furi

Squad servers are operated by the community, mostly by gaming clans and similar organizations. But Squad uses a "server license" system where server owners must meet certain criteria (for example a minimum level of moderation) in order to be allowed to operate a server. Supporting the DLC is sure to be a requirement.

This system existed in Project Reality too, I believe in that game it outright prohibited you from even having access to the server executable without a license while in Squad it only applies to being listed in the client's server browser.

The position paper linked in the article above says:

This is because through Article 45.2, the legislative proposal, in effect, mandates that browsers automatically include Trust Service Providers (TSPs) in their browser root programs.

I haven't read the law in question but I would take "mandates" to imply that doing the opposite is somehow prohibited by the proposed law.

Perhaps I'm out of the loop, but the EU attempting to make it illegal to distribute web browsers that don't include certain features is unexpected (and deeply worrying) to me.

In Ireland 92% of adults are vaccinated and 75% of the population overall. The "low" vaccination rate among children has more to do with the delays in approving the vaccines than any kind of resistance. I have been told this is among the best vaccination rates in Europe.

Despite this the government has just pushed back the return to normality yet again. They drafted a "vaccinate our way out" plan that would almost certainly fail because it allegedly requires some fraction of the populace in excess of 92% to comply. When it failed, they accused that fraction of spoiling their plans. And then, rather than accepting their failure and moving on, they began punishing the entire populace for it for an indeterminate amount of time.

Perhaps in other countries with higher rates of vaccine hesitancy the story is different. But in my mind, the responsibility here lies with those who made getting our lives back contingent on an outcome that was never realistically going to occur.

The type system is so strict that if it compiles it will almost always run. Nil is a type that must be explicitly ruled out before you can use a potentially nilable value.

But it avoids the manual memory management/borrow checking/pointer vs. reference vs. value unpleasantness of Zig/Rust/C++.

It's probably most comparable to Java/C#, but something about the design of the syntax and standard library makes it much more appealing than either of those for me.

The memory management can be quite suboptimal. I wrote the same program in both at one point (an experimental language transpiler) and the Crystal version would spiral up into the 10s of GB when converting a very simple file while the C++ version wouldn't even hit 1 GB.

No doubt there was something I could have done to coax it into behaving, but in C++ that was unnecessary. RAII and ordinary standard library containers were enough to make it work.

This was a while ago, so perhaps things have improved.

I didn't follow it super closely but if I recall right Nest bought a competing brand of smart home devices (Revolv). They kept it around for a year or two and then in 2016 turned off the servers that mediated between the phone app and the device, bricking the devices.

Except didn't Leela Zero (the closest thing we have to Alpha Zero anyone can actually use) beat StockFish, then StockFish was upgraded to use neural networks in a few edge cases and otherwise keep doing what it was doing and now StockFish is back on top? Seems like a Waymo-style approach is actually on top there.

The non-euclidean idea I like, something a bit like a physical store but it reconfigures based on traditional search terms (perhaps supplied via voice). But that's incompatible with memorizing 3D spaces and also with knowing that you've seen everything. But both of those are probably more to do with scale than anything else. I'm not sure I could remember where I saw a good product within a 3D Amazon because it's going to be the size of a small city and constantly in flux. The multiplayer thing is a definite strength too.

could also have been made 20 years ago when physical stores were hesitant about moving online

Indeed, but what we've learned since then is that consumer convenience is king (see: dark patterns in cookie prompts). Businesses were wary of the Internet transition but the force of convenience pushed them into it, I don't see a matching spike in convenience here.

AR I have less difficulty understanding, the benefits of a real world HUD seem fairly obvious. That said, most of the projects held up as "metaverse" seem to involve "opaque" 3D worlds: Fortnite, VRChat, Neos VR, etc.

Interconnectedness is really just a hyperlink, but instead of going to the link by clicking a link, you go through a space.

