• 8 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

    I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.


  • I agree that the steam machine was too early.

    I don’t know how it could ever start from zero without having to go through a growing stage. I think it was just necessary to have modest expectations, and so far as I can tell, valve partnered with third party vendors and didn’t lose $$$ on it.

    Moreover, the downstream effect has been to set the foundation for the Steam Deck, which has been a smashing success. It just takes time to build up a mature ecosystem.




  • My Puxl was from eBay.

    To be honest, I don’t know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it’s not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

    I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can’t distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

    But this is all speculation on my part. I just don’t know and I haven’t made whatever precautions would be needed.




  • Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

    However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.


  • I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

    Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.







  • I wholeheartedly agree. I’m glad that Amazon wanted to be ambitious, but there’s so much great fiction out there that hasn’t yet been adapted, even of other Tolkien stuff such as the Silmarillion (not exactly a story but still plenty of rich details about the world).

    I will say, it at least goes down smooth as turn-your-brain-off entertainment if you are looking for something that just looks nice. A lower bar to clear, but I liked having something to fall back to when I ran out of House of the Dragon.



  • And again, that’s not even within an country mile of being a good faith attempt at charitable interpretation, for several reasons.

    You’re twisting their words into some sort seemingly overnight goodbye to all software relying on third party libs. A more normal way of taking that is envisioning a more gradual progression to some future state of affairs, where to the greatest extent possible we’ve worked to create an ecosystem that meets our needs. An ecosystem that’s build on a secure foundation of known and overseen libraries that conform to the greatest extent possible to the FOSS vision. Ideally you don’t just say goodbye, you work to create ersatz replacements, which there’s a rich tradition of in the FOSS world.

    Your other point was even worse:

    important software shouldn’t reuse code already made, they should reinvent the wheel and in the process introduce unique vulnerabilities

    Somehow, you decided that putting words in their mouth about going out of their way to solve the problem only with worst-case-scenario bad software development practices (e.g. lets go ahead and create unique vulnerabilities and never re-use code) is a reasonable way of reading them, which is completely nuts. FOSS can and does re-use code, and should continue to do so to the extent possible. And like all other software, strive to avoid vulnerabilities with their usual procedures. That’s not really an argument against anything specific to their suggestion so much as its an argument against developing any kind of software at any point in time - new games, new operating systems, re-implementations seeking efficiency and security, etc. These all face the same tradeoffs with efficient code usage and security. Nothing more or less than that is being talked about here.