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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I’m guessing the reason for most things forcing you to use an app is less because of data harvesting, and more because it increases repeated use.

    When you have to go to your browser and remember to check a website it’s harder to create a habit. If you have an icon flashing on your home screen every day it’s much easier to remember to go to their site. Sure you can “Add to Home screen” functionality, but average users don’t even know that exists.

    It also feels like a bespoke app is more “professional” than a website, despite many apps secretly just being a website anyway.

    That said, they are definitely harvesting your data. I just don’t think that’s the main reason for most apps.





  • TLDR: number of possible passwords is x^y where x is the size of your alphabet and y is the password length. Increasing y is better than increasing x.

    It’s not immediately obvious, but it is pretty straightforward math. It has to do with password length vs alphabet size.

    Let’s look at an 8 letter lowercase only password. Each time you increase the minimum length, you increase the maximum number of passwords by 26 (the number of letters in the alphabet). So it would be 26x26x26x26x26x26x26x26 or 26^8 which is 208,827,064,576. This is a lot of passwords, but pretty easy for a computer to brute force.

    Let’s add the ! symbol. This means there are 27 options or 27^8. The total number of passwords is now 282,429,536,481. A bigger number, but not by much.

    If we only have lowercase letters but increase it to 9 letters long, then it increases to 26^9 which equals 5,429,503,678,976. We’ve jumped from millions of passwords to billions with passwords only 1 character more.

    If you allow all symbols and numbers, but also increase minimum length, you get the best of both without creating difficult to remember passwords.

    This of course ignores the primary way people get past passwords: by asking the user for their password. It also ignores that an intruder is going to check the most common passwords and not just try them all. Adding numbers and symbols doesn’t really change the most common passwords though, since dragon just turns into Dragon1!



  • So much of the game is simply infuriating, and I’m not all that far in yet.

    The menus are attrocious. It feels like wading through mud every time you try to get to menu. Half of them are locked to what feels like 10fps. You go into the map and it’s 37 presses of the tab key to get out, or else use the awkward as fuck hold tab to exit. The inventory menus are a fucking joke. It took two weeks for modders to fix all of Bethesda’s UI garbage that they have to fix every time a new game comes out. How is there not an option to sort by value/weight yet?

    There’s a lot of time wasting crap too. If you want to go to a different planet you have to walk to your ship, go up the ladder and go to the cockpit, watch an animation to sit down in the cockpit, watch a cutscene to take off, open the map, find your planet, set course, watch a cutscene as you jump to the planet, open the map again, find where you want to land, watch a cutscene as you land, get out of your ship. That’s a lot of steps. Unskippable cutscenes every time you go somewhere sucks.


  • @Poob@lemmy.catoStarfield@lemmy.zipRating down at 77%
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    2 years ago

    This is exactly how I felt playing it. The game played like a much improved fallout, but it took modern fallout’s shitty cynical “everything is a joke” attitude and multiplied it by 10. It was insufferable.

    Starfield has managed to tone it down, but every once in a while I see the fallout “jokes” pop up.





  • Capitalism is in a permanent prisoners dilemma.

    Overall they need to treat their employees well so that there’s growth in the economy, since no one to buy things means no market to sell things. However, they can also choose to screw over their employees with bad pay, terrible conditions, or in this case, automating their workforce and firing people.

    If no one screws their employees, the economy expands with modest growth.

    If one or few corporations screw their workers while everyone else doesn’t, they become fabulously rich and the rest get outcompeted.

    If everyone screws their workers, then the economy collapses because there’s no growth, and everyone eventually goes out of business.