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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Complete nothingburger of a study, which itself is locked behind a $25 paywall to access it. And the author of the article obviously didn’t cause there’s 0 mention in the article itself about the methodology used to determine the 20% revenue lost (nice round number might I add). The only thing that even alludes to the methodology used in the abstract is

    When Denuvo is cracked very early on, piracy leads to an estimated 20 percent fall in total revenue on average relative to an uncracked counterfactual

    Which really doesn’t tell us much, how are these counterfactuals selected in the first place? What is the cirteria? How are you determining that the differences between revenue of a game that was cracked and that went uncracked are due to one game being cracked? How can anyone even confidently claim that they’ve normalazied the data set enoguh that these differences in revenue are mainly caused by a game being cracked, especially with how rare early denuvo cracks have been in the past few years. Statistically this sounds dubious at best, especially when we have fully open studies (like the one funded by the EU a few years back) that have found no statistical proof that piracy has any impact on revenue ( with the exception of box office revenue of big new movies being leaked and pirated while still in theaters). Surely they wouldn’t have missed a 20% meadian difference in revenue.

    Lastly you have major tech news outlets all reporting on a study less than a month after it was made available online. For context the journal containing this study will only be published in jan of 2025.





  • At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”.

    Null at the SQL means that the value isn’t there, idk where you’re getting that from. SQL doesn’t have anything like JS’s undefined, there’s no other way to represent a missing value in sql other than null (you could technically decide on certain values for certain types, like an empty string, but that’s not something SQL defines).



  • Not riverboat businesses, rather we have plenty of restaurants and clubs on rafts on the Danube river in belgrade.

    But that’s the least of our worries rn, we had elections last week and the current president and government organized massive theft of the elections. There have been massive protests for a week since. They drove people from Bosnia to vote in our elections, hell the Bosnian minister of security voted in the Belgrade mayoral elections and proudly posted about it on twitter. Apparently he’s a resdient of Belgrade lol. Last night they sent a thousand cops at us to beat us up and break up the protest. Today student orgs are blocking infrastructure in Belgrade, and from 6pm we’re going to the parliament building again to block it off.

    Our president claimed that there were barely a thousand people gathered when he spoke through state media:

    For the uninitiated our current president is Aleksandar Vucic, also known as Milosevic’s minister of propaganda.




  • Linking to the great firewall article is completely nonsensical in this context, and you would be aware of that if you had bothered to open the link in my previous comment.

    just so we on the same page, I’m talking about data is gathered, not whether it’s protected ( legally ) , idc

    Which is exactly what I’m talking about, which you would again know if you read what I linked.

    I’m not a lawyer but I think somewhere in the DSL it mentions data is collected from companies within China and outside

    It doesn’t, what I linked to discusses the very laws you are talking about at length if you are actually interested rather than just spouting nonsense like “it’s in the constitution”.

    Just so we’re on the same page you have no idea about Chinese laws on gathering, processing and handling of data, but you heard it somewhere, repeat it, won’t bother to research further and then claim there’s no propaganda.

    but why is it hard for you to swallow, knowing that US based companies ( with all the power they have, lawyers… Etc ) comply with data collection laws

    Because they don’t. Evidenced by all the fines the EU is handing out to google, meta, etc. You could also look to all the stuff Snowden blew the whostle on. Do you think they just stopped doing mass surveillance on a global level?


  • especially when you know that that country is heavily invested in cyberwarfare, espionage and censorship.

    Which country isn’t? The US does more spying on its own citizens than China could ever dream of doing. The UK is currently trying to pass a bill to break e2ee.

    Even their constitution states that every Chinese product ( software or hardware ), must send data it collects to the government.

    This is false as far as I know, can you provide a source? China has some of the strictest laws on data protection, you can read more about it here: https://academic.oup.com/idpl/article/12/2/75/6537091?login=false

    This is like Apple saying your Android spies on you… lol ( I believe they did say that )

    Not sure where you were going with this. My point is you don’t hear any of these concerns raised about any other and as we both agree it’s not something unique to China.

    The real reason why you hear a lot of talk about moving production out of China lately is simply because Chinese manufacurers have narrowed the the gap a lot in terms of chip designs and are becoming an actual threat to western comanies’ profit margins.


  • Now, is all these news nothing but propaganda?

    Literally yes, not because chinese companies don’t spy on you, literally all companies spy on you. You prove it by linking a video about samsung. Google and Apple do the same shit. The fact that software is riddled with spyware has nothing to do with the hardware being manufactured in China. China isn’t some big bad, moving production elsewhere will change nothing. Lastly you should be far more concerned about western companies spying on you, the ones that cooperate with your local government and leave backdoors in their OS for NSA and the like. What do you think the CCP is gonna do to you? You’re outside of their jurisdiction completely.

    So yes it js just propaganda, in a sense that it’s trying to make you think this kind of behavior is somehow unique to Chinese companies or a result of tech being manufactured in China.


  • Using something like DOS is neither preferred nor more safe. Last time MS DOS received a security patch was 23 years ago. It’s open to pretty much any security vulnerability you can think of. In case you depend on a DOS app it’s preferable to run it on a modern OS that is DOS compatible, windows 10 32bit for example (I believe Win11 still has support). Or even better sandboxed in an emulator like DOSBox on a more secure OS.





  • Exactly this, you need to ground this type of argument in material analysis. Getting into a moral grandstanding contest with libs is an extremely pointless waste of time. Noone likes civilian (debatable how innocent you can claim israeli citizens are when they are actively participating in settler colonialism) casualties, what’s the cause? How do you stop it? By dissolving the illegal state of Israel.