Yes, I don’t think it’s just about the execution of Win32 code, but also the possibility of MS using marketing techniques and dirty manipulation methods to give themselves advantages within the Windows platform to sway the general public to their store in a similar manner as how they push their browser, their MS Teams communication platform, their One Drive Cloud Storage, their search engine, their data-collection tech, their assistant, etc.

Content curated by “the core geeks and nerds” might appeal to “geeks and nerds”, not to those consumers.

They want “consumer” content. And if one day they get tired of it then I doubt any amount of “steak” would have stopped them leaving anyway, since that was never what they were looking for. It’s not like reddit has to be the only place they visit in the internet, nor is the internet their only source of consumption. Just because you go to a snack bar does not mean that’s the only place you go for meals.

If you are into open source, give Remnants of the precursors a try, it’s a modern spiritual successor of the oldie Master of Orion.

Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.

I don’t care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.

You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking… but the opinions of the people running those things don’t matter so long as they keep being reliable.

I have contributed to other projects without really needing to get involved in their community in any personal/parasocial level, though.

I just make a pull request and when the code was good it was accepted, when not it got rejected. Sometimes I’ve had to make changes before it getting merged, but I had no need to engage in discussions on discord or anything like that. I’ve been in some mailing lists to keep track on some projects, but never really engaged deeply, specially if it goes off-topic.

If I find that a good code contribution is rejected for whatever toxic reason, then the consequence of that is the code would stop being as good as it could have (because of the contributions being rejected/slowed down), so it’s then that forking might be in order. Of course the code matters.

To his point: if not “discuss”, what is the correct approach against fascism? war and murder? dismiss it, try to “cancel it” without giving any arguments so it can continue to fester on its own and keep growing in opposition?

To me, fascism is a stupid position that doesn’t make much sense, to the point that it falls on itself the moment you “discuss” it.

I would have expected that it would be the fascists the ones unable/unwilling to discuss their position, since it’s the least rational one. So it’s certainly very jarring whenever I hear people jumping to defend against fascism while at the same time stopping in their tracks when it comes to discussing it. Even if those unable to reason might not be convinced by our arguments, anyone with reason would. Rejecting discussion does a disservice, because it does put off those willing to listen and strengthens those who didn’t really want an argument anyway.

Like flat-earthers, they should be challenged with reason, with discussion. Not dismissed as if it were true that there’s a huge conspiracy against them. Whether they listen or not to that reason, dehumanizing them and rejecting civil and rational discourse would play in favor of their movement.

Stating “genocide is bad” should NOT be a statement of faith. Faith is the shakiest of the grounds, if we are unable to articulate the specific reasons that make genocide be bad, then we are condemned to see it repeat itself. So, I’d argue it’s for the sake of the victims in Auschwitz that antifascism should not be turned into a religion, but into a solid and rational position that’s not distorted nor used willy-nilly.

The thing is that we do have “Morning!”, “Hello”, “Hey”, “Yo!”, “Hi!”… and many other greetings that are not in the form of a question that actually leaves it open for the other person to respond with honesty and that is often also used as a conversation starter. If you really aren’t open to a conversation, use one of the shorter friendly greetings.

If I say “how’s it going?” and they answer with something I don’t have time to hear… at most I would excuse myself and politelly say that I don’t have too much time to talk… but complaining about the other person actually answering truthfully makes no sense.

Of course it’s just a comic, but still… I don’t think the one answering is in the wrong here.

“you want a government backdoor on GPL licensed code? publish the backdoor for everyone to use, see and exploit/check for themselves. And/or watch as people simply take a version of the software built from a more reputable source without that backdoor instead. Thanks for the money!”

“you want to force all foss projects existing in the global internet across countries to get paid by you or close? enjoy your logistic nightmare as you pay to be made fun of by all other countries while I fork projects with one click”

If they really think there’s no reason to hide anything, why are they prosecuting Snowden for exposing something that was hidden?

Before having surveillance on people, they should have it on themselves.

Imagine how many corruption cases could have been prevented if the government was publicly monitored, with live streams from all offices, like a “big brother” show set up in the white house with live recordings of all calls and communications, so the voters can judge by themselves and monitor if the person they employed as the servant for the country is doing its job.

The thing is that being “willfully ignorant” has served them well, so it makes it the smart move when the goal is “line go up”.

Give me money and call me stupid, why would I care what a few “smart” people think when millions of “stupid” people give me all I want?

I think it’s more that executives think the average consumer is stupid and cares too much about IP branding. And I feel they are not completelly wrong. Though I think the OGL fiasco showed the D&D fanbase might be smarter than that …hopefully.

This.

I don’t understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible… I’m not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual …or in marketing stunts.

The only individuals I’m interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I’d rather use a more private platform.

And when I want to read a public post I’d rather it’s well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it’s curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don’t have to waste my time going through tons of content I’m not remotelly interested on.

It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.

In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.

Like, for example, there’s this function:

function vc() {
    var a = za.navigator;
    return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
}

Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.

It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.

That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {

    setTimeout(function() {
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    }, 5E3);

} else {

    c();
    a.resolve(1)

}

It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.

I expect it would be technically possible to have lemmy-like or peertube-like services built on top of the AT protocol Bluesky uses, like with ActivityPub. And I expect if/when that happens the communication across services would probably work too.

In fact, accounts being “portable” in the AT protocol can potentially make the integration more seamless across different services, not only might the posts be seen from different services, but you might be able to directly access those different services with the same account. Imagine if you could login in lemmy with a mastodon account or vice-versa.

Bluesky is just one of the possible services. But as long as the invites are private and you can’t host your own instance, I wouldn’t even consider it an alternative. I think it’s a bit early to judge, both its positives and its negatives.

It’s changing by having a library like wlroots do most of the work.

When you consider the overall picture, “wlroots + compositor” is actually less complex than “X11 + window manager” because you no longer need to consider the insanely high requirements of having to have a team maintaining the spaghetti mess of X11 code.

Wayland-based dwl has roughly the same line count as X11-based dwm (about 2.2k), without having to depend on a whole separate service as big as X11.

But of course, it being a completely different approach, it’s likely that for most smaller projects (ie. not Gnome or KDE) it’s easier to start a new project than creating a layer to maintain two different parallel implementations.

If you want something that’s more or less compatible with openbox, there seems to be this project, labwc, which claims to be inspired by openbox and compatible with its config/themes… though I haven’t personally tried it.

Also keep in mind that openbox (and I expect labwc too) doesn’t include any “panels” / “taskbars” or anything like that… and it’s likely your X11 panels might not work well if they do not explicitly support Wayland (but I believe that, for example, xfce-panel now supports both).

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Wouldn’t it be easier and more direct to simply impose a tax to those external big tech services?

I don’t understand why using protection against “bad actors” as an excuse is necessary at all if getting money from big tech were the ultimate goal. A lot of people within the EU would happily support such a tax targeting big US companies, it’s the privacy problems what we are pushing against, not the fees. So I’d expect a more direct and honest fee for external companies making business within the EU would be easier to pass if that were what they actually wanted, wouldn’t it?

espeak default voice backend is synthesized without using actually real voice samples. So it doesn’t require downloading a huge package for each language, which is convenient in some cases, but the outcome is extremely robotic.

You can use MBROLA as backend for espeak so that it uses some voice samples and the result should be less jarring (it’d still be easy to tell it’s not natural voice, but at least you’d be able to understand it better). There’s a tutorial on this here: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/mbrola.md

Or you can try piper (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper) it’s one of the most natural-sounding TTS (here are some samples).