azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Wants Judge to Break Up Google, Force Sale of Chrome: Here's What to Know⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It was all a lie, wasn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.