Just a friendly reminder that the OSA was never about safeguarding kids from seeing porn.

Are the government seriously worried about a child being exposed to Break Stuff or So What on Spotify?

(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk’s nazi bar.)

The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he’s on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.

He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:

If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.

This of course generated a lot of fury among the site’s users.

For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)

Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.

This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.

Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)

Zia Yusuf (head of Reform’s DOGE division, yes they’re ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:

Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.

Let that sink in.

Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they’ve handled this legislation, that they’ve straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.

Also, if you’re thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party’s deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.

If Labour don’t get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election…

Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.

The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”

Did I state that? No?

You can fuck off.

Let’s say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.

She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he’s being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.

Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is “misogyny”, apparently.

Good advice actually. Dating apps have been monopolized and enshittified by the same two or three parent companies in recent years.

They also said they deleted IDs once users were verified. The breach proved that to be an outright lie.

Tea is the offshoot of all those “Are We Dating The Same Guy” Facebook groups where ladies gossip, talk shit, slander and creep-shame guys they went on dates with, sometimes throwing around false accusations maliciously to get men ostracized.

On one hand, damn these groups are toxic as fuck and that makes me feel a lot less sympathetic. But on the other hand, this is a textbook argument for why mandatory age verification laws need to be abolished. AWDTSG works as a way to keep women safe when it’s used as intended but there are too many women that will slander men with false allegations purely out of spite.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

I think it says a lot more about how much recent versions of Windows have bogged down the whole gaming experience.

Microsoft seems to have forgotten that people want an operating system that works, not something bloated with bullshit like telemetry, advertisements, tracking cookies and artificial intelligence. The only reason they even have a market lead in the desktop space is due to marketing and monopolistic practices.

My only gripe with them is that if I spend any amount of time outdoors, even if it’s not actually sunny, my glasses quickly turn to shades.

Image comes from the monstrous work the Asahi Linux team did to get Netflix working on Linux on ARM Macbooks: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/

There’s your problem. Using Linux is like using a dishwasher instead of a rice cooker to cook rice.

Does HML actually exist?

This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become mainstream and would rather see another Reddit clone pick up the slack.

Lemmy is like circa 2010 Reddit, minus the jailbait, creepshots, incest-posting, racism and all the other degenerate shit.

I’m curious, what led to the December user spike?

I thought the performance hit was quite substantial, like 20% to 30% lower frame rates from using dxvk. Maybe things have improved?

Native Vulkan support is of course the holy grail but so few games support it. The only few I can think of are Valve games.

Not even World of Warcraft supports Vulkan, and they’ve supported OpenGL for so long.

3.82% is actually pretty damn good. And if Windows 12 pushes us into a subscription model I can see that gap rising.

Also, if/when DirectX gets native Linux support, or DXVK/VKD3D matches the API in performance, that’ll be it.

Personally I’m thanking Valve for this.

I’m not worried about Threads joining the fediverse. They can’t even properly implement hashtags and trending topics, which already puts them far behind Mastodon and X.

Also, how would users on a microblogging platform be able to interact with a Lemmy instance? I’m a bit confused about how ActivityPub works in that respect.

The ‘they can farm our data’ argument is a bit moot when Lemmy is already publicly accessible, and it makes us no better than Spez if we are trying to combat people for 'data scraping"

I’m not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.

Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn’t. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.

I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don’t think leeching on to the fediverse.

Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.

Zuckerberg doesn’t need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.

X is still on top despite Elon Musk’s stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)