499 karma · joined March 16, 2015
It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon federation—kind of like not having the freedom to block someone on Twitter.
It's true that attackers can take precautions against this, but that also makes their attack harder to carry out.
Yeah, I totally understand his attitude on this. I'm not a daily Linux user myself and it's been about a year since I last tried it so please take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but all the times I've tried it out and set up my dev environment, I've run into issues which the forum or Stack usually tells me to resolve using the command line.
It's not that I personally mind using the command line, since I use it all day long as a programmer, but there have been plenty of times where I don't feel it's "warranted". People shouldn't be forced to touch the command line unless it's really necessary.
In general whenever I try out Linux I run into a lot of things in the UI that seem just plain strange and not quite right, even though I understand you can't expect things to work the way you're used to on a different system.
Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence.
Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate?
Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use.
The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.
It's pretty much unfathomable that you could build a standard that would allow for the kind of seamless interoperability that's being promised. You'd either end up with an outrageously complicated standard that's completely impractical to make use of, or you force people into a very stringent set of artificial limitations. That's assuming you are capable of tackling the unknown technical challenge that lies ahead, which is entirely in uncharted territory since no one has ever been stupid enough to try this.
Someone was telling me earlier about how in the Metaverse you could, for example, get a character skin for Fortnite and then use that in Roblox too. When I hear that the alarm bells start ringing. Even if we assume that this just works, and all issues related to implementation magically don't exist, Roblox looks absolutely nothing like Fortnite and any skin carried over from there will look totally out of place.
Actually, what if you have an avatar from a more adult oriented game and use it in a kids' game like Roblox? Is there gonna be a standard for what's acceptable that we should assume every vendor will follow to the letter?
But no worry, I'm told, this Metaverse annoucement just means they're going to start researching these problems and working on them from an architecture and standards viewpoint, and so the answers will eventually present itself. So, basically, this amounts to a promise to commit resources to an R&D project of unknown scope and duration to ROI, with largely uncrystallized use cases and exclusively commercial entities as arbiter of how the standards will look and lots of investor cash, all just so we can do things we can basically already do better with conventional technology at a significantly lower CO2 expenditure.
It's really nothing more than a giant investor cash sink that's going to keep a lot of people busy for decades and then fizzle out. Years later people might ask why the hell we ever fell for this nonsense, but we didn't: this is just how capitalism works now.
It's completely disingenuous to suggest that recognizing the horrors of an oppressive nation-state equates to some sort of bigotry against the country itself.
Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show.
But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible.
And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable.
What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.
Even in cases where nothing too important goes missing, cropped video just looks really off. Oftentimes you'll see the tops of heads cut off at the top of the frame, or small details just on the verge of being visible. If something is framed just off center, the cropped version will show it very off center.
Just look at this shot, for example: https://imgur.com/KKiMbWP - nothing is missing, but the right character's bottom half is completely out of frame and it just looks incredibly weird. The floor also is totally invisible so you lose your sense of grounding.
It's just a complete lack of respect for the hard work that went into creating these shows.
When something like this "just works" it's easy to fall victim to the belief that it's irrelevant, but that's just because it exists in the background.
I sincerely hope you will not remove RSS support because it's an easy way to monitor publicly visible updates from all kinds of sites without needing to implement their APIs. I've got a bot that monitors Youtube accounts via RSS and posts updates to a Discord. Writing the code took only about a half hour because parsing RSS feeds is literally a single call to a library.
To me, RSS/Atom is one of the original promises of the web: a freely accessible network of information from all over the world in a standardized open format that anyone can use. Takes practically zero time to implement because libraries will do the work for you. @intenttoship is already lamenting the fact they're going to have to write a screen scraper now.
What's happening is that the <h3> tags are all nested, since they don't auto-close in this situation, and modern browsers define the <h3>'s size as "font-size: 1.17em;" which of course adds up over time. I'm not sure how IE5 interprets the page. Maybe I can get an older embedded version of Firebug to check.
I think it's important to not break even older websites even if they have totally busted HTML, but this is probably such a rare case that no one ever thought of it, and at this point it'd probably be much more disruptive to try and "fix" it.
Regardless of whether it is, you can really tell the hypocrisy. Medicine is a vastly more protected profession than engineer. The article states about 80% of engineers nationwide work legally without a license. That would be unthinkable for any form of medical work.
And yet, there are vastly more people giving out medical advice without a license, and even performing all kinds of quack procedures like faith healing as replacement for medical science.
Some retired engineer talking about his profession while technically not having a license is an absolutely minuscule problem, if it even is one, compared to the reprehensible alternative medicine industry.
English is one of the two official languages of Ireland.
Either way, I think everything you've said is basically beside the point because English is the primary international language of the business and science worlds. That's why virtually all airports everywhere in the world have English signage and announcements, that's why many international university lectures are in English. It's very practical.
For better or for worse, that's how it is, and choosing another language based on some principle of neutrality (which certainly won't really be neutral, because anyone's definition of neutrality will be biased) is going against the flow. Something like Esperanto would actually be an especially terrible choice given that there's almost no one who speaks it and virtually no entertainment media that uses it, which makes it far more difficult to learn.
Learning languages is hard enough as it is. As someone who lived in Tokyo and studied Japanese full time, it's something you really need to be motivated for to make it work.
But a much bigger problem is presymptomatic transmission, which is why this disease was able to spread so steadily. Aside from that, there are people with symptoms that are so minor they never even consider themselves sick (although hopefully today people are more vigilant about this).
