cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/69330953

Hi guys, actually I was a hardcore Firefox and Brave browser user. Which means I have already used some powerful browsers available today.

Some days ago I posted a negative review about the Vivaldi browser, and another person commented that Vivaldi is not just a Chrome fork but more than that. So I thought, am I misunderstood about Vivaldi? Is Vivaldi really awesome and equivalent to Firefox and Brave? So I installed it and tried.

I am in Debian. In the native Debian repo there is no Vivaldi, but it’s downloadable from the official website as a .deb package. When we install the .deb package, it automatically adds the repo to the Debian repo list, so automatic updates are possible.

When I opened Vivaldi, it welcomed me with a welcome screen, and I needed to click around 6-7 times on the next button to land on the start page. I expected a minimal browser, and that’s ok; maybe it’s a part of customization. Then on the homepage there are some built-in bookmarks/speed dials. Maybe those are Vivaldi sponsors and partners. Vivaldi has to make some money to maintain the browser, right?.

The default search engine is startpage, which is very good. Btw, Firefox still has Google as default, which I really hate. There are lots and lots of options to customize the browser and make it ours, including sync to make the settings synced across platforms where we use the Vivaldi browser.

But the sync doesn’t seem to sync all settings, only some of them, also in extensions. Some extension settings, like SponsorBlock and dislike returns, are synced, but some other extensions, like AI Block for YouTube and Reddit Enhancer, have not synced across browsers.

I really want to talk about the adblocker on Vivaldi. Yeah, Vivaldi has an adblock and tracker blocker shield by default (turned off), but this is much less efficient at eliminating ads and cosmetic filtering on web pages. Somewhat in some popular news sites other than YouTube and Reddit, I still see ads and promotions. Also, the tracker blocking test online never gave me a 100% just with Vivaldi’s built-in blocker.

In such cases many extensions and filter lists come to help us make our web browsing more secure and faster. But recently installing and managing extensions on Vivaldi has become too hard. It’s also impossible to sideload extensions into Vivaldi by dragging and dropping CRX files. Also, when we are in the web store, there is always an annoying popup that says “Switch to Chrome.” Inside the setting, I turned on the brand browser as Chrome inside Vivaldi, so why is the pop-up still there? So finally, we have to download the zip file of an extension and extract it. Then, by enabling developer mode in vivaldi://extensions, we have to load it unpacked. But still, this won’t work effectively at all. I know it’s not intentionally done by Vivaldi, but Google’s stupid changes cause this.

Recently Google completely wiped MV3 from all Chromium-based browsers except ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Helium, etc., but Vivaldi is an independent company, right? Why does Vivaldi have to follow Google’s strict tricks to make advertising online more effective? Why shouldn’t Vivaldi make its own ad blocker more powerful, or instead of building it themselves, why don’t they consider making uBlock or AdGuard compatible with their browser? Finally, I figured out a way to sideload uBlock, but still it’s not working as amazingly as before.

So many will tell me to just use uBlock Lite, but even though uBlock Lite now has custom filter list options, adding 3 filter lists externally makes that extension crash only in Vivaldi. Then we reopen the extensions setting to see there is no filter list shown, not even the default one. Until we reset the extension settings completely, which removes the custom list we added.

Also in KDE (Wayland), the browser is working almost perfectly, but in GNOME I am unable to drag and reorder installed extensions on the toolbar by pressing and holding Ctrl. I figured out that GNOME has worse drag-and-drop support. But still, this works on every other browser like Brave, ungoogled-chromium, Helium, and Firefox, but why not on Vivaldi? Opening a support post on their forum didn’t even give a clear answer.

Finally, Vivaldi is a very good browser for productivity, customization, and more unnecessary control most people don’t need. But what about privacy? Do even they have anything in that browser to say the word “privacy” except an insufficient ad/tracker blocker? I wish Vivaldi and its developers would deeply look into its possible privacy protections on the modern web and ad/tracker-blocking capabilities.

Thank you.

Artist: Sooon | fediverse | bluesky | pixiv | twitter | danbooru

cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/69314422

This year, the battle for song of the summer has been eclipsed by a much more complicated – some would even say disturbing – debate. That’s because we find ourselves asking not “What’s the song of the summer?” but rather “Is the song of the summer even real?”

Among the top contenders for the title is Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz, a single released in June that has ascended to No 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up more than 35m Spotify streams. It’s not the sort of fare Fenix usually cooks up. The artist is known for his trap music as part of the rap duo Shoreline Mafia, but Rubberz is a mildly noirish, 80s-inspired synth-pop track featuring a voice nothing like his. The song has drawn comparisons to Morrissey, but it more closely resembles Men at Work’s Down Under, or a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Men at Work. It’s pretty awful. But more importantly, it has an uncanny quality to it. It sounds off.

