I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.

In the FPS genre I’ve found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.

The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.

This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.

I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.

Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.

I have uBlock Origin but didn’t bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).

However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn’t get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason… I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.

Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.

I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.

It’s not about the bindings. It’s, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.

Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina’s breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.

… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.

You underestimate the sheer volume in my hippocampus dedicated to tracking tabs.

… Kidding, mostly. Because generally tabs are grouped together in a way that makes sense so it’s easy to remember. These 10 tabs are me researching a new tool… A couple tags for articles I will surely get to… Then these 15 tabs are documentation for XYZ… Those 5 tabs are YouTube videos I want to watch… These are three Wikipedia searches that popped in my head and oh look a couple songs I want to listen to before adding them to my playlist.

If I want to find a tab and they are fully minimized then I click on the group with the relevant icon then I Ctrl+Tab through them until I find what I want. Perfectly reasonable.

I swear it makes sense and bookmarks are not an adequate replacement.

ls -l /proc/xxx/{fd,syscall}

Camera pans down to resource locks hiding under the floorboards

Good news: where I live we don’t build our houses out of paper and spit and I’d find it very entertaining to see a critter eat through a solid 40 cm of bricks and mortar.

Bad news: Where I live there are no porcupines :(

Without good and realistic answers to how the long-term maintenance of such changes would be managed, it is myopically unrealistic to propose those changes

Lina is talking about a minor change though. It challenges the dominant paradigm but her opinion seems to be that it doesn’t have negative impact on the overall maintainability. To shift the discussion to maintainability is whataboutism; if these kernels maintainers can’t accept patches that do not have a negative impact on maintainability or directly involve Rust in any way because they are related to Rust in general, that’s disappointing tribalism regardless of your opinions on Rust or Rust developers.

I might be missing some context here as I’m only going off what Lina has said, but if half of it is true then we need to shift attitudes before talking about how to integrate Rust in the kernel ecosystem. It certainly feels very disingenuous and retrograde to present Rust as some kind of existential threat rather than a novelty or opportunity, as if no combination of processes and tools could ever possibly overcome the stated maintainability challenges.

The vibes I got in the other thread about Wedson’s announcement is that the concerns may be valid but there are indeed a handful of contributors who are aggressively shouting down Rust contributor’s efforts to set up the processes you outlined based on hard prejudice. The video Wedson posted was hard to watch. From the outside looking in it looks to be way more about ego than any particular technical roadblock.

Furthermore Lina’s concerns here are only broader what you are saying:

When I wrote the DRM scheduler abstractions, I ran into many memory safety issues caused by bad design of the underlying C code. The lifetime requirements were undocumented and boiled down to “design your driver like amdgpu to make it work, or else”.

My driver is not like amdgpu, it fundamentally can’t work the same way. When I tried to upstream minor fixes to the C code to make the behavior more robust and the lifetime requirements sensible, the maintainer blocked it and said I should just do “what other drivers do”.

Mainlining memory safety improvements, in C, for C code should be welcomed and it is very concerning if she indeed got shunned because the end goal was to offer lifetime guarantees (which to my admittedly non-expert eye sounds like it would be a good thing for memory safety in general).

The concern from those contributors (and we might soon see the same in QEMU) is that these bindings are essentially a weaponization which forces the great majority of contributors to learn Rust or drop out. Essentially a hostile takeover.

Seems like a moral panic over absolutely nothing (where are the Rust developers allegedly forcing people to learn Rust? all I’ve seen in these threads today is Rust developers asking for an open mind and a willingness to collaborate), and that the response to this “concern” is to block any and all changes that might benefit Rust adoption is really concerning (but unfortunately not unsurprising) behavior.

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

It’s the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid “win” when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

I don’t play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you’ll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn’t feel like improvement.

Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.

In 2022 she announced she was diagnosed with a neurological disorder (SPS) and hasn’t performed in public in 4 years. She delivered such an incredible vocal performance against all expectations.

Uh, they originally weren’t paid. They were paid for.

Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).

However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.

Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.