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@network_switch@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Proton freezes Swiss investment over surveillance fears 1 week ago:
It just needs a dark theme. Work computer is powerful enough that I can run local models and use it occasionally. A cloud one that’s just using similar open models as what you can easily download is fine to me.
Proton does have aot of work to do understandable to people’s annoyance with them. Lack of Linux Drive application but they’ve released alpha/beta API for Drive. Drive performance isn’t great yet. The Docs feature is pretty barebones for now. Calendar is too simple for power users. Regardless for now they’re the closest privacy centric replacement for Google services
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
You’re a dick. Hope you get better
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago
Lose access to the major payment processors and they’ll lose far more than 7%. Until there’s a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it’s an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they’d lose without support of major payment processors.
The way things are going, there’s going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don’t use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There’s a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like
- Comment on Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support (But Still Bound By Slow Hardware) 2 weeks ago:
Whenever it seems like people are saying there’s a solid RVA23 dev board out there, I’ll buy it especially if it has a pcie slot on it
- Comment on Crypto sector breaches $4 trillion in market value during pivotal week 2 weeks ago:
It’s to pander go conspiracy theorist. Not that a digital currency isn’t a privacy nightmare and a potential powerful tool for control, but I think the reality is that every country in the world will eventually shift over to a digital first based currency/finance system rather than the current Frankenstein of old paper banking with digital services stapled on top. It would be more forward thinking to legislate requirements for privacy and limits on government actions towards account freezes and seizures for digital currency accounts
- Comment on Mass Effect 5 is "still in pre-production" says director as BioWare shifts full focus to the sci-fi RPG amid dev reshuffles and reported layoffs 2 weeks ago:
So 2030 at best for a new game
Bioware dodged making a milky way game after ME3 and didn’t make anything compelling for andromeda. 2030+, 18+ years after ME3 release, got to keep any expectations super low especially after Veilguard happened where that at least had the David Gaider lore bible to finish off the plot threads of the first 3 games. Bioware characters and multigame plots from scratch modern Bioware, that is not an exciting prospect
- Comment on ROG Xbox Ally Is $700 And Xbox Ally X Is $1050 3 weeks ago:
I’m guessing maybe having the Xbox branding entails some certification fee? Also is the base Z2 supposed to be stronger than the Z1 Extreme? It’ll be rough to compete with older Z1 Extreme handhelds and presumably any of the Z2 family of chips that come with SteamOS
- Comment on EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects 3 weeks ago:
I tried to play through Unbound and I couldn’t deal with the writing. It was “hello fellow kids” to me which I feel has been a worsening problem with video game writing since Borderlands 2. Even worse with it feels to me like video game writing really tried to moralize moral grey’s or bad behavior or make characters not just people that want to go fast, make money, feel cool, getting in trouble with the law for going an incredibly dangerous for anyone in your vicinity speed disobeying traffic signals, probably associated with organized and just trying to survive, …, they’re actually people just trying to express themselves and find community of deep down kind and good people
Also I felt like I was playing rich/sheltered kids ideas of street racing and people that live in the night. Way too idealistic. Should be way more cutthroat, emotional burnouts just trying to go fast as their happy/thrill place. The sheltered/rich kids fantasy comes to mind when games try to make living among graffiti and gangs as like living among street art and community health organizations. It’s the digital nomad view of local (underground) cultures
- Comment on EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects 3 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t know how to fix the series so that it’d sell. Same as burnout. The arcade open world racing game with a sterile storyline is dominated by Forza Horizon. Cop chases don’t seem to spark excitement like before the PS3 era. Street racing doesn’t seem to spark excitement like the pre-PS3 era. I’m thinking every game after NFS Carbon hasn’t been able to capture any sense of mystique of street racing and that just may be that street racing isn’t culturally significant anymore. Fast and the Furious isn’t about street racing anymore
With Forza Motorsport seemingly on the way out, there’s room for a multiplatform Gran Turismo competitor. Something that’s gamepad centric rather than wheel. Seems just as hard to resonate with gamers as these other racing games though
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 3 weeks ago:
It the country wasn’t so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I’d imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren’t so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech
It isn’t even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it’s political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it’s really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology
If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 3 weeks ago:
Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 3 weeks ago:
Tariffs be damned, I will not buy an American brand car. They’ve been mediocre my whole life and it’s always been easier to source parts for Hondas and Toyotas. I’m not sure how repairable any EV is, but I doubt American brands will top the charts of value in repairability in my lifetime
- Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not 3 weeks ago:
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
…
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users. Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on 'Xbox Hardware Is Dead,' Says Founding Team Member, 'It Looks Like Xbox Has No Desire — Or Literally Can't — Ship Hardware Anymore' - IGN 4 weeks ago:
I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.