Almost immediately after it came out, skeptics accused Fenix of employing artificial intelligence to create the track, if not entirely at least partly. He and the song’s credited producer, Purps on the Beat, initially denied it, with Fenix insisting that he’d just used Auto-Tune and a phoney British accent. The kerfuffle culminated this month when indie DJ-producer Medasin posted a video that he said proved that Rubberz had been made using the free generative music tool Treblo.

Medasin then captured himself giving Treblo prompts to pump out his own track. Its sound and lyrics were eerily close to those of Rubberz. Fenix rejected Medasin’s claims, posting what he said were clips of the song’s stems, or its fundamental components, but then Medasin posted a rebuttal of him demonstrating how AI songs, too, can be broken down into stems. A few days later, Fenix finally admitted to using AI to make Rubberz, writing: “never said I didn’t use AI, i said it had nun to do w recording process.”

In any discussion about AI’s potential, it’s important to separate the technology from the socio-political system it’s embedded in. That AIs can lack context, mix up facts, or fall for stupid tricks are all technological problems. Because the giant developers like OpenAI and Anthropic have prioritized solving them, AIs can now more easily access resources like the web or email, are more disciplined about using those resources, and are better at staying within their guardrails.

Yet AI developers do not seem to be prioritizing other technological problems. Major AI models still act far more sycophantic than humans, telling people what they want to hear even when untrue or not in their best interests. Popular AI models tend to answer questions confidently even when they lack training, knowledge, or evidence to back their claims. In both cases, AI developers choose to train models that please users with flattery and the appearance of competence, rather than constraining them to act in users’ and society’s best interests.

…

In a different political and economic system, Chinese developers are producing—and then giving away—smaller, more efficient, more affordable models. While the US government seeks to restrict China’s access to the most advanced chips, China is betting that incentivizing their tech giants to create leaner, more open models using more commodity hardware—models that can be trained with older chips and run even on personal computers—will be an advantage in achieving widespread use and, perhaps, Chinese national influence.

There’s a green powered, ethically trained LLM out there: Apertus. But we’re not (currently) choosing that route.

Prior to its Netflix tenure, Night School had developed the award-winning supernatural thriller Oxenfree.

So like a doofus, ive never really done encryption on any of my PCs/drives. With the way stuff is going, now I want all of it encrypted. The issue is I have so much data from over the years and everything ive read says it deletes everything when you encrypt.

For me it would mostly be my desktop and my nas.

Is it really a matter of, I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs to copy everything over to, encrypt, copy it all back? What’s the best (Linux) software for a mass copy task like that to be sure it works correctly?

www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/145599348

The games will vary in obscurity, but I promise each would have had a North American release.

Please refrain from using reverse image search.

I’ll provide an answer if unsolved in 8 hours.

Can you guess the game ?

The National Week of Action Against Automated License Plate Readers is an opportunity for all of us who oppose surveillance to stand up together and say no! DeFlock has received an overwhelming response to the call for a Week of Action as thousands of people, from coast to coast and across the political spectrum, have already registered.

Laura Fryer gives a fairly scathing review of HR’s encroachment and obvious power grab to be less “day to day” and more to (verbatim) be “at the same level or above the CEO”.

Video goes into how HR makes toxic work environments that demonize ever speaking out or questioning anything, and the toxic positivity that holds games back.

From HR -> “People and Culture” -> “Chief Disruptors”

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73899919

Authors Twitter: x.com/demk0814

The manga centers on Kurumi Fukuka, a college student who will make her debut on the foreign exchange market in order to recover the 20 million yen (about US$126,000) her late mother lost in that market. She believes that it will be easy to get back that money, and with that goal in mind, she jumps into a world where things can turn from heaven to hell in an instant. Unrealized losses and loss-cutting, a racing heart that won’t stop… Despite this, she wants to buy, sell, and earn. She is joined by other “FX fighters,” and the market heats up. Kurumi continues to play a cute and slightly dangerous money game as charts swing back and forth. Can Kurumi and her friends survive in this raging world?

Authors Twitter: x.com/demk0814

The manga centers on Kurumi Fukuka, a college student who will make her debut on the foreign exchange market in order to recover the 20 million yen (about US$126,000) her late mother lost in that market. She believes that it will be easy to get back that money, and with that goal in mind, she jumps into a world where things can turn from heaven to hell in an instant. Unrealized losses and loss-cutting, a racing heart that won’t stop… Despite this, she wants to buy, sell, and earn. She is joined by other “FX fighters,” and the market heats up. Kurumi continues to play a cute and slightly dangerous money game as charts swing back and forth. Can Kurumi and her friends survive in this raging world?

Otome Kaijuu Caraméliser, episode 7

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By swapping a game binary for a modified one that gives access to the desktop he was able to trick the system into thinking he was playing authorized material, and even got local AI models to run on the 48GB VRAM a6000 card that powers the system. I can’t imagine this hole will go unpatched for long though.

