zetanor

Even if you're putting in 10-20 hours a week, you still have to pick what you play. When Backloggery was more popular, it was quite common to see profiles with dozens or hundreds of "I want to play this when I have the time".

Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.

>It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to.

Strange sentiment, which is well past the massification and gamesjournalismification of video games. By then, cover shooters were just a bad memory and most serious hobbyists had for a long time embraced both indies (Braid, in 2009) and older titles (Braid, in 2015, when the article was published).

It is indeed malicious compliance: https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en

I have to assume that this is the work of some contractor (Intracom?). Every cookie could be removed (analytics, etc.; and does europa.eu really need to embed a dozen of American services instead of just using <video>?), and the necessary ones could be consented to at the point of creation without any general interruption ("[ ] Remember Me (stores a 30-day cookie)" during the login flow).

The near-ubiquitous malicious compliance that took place during the implementation of GDPR (i.e., displaying consent modals instead of just not sending visitors' personal information to 93 third party services) at least had the benefit of bringing to light just how much web service providers view their users as things to be bought and sold. I doubt that text watermarking will result in much of anything at all, besides additional expense.

It had to be restricted after someone started using a complete Wikipedia database dump as a password.

The bottom quintile (of stock, not of class) has always been society's problem. What changed is how they're dealt with.

So they don't view humans as fungible economic units? That's very backward.

I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect, sometimes I'm too lazy to reprompt, so I'll just write back "It's not Y" and it'll answer "wow omg you're so absolutely right, Y is not X!!! here's X instead."

This wasn't great, but then I started catching myself writing "It's not Y" responses to colleagues on Teams. I'm pretty sure I've caught all of these and never actually sent them (I did go and review a few chat logs recently and found no such sent message), but my point is that despite my relatively light LLM usage, I am "LLM-conditioned." The abyss stares back. There could be a lot of deeply "LLM-brained" people out there.

The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.

Government jobs attract all the wrong people.

Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?

Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.

Call me cynical, but I've long stopped taking the time to report minor edge case bugs if I can't also provide a solution or patch, as such reports usually get ignored or sit at the bottom of a bugtracker forever. I likely didn't realize that deSEC was a FOSS stack at the time, or I might have looked into the zone file parsing further.

As for the zone file based workflow requiring zone deletion/recreation, perhaps a report/discussion would have led to something, but I was in the middle of testing managed DNS providers to get rid of my BIND servers and I didn't have any investment in deSEC, so it didn't occur to me to take the time. My initial post on here was less lamentation and more conveying personal experience to (possibly) save someone else some time.

In any case, none of these things were showstoppers for me (I went to another (paid) provider because I need very short TTL on some records for testing purposes), but I'm glad you took the time to look into the parser; it almost certainly will benefit others.

The COVID library wasn't even the first time they had book lending on the Archive. I remember at least a couple of different prior borrowing mechanisms. But besides books, JS/WASM emulators were added a long time ago to run game console ROMs directly in the browser on any collection that happens to contain them. There's probably other examples, but nothing else comes to mind right now.

I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".

I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

A problem there is needing to temporarily delete the entire domain just to update using a zone file. I don't manage the DNS for anything remotely critical, but if I did, it would be unacceptable. Either way, the workflow feels deeply incorrect (though most users likely will use the record editor or the API instead; even I'd use the API through DNSControl, now).

Logging back into deSEC right now, it seems like the parser does work better than it used to, but TTL inheritance is still spotty. As an extreme example, the following input:

    @   7777 IN SOA  x. x. 1 9999 9999 9999 9999
                A    203.0.113.1
        4444    AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www         A 203.0.113.1

... correctly gets parsed by BIND (with the addition of a dummy NS record) as:

    @   7777 IN A    203.0.113.1
    @   4444 IN AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www 4444 IN A    203.0.113.1

... but deSEC parses:

    @   9999 IN A    203.0.113.1
    @   4444 IN AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www 9999 IN A    203.0.113.1

... where 9999 is a $TTL value from a different zone file, from a different domain, that I'd imported in a completely different session. The value is permanently (?) stuck to the entire account. This is ultimately almost a squabble since there's simple workarounds, but it did affect me when I used deSEC, and it's the sort of problem that I constantly run into with other managed DNS services too.

Hopefully this helps in some way.

When I last tried deSEC, the service was reliable and well worth the price of admission, but the web UI and API were both quite rough, and propagation tended to be quite slow. It was annoying to do an ACME DNS01 challenge on it, for example. IIRC, the API didn't have a complete set of replace/edit endpoints, so even DNSControl (https://github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol) would leave records nonexistent for a while while during updates.

As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.

I'm sorry that you have to be around Germans, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, and—worst of all—the French. Nobody should ever go through that.

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone

I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.

On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?

I suppose there might be a way to sign up for the alternative billing scheme:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

but make sure to "pay the relevant Play service fee, starting October 1, 2026."

Very cool, Google.

I'm expressing disappointment in many things.

I would prefer that people post their own works to their own websites, but that's a pipe dream. As far as X is concerned, I would prefer that it behave more like 2010 Twitter and less like 2020 Twitter, but I can deal with the differences. I'm ambivalent about anyone posting on X over the Fediverse, Bluesky, Medium, Substack, here, Reddit or whatever else; it's all bad. I'll log in wherever I need to, except maybe Facebook and TikTok.

It's both funny and sad that despite several malicious actions like this, despite wasting a ton of Twitter's social capital and despite years of broken promises (e.g., dealing with bots, bringing back free speech, ending algo/report manipulation), none of the writers and artists whose work I enjoy have even attempted to move away. I mostly just read there, but presumably posters feel bound to their social network. Maybe the site really was worth $44B.

The current state of things makes the problem seem worse than it is, but it is not a simple problem. Should a post about "L'acteur Gérard Philipe" be found by a search for "gerard", without the accent, through collation? Probably, but should quoted/verbatim searches also do collation? How about the non-verbatim but misspelled "gérard philippe"? What if the search has a correct spelling, but not the page? What if the search is for "ジェラール", or if the page only has the name "ジェラール", especially if the user specifies that they can read Japanese? Should "acteur" find "l'acteur", and vice-versa? How about "comédien gérard", even though "comédien" does not appear on the page? Should a search for a "theater" find "theatre", and vice-versa?

More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?

I suppose someone could have done

  [class^="btn-"], [class*=" btn-"]

which would have equally thrown you off, but I do agree that encouraging this is unfortunate.

The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store

I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.

Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.

Thought this was going to be Wordle for how to download something correctly using wget.

If you can get replaced over something so minor, it means there's dozens of capable bootlickers lined up and ready to do it as soon as you're gone, so yes, there is a webdev problem.

"No."

If every webdev who would say no can be trivially replaced by webdevs who won't say no, then yes, it is webdevs.

The EU said "you have to ask for permission before forcefully sodomizing your users", and webdevs thought "let's ask for permission" rather than "let's not forcefully sodomize our users". Of course, the law could have said "don't forcefully sodomize users", but it seems the west is still under the impression that some people will do the right thing, just because, sometimes. (maybe 20 years ago they would have, just because, sometimes, but they won't now)

I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.