Hyperlinks are much easier to implement. There's no requirement to have your game engines interoperable and translate seamlessly between the two as the transition takes place. And even then traveling via hyperlink between websites is hardly a seamless experience already. Inter-site hyperlinks are also not that popular. Social websites of course deal in them in large quantities, but your average business website avoids them like the plague. I don't think there's a single hyperlink on Amazon's website that leads out of their ecosystem.

I'd welcome anyone trying to explain this idea to me along a number of axises, because I really do not get it.

1. What does 3D space add? If I want to shop for some item it's more convenient for me to look at a list with pictures and text than to wander through a 3D store. It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc. The Internet won through being more convenient, I don't see how this isn't a step backwards.

2. What are we going to do about UGC kitsch? Second Life and more recently VRChat and NeosVR have provided demonstrations of what a metaverse combining content from thousands of creators of mixed skill levels is like. While I can appreciate it on some level, the fact is it's hideous. Are the operators of metaverse-Amazon really going to let their in-store aesthetics be ruined by a low-poly neon-purple wolf wandering through it while I'm trying to browse? If they are, why? If they aren't, how is this an interconnected metaverse?

3. Why is anyone going to respect the interconnectedness of the metaverse? Websites successfully resisted the Semantic Web. Businesses don't want to point the way to their competitors. Games want to constrain what the player character can be to fit a specific power level, tone or art style. Fortnite, for all of its metaverse cred, does not allow players to upload their own avatars and has never (to my knowledge) added a portal which when entered closes Fortnite and opens another game.

What part of criminalizing the obvious course of action that everyone is taught to do (find evidence of illegal activity, give it to the police) makes any iota of sense to you?

If drunk driving laws were enforced by mandating a breathalyzer in every car and nobody really knew how the breathalyzer worked and also it maybe doubled as an instrument for the government to catch you doing fifteen other things then I might consider that a fair comparison.

But yes, there's a lot of drive-by engagement in this thread, thank you for at least engaging with it directly.

...And direct opposition to those hundreds of millions of other users. Trying to fit this to a victims vs. offenders model is a deliberate attempt to turn those hundreds of millions of other users into uninvolved bystanders. They have been pushed out by the lack of space in the model for them and their right to not have their door kicked down based on the results of an algorithm and database they can't audit, which are susceptible to targeted adversarial attacks and authoritarian interference respectively.

I feel it's a little disingenuous to describe millions of innocent people being surveilled as "the offenders" because there are a handful of actual offenders among them.

I'm thinking of Crystal, Nim, Zig, Odin and (ignoring that the topic at hand is avoiding Google having unnecessary control over things) Go. I'm aware they may not share Rust's exact feature set; Crystal is the only one I've used, including Rust itself. That comment was intended to illustrate that this is a field where attempts are made regularly and manage to achieve some measure of success, relative to browser rendering engines where I am only aware of a single (proprietary, incomplete) attempt in recent years: Flow.

You misunderstand me. I don't think Mozilla's mismanagement was responsible for Firefox's decline in market share, although it probably can't have helped. My concern is that now that that decline has happened, for one reason or another, Mozilla's mismanagement of their finances means the entire existence of Firefox is at risk, along with the seat at the web standards table that it represents.

Rust is definitely a significant and important project. That said, Firefox's peak market share was a little over 30% of desktop browsers (in 2009 so they weren't yet a sideshow), while Rust isn't even currently in the TIOBE Index top 20 (can't find any easy way to see a peak position sadly).

More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.

I feel like we've already seen this pan out once. Mozilla received a large payment from Google for many years for making Google Search the primary search engine in Firefox. They used that money to pay large salaries, launch a dozen side projects (none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox) and aim for lofty goals much like Wikimedia is doing here. Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's market share is dwindling) and Mozilla are having to cut staff, including staff who work on Firefox development, to survive.

It's less obvious what would cause Wikipedia's money to dry up, but in light of Mozilla's example the only part of this I disagree with is the article's negative angle on the endowment. Creating an endowment like that is exactly what Mozilla should have done.

nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors

Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).

