Americans: “Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we’re all out of ideas.”

Thousands of kids died for Americans’ right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

“American ideals”? All bark, no bite. You’ll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don’t huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y’all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.

Classful IPv4 was obsoleted 32 years ago. Only 8 years left before it’s literally older than a standard career.

It’s fascinating the sheer inertia that leads formally-trained IT professionals to use and perpetuate such profoundly useless and obsolete nomenclature. You’d think that having an incorrect use of the term “class A” and not having any use for classes B and C would tip off academia that they should cordon off classful networking to the “History of Computing” course next to ARPANET.

Maybe next time someone refers to 10.0.0.0/8 as a Class A network I’ll refer to it as the ARPANET Network. That’s only very slightly more anachronistic (3 years).

What do you mean what was the plan?

This is the new CEO, spinning into “stripping Intel off for parts” mode.

The previous CEOs (Brian Krzanich, Bob Swan, and Pat Gelsinger) meanwhile made more money than you or I will ever make on maximizing short-term profits by refusing to invest into competitive levels of R&D.

That has always been the plan. If you want to figure out why Intel paid 3 CEOs millions to shoot itself in the foot, then one has to start investigating the board of directors since 2013-ish. They’re either inside traders, incompetent, or both.

Intel, Boeing, and the Big Three are emblematic of the ultimate decline of American capitalism post-2008. They inherited empires and had virtually unlimited state welfare and still fucked it up because halfway decent corporate governance is apparently a bigger challenge for these big companies than building airplanes the size of buildings or mass-printing circuits with sub-micrometer resolution.

Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?

IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.

Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.

Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.

It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.

(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.

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.

Half the time I realize the parenthesis works better as a separate sentence, preceding the original sentence, because I’d gone “Thought (context).” instead of “Context; thought.”

But then I start writing “thought (context1; small tangent; context2 (sub-context)). Follow-up thought (…” and it’s a damn Chinese puzzle trying to put back flat and in the right-order.

It doesn’t have the worst of google apps, but it still runs Play Services with all its opaqueness and potential spyware. So Gemini should hopefully not be an issue but GrapheneOS would still be nice to have.

So my Fairphone is not supported because the security updates aren’t good enough. Serves me right trying to find an ethical approach to mobile computing.

I understand GrapheneOS’ philosophy but buying a google product to get away from google software is certainly… a choice. Refurbished or not buying a Pixel would serve Google’s interests, nevermind the fact that I bought my current phone a couple years ago hoping to get close to a decade of use out of it.

Realistically software freedom on mobile phones is doomed until the industry improves the firmware situation. Every project suffers from severe drawbacks because of it.

A key feature of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or Louis XIV, keeping the court close like this is an absolutely essential part of holding on to power. For one they’re too busy with the king to have time to get bored and start scheming against him. For two the courtesans are around each other and competing for attention so they scheme against each other instead. We know that Trump listens to his advisors very haphazardly; it keeps them on their toes, constantly begging for attention (even if the end result is unbelievable political flip-flopping, that’s irrelevant to Trump himself).

People have this image of the Third Reich as super organized, but in reality the top command was a complete mess as everybody was trying to backstab each other and to please Hitler who didn’t necessarily even have a clue what was going on. The utter incompetence of Nazi leadership was always going to cost them the war, but it did keep Hitler in power until the very end even though the outcome of the war was long considered inevitable by his own generals.

Putin does the same. Remember the feud between Wagner guy and Shoigu? Putin intentionally encourages internal squabbles because it means in an environment where everyone mostly hates everyone, the only consistent loyalty is to him.

Anyway, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about Mr. biggest-nuclear-arsenal-on-the-planet going at a Hitler speedrun, but the only saving grace right now is that the whole thing is an inefficient mess and a large chunk (but not all) of them are too dumb to be truly dangerous. When he starts exclusively listening to his war hawks or the project 2025 guys… We’re fucked.

At the end of the day these are commodity items. It’s reasonable for consumers to buy whatever’s cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.

The solution can’t come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can’t be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.

The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don’t often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can’t buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore… So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.

Relevant for England but not Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

A good metaphor for Brexit I guess.

Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.

Anecdotally I haven’t seen a plug in Belgium that didn’t have them that also wasn’t ancient. Dunno if the RGIE requires it, I can’t be arsed to find out, but the risk/reward for manufacturers considering lawsuits probably tips it in favor of safety given how inexpensive the mechanism is.

Also it is worth noting that the plug hole is much smaller on EU outlets than NEMA, and recessed. Even with exposed conductors it would take a determined toddler to find something small enough to reach inside (basically a needle or small screwdriver which they should not be playing with to begin with).

EU plugs designed in the past 50 years also have half-exposed pins and EU sockets from the past 30 years also have little rubber flaps that only open if they’re pressed both at the same time (I’ve tried it, it works really well, I couldn’t get a singular multimeter prong in my outlet until I used the second prong). There are no exposed live conductors anywhere in my house.

Nowadays the main practical difference between EU and UK plugs is the “lack” of a fuse, except any semi-modern appliance that could make use of a fuse should include one internally. In every other situation circuit breakers work fine, UK plugs have fuses because they historically couldn’t rely on the circuit breaker existing.

Nowadays the regulatory focus is not on plugs, which are fine, but on GFCI. Gotta put one 30 mA differential per electrical circuit in kitchens/bathrooms and a whole house 300 mA differential. That’s a much safer way to detect electrocution than wait until several amps have been going through the plug because all you’re getting by the time the fuse trips is a fried person sandwich.

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.

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.

It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.

Yeah it’s Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can’t easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it’s apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

My computer desktop follows the same principle. I’ll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it’s much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.