azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fucking math...⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Speed limits are trickier than structural safety margins because of several factors:

  • In some areas, particularly remote areas, the process isn’t very well defined. Sometimes the speed limit will be set by one guy who just felt like that was fine. Doesn’t even have to be an engineer really.
  • Standards evolve over time (trending towards lower speed limits) but speed limits only change when a tragedy or major road renovation happens. Where I live there’s sometimes a 40 km/h spread on posted speed limits for similar roads depending on whether they were rebuilt last year or 50 years ago.
  • Car culture means drivers hold a ton of political power. There are a myriad of traffic devices that cannot be built not because of practical or financial constraints, only because they would “inconvenience drivers”. Lower speed limits are often one of those. People complain so the government backs down despite engineering recommendations.
  • A driver is always liable if they drive too fast for the conditions, not the traffic engineer. That goes to the previous point, with zero penalty for not sticking to the sensible engineering choice, political pressure easily wins out. Hard to argue against a work order when the person signing off on it cannot be sued for negligence.

  The upshot is speed limits in my local experience have a lot more to do with the municipality/region’s political climate than engineering standards and safety factors. Sometimes I feel like I could safely go 2x, sometimes the limit is 90 km/h on a two-way one lane road with 30 m of visibility where 30 km/h feels like I’m pushing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honestly Bizarre⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, fun! The debate over the culinary vs botanical meaning of fruit intersecting with the debate of culinary vs topological meaning of soup.

  Breakfast cereal is soup[topological] but not soup[culinary]. It is therefore not a contradiction for it to be fruit[culinary].

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honestly Bizarre⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Water is debatable, everything else why not. If a recipe is generic enough to call for “vegetables”, you wouldn’t be wrong to include any of those things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honestly Bizarre⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming you like eating chicken, when is it wrong to pair chicken with vegetables? I made a vegetable-mushroom-chicken soup last week and it was delish. Whether chicken is or isn’t a vegetable is an academic concern, not a culinary one.

  Try putting mushrooms or chicken in the sangria however and you’ll be rightfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honestly Bizarre⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If it goes in soup, it’s a vegetable. If it goes in Sangria, it’s a fruit.

  Next question please.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  THANK YOU.

  I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

  I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

  The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do companies always need to grow?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ??? Of course you do. Investors don’t just buy their way into hypothetical future profits, they buy control over the company. The specifics depend, whether it’s voting shares or the looming threat of debt collection, but the courts will 100 % enforce investors’ right to demand things from companies.

  Furthermore the idea that publicly traded companies have some kind of obligation to make as much money as quickly as possible is a reddit-born myth. Shareholders will bring in a CEO, who will be tasked to do whatever and can be fired from the shareholders at any time. Grievous mismanagement and intentional damage can expose a CEO to legal action, just like intentionally destroying tools can expose a worker to legal action. But a CEO acting in good faith has no other obligation than to fulfill the tasks asked of them by shareholders. The problem is that goes wrong when large shareholders plan to sell their shares and need the numbers to look a little better to sell a little higher. But this phenomenon absolutely happens with PE as well – in fact it’s arguably way worse because publicly traded companies at least have legal obligations of financial transparency. Private shareholders can do whatever the fuck they want, including secretly selling their shares to Evil Inc. for them to strip the company for parts and not a single employee has the right to even know who the majority shareholder even is, nervermind what their plan is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data Shows That AI Use Is Now Declining at Large Companies⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Worse, those of us who have been sticking our neck out and saying “hey guys let’s maybe slow down a minute on investing into things that have no foreseeable path to profitability” are getting passed over on career advancements while hype-chasers are getting rewarded.

  Life ain’t fair man, especially when you have a passing interest in understanding wtf is going on and a moral compass that tentatively points towards not actively and knowingly making the world worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even about predictions or estimations - everything’s so many years late everyone stopped counting. They just… don’t seem to understand “scoping”? The pitch is “ultra-realistic life-size universe sandbox simulation” and they keep hitting walls because they’re using tech that’s completely inadequate for the task at hand but they won’t let that deter them. They’ve probably reimplemented every subsystem of the Crysis 3 engine a dozen times by now, and it’s still not anywhere near capable of achieving even a tenth of their ambitions. Fuck, they just very recently got their server meshing thing barely working after like a decade of development (at the cost of rewriting everything again of course).

  It’s like watching a team raising billions to build the Burj Khalifa but all they have is a bunch of dry sand and some spoons. Deadlines aren’t really the issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.

  Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.

  There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
  For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

  In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I’m kinda surprised Google didn’t already gift an underage child to Trump so he’d make the problem go away.

  However a perfectly viable option that I’m sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google’s former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone’s best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

  This wouldn’t be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a “common good” is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
  270G	.
  

  I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.

  When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it’s completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.

  With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go “uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you’re at it?”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft breaks Windows reset and recovery⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency… on Arch Linux. It’s rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org’s homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

  Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about “feeling superior” when you’re out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.

  I don’t see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that’s the only reasoning you’re willing to entertain… Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve completely missed the point.

  You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.

  HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation’s first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn’t nag with software updates, for music that can’t be “unlicensed” and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.

  The entire point of analog is that it’s “worse”. It’s un-clinical, it’s raw, it’s tactile, it’s physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don’t crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The hard part isn’t processing payment… They already basically do that for themselves with the steam wallet.

  The problem is getting the ability to withdraw funds from your customers’ bank accounts. That requires a commercial relationship with your customer’s bank and going through an insane amount of red tape. And there is no standard worldwide protocol for this, you’ll be starting from zero in every market by cold-calling major banks.

  The only viable approach is to have an army of salespeople, accountants, and project managers to do all those individual negotiations.

  The EU has been trying for years to have an indigenous continent-wide payment processor. The first attempt failed, now Wero is poised to succeed in the next few years but that’s building off negotiations that started a few years ago with pressure from the EU and buy-in from the financial sector, and still only a handful of European markets have been integrated at this point.

  Now imagine all this difficulty but you have to also get active buy-in from every market worldwide. There’s a reason Visa/MC have a near monopoly on international payments in the western world, and it’s not that no-one else thought to get a piece of that very juicy pie that’s making them literally billions in profit every year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone else guilty of this?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apples and oranges.

  '90s equivalent to “them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites” isn’t Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it’s Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful “classic” animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. “Impulse control” my ass, most of y’all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people “brain dead zombies” is such an “old man yells at cloud” moment, look at yourself.

  There’s more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tunic…

  The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don’t know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don’t say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.