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.

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.

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.

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.

Saying “After 2 years with college professors” seems creepy to me, like he thinks college professors are supposed to take over the parents’ role.

Was it the part that’s normally responsible for pooping?

my information might be out of date yeah! I’ve just skimmed their wikipedia which hasn’t helped clear things up! Seems they did have difficulties around 2011 - “After two decades in decline, Philips went through a major restructuring, shifting its focus from electronics to healthcare.”

Then, “On 29 January 2013, it was announced that Philips had agreed to sell its audio and video operations to the Japan-based Funai Electric for €150 million […] Funai was to pay a regular licensing fee to Philips for the use of the Philips brand.[59] The purchase agreement was terminated by Philips in October because of breach of contract[61] and the consumer electronics operations remained under Philips”

It’s a long wiki article with a hell of a lot of transfers and acquisitions, and it’s not clear how up to date some sections are. So I’m not sure what the current situation is.

Phillips is another one not on that list. European company that AFAIK have mostly resisted the enshittification urge.

Same. This hardware keyboard is taking up potential screen real-estate.

If you want a hardware keyboard, just use a bluetooth one, you can get folding ones which fold up pretty small.

If you’re a firefox person, there’s an add-on called Peertube Companion which will convert peertube links to use your instance. So for me, that link takes me to peertube.wtf rather than peertube.gravitywell.xyz

Apparently it will also redirect you to your peertube instance when you watch a video on YouTube that also exists on peertube (I’ve never had this happen though! Not sure how it does the comparision - hashes I suppose?)