Otome Kaijuu Caramelise, episode 7

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Artist: Melowh | pixiv | twitter | deviantart | linktree | patreon | danbooru

Full quality: .jpg 3 MB (3710 × 5105)

Yani Neko, episode 7

Related Communities

• !ChainsmokerCat@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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Tsuihou Sareta Tensei Juukishi wa Game Chishiki de Musou Suru, episode 7

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Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government’s system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years.

https://archive.ph/20260812211511/https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/

BanG Dream! Yume∞Mita, episode 9

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A few months ago I shared Paperweight here. An open-source desktop app that scans your inbox to map out your digital footprint.

Every account you create, every service you sign up for, every online purchase is connected to your email address. Most people have 100+ accounts they’ve forgotten about, creating security risks and privacy exposure.

Local-first. Your inbox is scanned on your own device, your data never leaves it, and there is no account or cloud component.

Since last time, a lot has changed:

• New pii analysis engine to check addresses, phones, IBANs, national IDs, cards, and more
• Improved multi-language lexicons for better classification
• Track GDPR data requests you send fromPaperweight
• Improved sync, receiver, hide-my-email aliases, and message tagging
• Fully verified builds for Apple, Windows and Gmail OAuth connections
• Several minor improvements and bug fixes

Links

• Github github.com/wslyvh/paperweight
• Website www.paperweight.email

I opted to link to Wario64, because he already pulled out the stuff we’re interested in from a pretty dry report. The next Kingdom Come is expected to be titled “Salvation”, and based on the development timeline, I would expect it to reuse some characters and locations from KCD2 but probably not Henry of Skalitz.

Ganso! Bandori-chan, episode 45

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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1332594/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-con

Hello! I am looking for more players for a weekday game, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday starting around 7:00 - 9:00 PM CET and lasting around 3 hours with a break part way through.

I am liking the idea of running savage worlds which presents itself as “fast, furious, fun” but I have a variety of systems that I’m comfortable running. (No D&D, Path/Starfinder)

You build characters by selecting attributes, skills, and feats. To accomplish something you roll a dice (1d4 - 1d12) based on the appropriate skill trying to get a 4 or higher, if you get 8,12 (etc.) You are able to critically succeed. All dice explode, meaning if you roll the highest number on a dice (a 4 on a 1d4, 6 on a 1d6, etc.) you reroll and add it the previous roll(s).

I plan to use the setting book “Vermilium” which is dark fantasy + western + post-post apocalypse (the image touchstones include: Tri-gun, Outlaw Star, Steel Ball Run, Cowboys & Aliens, El Topo, Wild Wild West, and the Pathfinder setting Alkenstar).

I have been running TTRPG games for fediverse folks for a few years now and have previously run (Cyberpunk Red, Shadowrun 5e, Lancer, The Burning Wheel, Pathfinder 2e, Shadowdark, Ars Magica, Masks, Delta Green, Mothership)

I have previous experience with the above as well as D&D 5e, Blades in the Dark, Monster of the Week, ICONS, Starfinder and Vampire the Masquerade 5e.

I tend to run according to the rules more than homebrew, am more merciful than antagonistic, rely on prep more than improv, faction over disparate NPCs, lower amounts of explicit violence/gore, complex encounters, slow burn terror over horror.

We use Discord for voice & session scheduling and Roll20 for the virtual table top, it is a dedicated discord server and I’m happy to help folks with roll20.

I will provide all the rules needed and we will have a session 0.5 where we go over some of the safety tools I like to use (X-Card & Lines and Veils), make characters and with whatever remaining time we will jump into the game.

I have a hard line with Romance/Sexual content, and Young Children. There are veils for Extreme Violence, Torture, Adolescent Children and Player vs Player.

Feel free to respond here or DM me.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you are interested.

Consider that Meta’s Marketplace is the largest competitor. Immediately after they launched, they quickly capitalized on their Identity Verification natural monopoly on online social networking. This was ‘pivoted’ into “Identity Verification Assurance” for your average Playstore and iPhone users.

Marketplace wasn’t even easier to use than Craigslist, 99% of the arguments for using it were “it’s safer because it’s less scams”.

I wouldn’t put it beneath Zuck and his bootlickers to pay a few bitcoins to maintain an artifically inflated number of scams on Craigslist.

It reinforces the mistaken belief that scams are driven by anonymity (instead of the truth that you can have all their data and the justice department will look the other way… that’s why they keep doing it until they scam Grant Hudson of McLean, VA).

Anyway, the faster CL dies the sooner Meta consolidates a monopoly on electronic flea marketing or whatever it’s called.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1332159/researchers-show-how-meta-s-pervert-glasses-are-used-to-harass-women

Pre-print research paper.