRM free software?

Or, if you work for a company and it demands this tool, maybe you could ask them to provide the software for you?

On a 3rd point, I’ve seen official softwares detect when they’re being run in VMs or similar, so maybe that’s what happened.

On a 4th point, if you must use a crack, maybe do so on a less usual Linux system, so if it’s a functional one but packaged with virus, the virus breaks either because it runs under Wine or similar, or because the less usual system lacks some needed dependency for the virus if it can run on Linux as well?

Found a few candidate tools though can test neither now, mutool (part of the mupdf tools), PDFtk, qpdf, pdf2txt (name sounds familiar though it might be memory playing tricks).

If any of those could be found as a single portable exe around 2020, chances are it is the tool I used for it.

Iirc, tested it out quite a few years ago, and I had to use a software that would both decompile and recompile the PDF, and while it was decompiled, I had to remove the repeating pattern I didn’t want with something like Notepad++. File got recompiled a bit over 50% bigger iirc, maybe different compression methods, but the pages themselves didn’t seem affected.

Sadly can’t remember the name of the program I used for compiling and recompiling, only that it’d do both and that I looked for how to remove watermarks from PDFs. Also the program was certainly offline.

From what I can observe, usually older companies don’t have direct means of monetization, the option instead seemingly being preferred for smaller/independent groups. I’d expect the team behind South Park to be no different given how long the show’s been around.

And if no means of direct support can be found, best I can think of is to purchase merchandise from the series from official retailers, like DVDs, toys, etc. Some cut will go to other parties, but at least the SP team will be financed, and you’ll have a tangible item too.

Don’t know tbh