azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it could work. If the local government gave a shit. Which they don’t, because Texas. But the water going into a datacenter does come out… The main downside being that it’s hotter (which is a limiting factor, you can’t run it in a loop without some big cooling system, and rivers/lakes are by far the most effective way way to do that).

  The article I saw doesn’t say what the problem is exactly. Is the datacenter pumping from an aquifer rather than a lake/river? Are they raising the temperature in ways that affect the environment negatively? Are they abusing the municipal water supply instead of pumping their own water, forcing the taxpayer to essentially subsidize their infrastructure? Lots that could go wrong, but it’s all shit that should be fully figured out during the permitting process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Weird, either there’s some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn’t dependent on the big American payment processors.

  The way towards undermining Visa/MC’s power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).

  American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it’s not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they’ll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

  There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

  • Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
  • Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
  • Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
  • Use physical cash
  • Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

  In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

  Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

  Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Virtually every payment processor uses VISA/MasterCard in the back-end. For EU users PayPal can be backed by SEPA mandates instead (direct bank pre-authorization), but otherwise VISA/MC is holding payment processors by the balls in virtually every other market. Without Visa/MC, there is no way to bring funds in or out of your account.

  The only alternative is to negotiate interconnection with banks directly, but that’s a very high bar for broad adoption. It has happened on a small scale (e.g. Payconiq in the Benelux) and the EU is attempting to broaden that to the rest of the continent, but it’s a very tough sell because they have to convince every major bank to support the new standard.

  This is a textbook case where capitalism isn’t the solution because there are only two market actors and a virtually insurmountable barrier to entry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not related to Trump/Congress. They almost unironically got OnlyFans to ban sexual content from their own website a few years back due to the militant actions of one fringe puritanical group. They got memed so hard they eventually backed down, but MasterCard&Visa have been acting as World Sexuality Police for a very long time.

  I don’t think it’s a rational financial decision, AFAICT they just have a puritanical leadership. As a cartel they don’t have to be maximally financially efficient. Their continued existence is an artefact of the 20th century, and their corporate values reflect that.

  Hopefully Wero takes off soon to introduce some competition in the online payment market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome! Stopping (AI)crawlbots⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

  That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  (They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)

  I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them

  Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).

  I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

  Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

  The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It was all a lie, wasn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It was all a lie, wasn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

  But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I looked it up because I already forgot, but you need to do half of the puzzle I’m talking about to do the big one. And that one is annoying as fuck to do because even if you immediately understand how it works (it is very neat) you’ll be looking at it for literal hours getting tiny details right with zero feedback from the game, and the “this is neat” feeling quickly turned into intense frustration for me. Doubly frustrating because I was not in the right headspace after being forced to do a bunch of content filler puzzles to even get there. I just can’t find any joy in the tedium of figuring out a bazillion very similar puzzles over and over again to solve a bigger puzzle I already know how to solve. I figured out your trick, game, where is my damn reward? I guess that’s why I could never get into Rubik’s Cube…

  Outer Wilds approaches this very differently, I definitely spent hours wandering because I misunderstood one very specific thing. But once I did understand that thing, everything clicked into place and the game revealed itself to me. Late-game Tunic instead punishes discovery with more grind.

  The combat was fine, I never touched the difficulty either. Though I will say the difficulty scaling was a bit all over the place, most of the regular enemies were barely a threat, while the bosses were pretty all over the place in terms of difficulty. But overall the combat progression was quite enjoyable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s more of a “souls-lite” meets Outer Wilds for sure. You gotta be relatively on top of things mechanically to beat it, and on top of that in the second half of the game it switches to puzzles that are (IMO) infuriatingly grindy and will take hours to complete after you’ve figured out the mechanic.

  Which is perfectly fine for those who like that, but I was sold “knowledge base game like Outer Wilds” which doesn’t accurately capture how disgustingly grindy Tunic really is IMO. That’s like saying Elden Ring is an “open world walking simulator with gorgeous graphics and compelling combat”. I mean, yeah, it’s all that and it’s a great game. But that’s kind of underselling the fact that if it’s your first Souls you’ll probably break a couple keyboards after meeting Margit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can't believe nobody in the LA protests hasn't already started a big sing along of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" Yet.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That song is very hard to coordinate with a crowd of untrained singers. It was written to be sung on stage in a theater, not by a rowdy crowd. It can be (and has been) used as a dub over videos of protests though.

  The reason why La Marseillaise and its offshoot L’Internationale were so successful is that they’re slower songs, meant to be absolutely belted by a crowd of belligerant drunks. La Marseillaise is originally a literal revolutionary marching song.

  Plus La Marseillaise just goes harder lyrically. It would actually have been pretty scandalous if it was written in 1980 for a play.
  “To arms, citizens! Form your Battalions! Let’s March! Let’s March! So an impure blood can water our furrows!”

  Maybe one of them Angelino theatre kids should do a partial English and/or Spanish translation focusing on rhythmic accuracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

  The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

  Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

  The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selling Surveillance as Convenience⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

  Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selling Surveillance as Convenience⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

  Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
  Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

  So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

  There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

  Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WHERE ARE MY PRECISION SCREWDRIVERS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Speak American⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you see danger coming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What?

  The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

  The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you see danger coming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can’t metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

  What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

  What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

  It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

  Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

  ---

  In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

  Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

  Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

  Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

  So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Clair Obscur’s Composer Created An Incredible Soundtrack⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The main difference in difficulty between the modes is the parry window. If your problem is the parry window, switch to normal mode.

  I find in normal mode the game is not very hard for main quests, but extremely punitive with the many optional bosses. So if you still want a challenge, they’re right there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.

  Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.

  Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.