> I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads on freenode that they are being harassed and are at risk of being canceled if they do not leave, to Libera. This activity does not belong in FOSS. Stop it.
lmfao sure, why not? Claim to be a victim of "cancel culture", and that people moving to Libera are just being forced to do so by the evil SJW cabal (no, we're not giving you any proof).
This whole pathetic statement from Lee on the website really says a lot about what type of person he is.
> Sadly, some time ago, a holding company, Freenode Limited, was sold or transferred in some way to a third party by our previous head of staff
Apparently the third party is called Private Internet Access (PIA), according to other posts. Who's the previous head of staff, and how did they have the authority to sell Freenode Ltd.? How long ago did it happen? Was this ever announced or discussed among other staff, and are the exact details of the deal even known by anyone else?
Someone else also asked this, but, what are the "recent changes"? To what end is the third party company exerting control?
It feels to me like someone was at some point put in charge of Freenode, and then decided they could make a buck off of it. If that's the case then the "hostile takeover" already happened long ago the moment that person decided to sell it. But there are so many unanswered questions here that I can't be sure of anything. It's a totally vague and confusing letter, and it alludes to all sorts of troubling things without ever clearly stating exactly what they are.
Maybe in a little while all the drafts get published and we'll actually learn exactly what's going on. But then maybe there's something I'm missing, so if anyone knows please let me know.
Ultimately I quit doing that and installed an ad blocker because I felt there wasn't really any point to knowing this. It's the same story on every commercial site, and there's nothing I could do about it anyway.
Like, yeah, lots of industrial waste comes from developing countries where the major production centers are, mostly in Asia. But the people sharing that image should ask themselves where those products go after they're made. A huge amount of that production is for the richer Western countries, and that does make it your responsibility if you live there.
This is how industrialized countries lower their CO2 output as well: just outsource it other countries. Under the Paris Agreement, countries are only held responsible for emissions that occur within its borders. It's just another way for the greatest consumers to be able to shrug and say "not our fault".
Some parsers intentionally support subsets of the spec for this reason, and there's multiple specs (like 1.2 which dropped support for things like 'no' to mean false), but that also just means you need to be 100% certain your parser is set up correctly. It's just not worth the extra headache to me.
Eventually they stopped asking him to come because he couldn't get anything done, and so I had a look at it. In the Movie Clip library of the project I found he had an empty text field somewhere that was configured to include a copy of almost the entire Unicode range, including thousands of CJK characters, so each time you built the SWF it would collect and compress numerous different scripts from different fonts as vectors for use by the program. And it wasn't even being used by anything.
Once I removed that one empty text field, builds went down to about ~3 seconds.
It's the same with, say, the massive fires in Australia that were in the news late last year. People rightly point out that there have been large fires in the past too. That's correct, and no one is disputing this. People then conclude that, since there were massive fires in the past, there's nothing new about it and therefore the climate crisis is just pointless alarmism. That's totally incorrect. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with how dire the situation is.
The thing about climate change is that what were once extreme freak events are now becoming commonplace. Extreme temperatures are becoming normal temperatures. Massive wildfires are far more likely to occur. Warmer oceans means more heat energy available for the formation of tropical cyclones.
I mean, honestly, do you really think that the entire scientific community of the planet did not consider the fact there were extremely hot days in the past?
If you want to ridicule the basic science behind climate change, you'll need to understand it first, instead of assuming you've found a loophole that invalidates everything that everybody in the world missed.
The fact of the matter is that we're all in extreme trouble. So are you. So is everyone. It can not be overstated how bad the situation is. But rather than face that, people would rather choose to believe they're such geniuses that they can invalidate the entire scientific community's decades long work by a gotcha.
Of course, it gets really hairy really quickly. Technically, a perfect runahead/negative latency requires ([all possible input states] to the power of [amount of frames of lookahead]) frames to be rendered.
A single player NES game has 8 binary state controller buttons, so 2 to the power of 8 input states. You need to render 256 frames for each frame of runahead.
Now surely you're thinking you'll just prune the set of possible input states through smart prediction of what the player will probably do next, but it doesn't matter. The number very quickly grows to ludicrous amounts of processing for anything that isn't an antiquated console. Let alone for 3D FPSes that use float values for e.g. mouse state.
Edit: and I should add that if they even try to do this, the amount of CO2 they'll waste is going to be horrifying.
Check out some of the Games Done Quick runs from last summer on Youtube, for example. A lot of the FPS games especially look dreadful. I'm sure Stadia can do better, but there's only so much bandwidth you can throw at this problem before it becomes untenable: https://twitter.com/dada78641/status/1207751665752911872
To me, the main issue with Stadia is not the product itself but the massive amount of extra CO2 that's generated trying to solve all these issues that were already solved decades ago by having your own cpu in your own personal computer in your own house.
This is an apt observation and completely true, except now I can't help but imagine my frames getting stuck in between the closing train doors.
* If Facebook is "changing" the BSD license, why is the BSD license included verbatim and in full?
* Also, why does the PATENTS file explicitly state that it is an "ADDITIONAL grant of patent rights"?
* Why don't I see comments like the one I originally replied to being posted on articles pertaining to Apache? They have almost exactly the same wording in their statement.
I'll believe claims of Facebook "changing the BSD license" when they actually change the BSD license.