They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation
Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise
- Comment on Randy Pitchford asks fans if they'd swallow future Borderlands exclusivity deals, almost 10,000 people say just put your damn games on Steam 4 weeks ago:
Pitchford is the only person in the industry that seems to love the smell of their own farts as much as Tim Sweeney
- Comment on Windows seemingly lost 400 million users in the past three years — official Microsoft statements show hints of a shrinking user base 4 weeks ago:
Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I’ve seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email
At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you’d regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures
Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it
Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker
Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux
Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else
To me there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.
Then there’s national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn’t seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now
Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming
Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal
- Comment on Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp 1 month ago:
Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users
- Comment on Tough, Tiny, and Totally Repairable: Inside the Framework 12 1 month ago:
I would guess he’s thinking money. Design, production line, and legal are all going to be extremely expensive. Bezos is a name and face but if you replace his name with JP Morgan Chase, BNY Mellon , Blackrock, etc is there really that big of a difference. The large financial institutions have done far more for far longer to people all around the world
- Comment on WhatsApp is officially getting ads 1 month ago:
It’s a slow grind for adoption. I’ve had Signal installed on my phone since like 2016. Went from one person I knew to now about ~30. It’s mostly people from work at tech companies but progressively I’ve noticed other industries employees adopting it for unofficial chat that my contacts list has been growing over the years. Probably won’t take off in a few years. Maybe another decade
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
I have one. I think it’s too big. It’s fine if I’m playing with my elbows rested on something but anytime my elbows aren’t backed by something, it’s not ideal. And then whenever I travel, with a case it is bulky. I got a Switch 2 and that feels great to carry around regardless of less ergonomic hand grips
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
Real just need Steam Deck performance and screen size but like 100-200 grams lighter. I’m guessing once AMD starts churning out 3nm UDNA APUs will be the time for PC handhelds to go a lot more mainstream. FSR4 will be a great boon for low powered gaming
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
I’m pretty sure people have been playing Tales of Berseria on Steam Decks for 3 years and it still says unsupported. Seems perfect to me
- Comment on VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website. 1 month ago:
I’m pretty satisfied as a subscriber. Slowly using proton mail for more and more important accounts. Constant usage of the VPN. Trying to use the calendar more but still haven’t broken my Google Calendar habits. Proton Drive I use over google; I just need a Linux desktop application. Proton pass, still haven’t given that a go. Comfortable with KeepassXC and managing the backups myself. Proton Docs, it’s OK. Solid start. Hoping that notes partnership/acquisition eventually replaces Google Keep for me as a cloud notes application. I have pretty strong confidence now in the company regardless of the slow Linux developments
- Comment on iFixit says the Switch 2 is even harder to repair than the original 1 month ago:
Friends with Switchs to play Smash Bros and Mario Party. Occasional Nintendo game but everything else PC. It’s lighter than almost every PC handheld. The Ayaneo Air 1S is lighter but has a 5.5" display
I have a PC handheld but they’re all too heavy in my opinion. The holy grail to me is a Steam Deck that’s about the same weight as a Switch 2 or lighter. 7" display
- Comment on Nintendo warns Switch 2 GameChat users: “Your chat is recorded” 1 month ago:
The first time some coworkers told me things they discussed with other work friends over the internal chat service, I was in shock over the stupidity
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 1 month ago:
For me the trouble has always been interactions with other people. It’s way better than 10 years ago. Just LibreOffices ribbon interface looks so much better today than 5 years ago. File compatibility is just going to be a continued growing pain until LibreOffice hits a major marketshare