I think the intended image there is that they can come and go without announcing themselves, which is what's being proposed.

They can still access your E2E encrypted messages under existing laws by bringing a warrant to your door and asking you to hand over your phone, then:

A: finding it unlocked. B: hacking it. C: using normal police techniques to convince you to hand over the passphrase. D: using a key disclosure law to compel you to hand over the passphrase.

What they want to do instead is take the warrant to Facebook/Signal/etc. and get them to hand the messages over without needing to interact with you at all.

Strong end-to-end encryption essentially means that the police cannot access communications ever, even if they get a warrant because they don't have a technical mean to do so.

This isn't true. It means they cannot access communications without revealing to at least one of the communicating parties that they are doing so. The messages are still decrypted on the endpoint devices for reading, a warrant could be used to acquire those devices from their owners. Device encryption can complicate this some of the time, but that remains fairly hit-and-miss (and is a separate issue, you could have mandatory key disclosure without backdoored E2E and vice versa).

the police has always been able to access those communications should it be necessary and according to the law.

And neither is this. To find out the contents of a verbal conversation that was not recorded (most of them, even today) the police would need to ask one of the participants to tell them what happened, and the participants can usually refuse to self-incriminate. Even if the conversation was recorded the recording would usually be in the possession of one of the participants as recording a conversation while not being a participant is illegal, at least where I live. To find out the contents of a letter they would need to intercept it during transit or recover it from its destination at a later date. If the letter has been destroyed they're back to asking the recipient or sender to tell them what it said who again can usually refuse to testify. To find out what was said via instant messaging under this no end-to-end encryption scheme, they can, at any time, simply ask a third party who cannot refuse to testify. This is an utterly unprecedented invasion of privacy and I struggle to see anything that could justify it in a (part of the) world where crime seems to be on a downward trend.

If the scheme described by the article really exists, then it represents a substantial fraction of the demand for BTC. It's true that such a scheme collapsing would drive demand for BTC from USDT holders up. That's of course assuming they could still trade their USDT. Tether (the company) cancelled $30 million worth of coins stolen from them a few years back which suggests if the company was seized the ability to trade USDT could be disabled. But it's also true that such a scheme collapsing would instantly drive demand for BTC from Tether (the company) to zero. If that demand really is almost 70% of all the demand for BTC then BTC's price should decline significantly.

This exists. It's ZeroMe on the ZeroNet distributed network. It has optional Tor integration, Bittorrent style distributed file hosting, and block lists maintained by the community.

I don't support what Epic did but whether or not it was justified is irrelevant here. A modification was made to the functionality of your device after the moment of purchase, that remains true regardless. And you could not have foreseen that specific modification to your device unless you worked at Epic and had internal knowledge of their plans.

You effectively need to know what every company in the world is doing to have any real idea what your device is going to be able to do tomorrow. Under those conditions I don't think you can say you were informed when you purchased it.

The problem isn't that they make decisions about what the device can and can't do before the moment of purchase. As you correctly pointed out in another comment they made the implicit choice to not ship it with the ability to make pizzas and everybody thinks that's fine.

The problem is that they (have the ability to) continue to make those decisions afterwards. You could have "known" an iPhone could run Fortnite at the moment you bought it and then after you received it in the mail discovered that they had decided you were no longer allowed to do that.

You could then say "well I bought it knowing they had the ability to change anything at any time" but I'm not sure I agree that you can give informed consent to a blank check.

I'm not in that camp, I think it's fine for more mundane queries and kinda bad for more obscure ones. That said I can try dig some out of my search history anyway:

"fiction perspectives" brings up an article titled "Fiction: Jewish perspectives on Niue" in DDG. In Google it brings up an info box titled "Here are the four primary POV types in fiction".

"US military clacker" (searching for the name of that thing the player often squeezes in first person shooter games to set off explosives) brings up "U.S. WWII D-Day Signaling Cricket Clicker Clacker" in Amazon.com in DDG. In Google it brings up the Wikipedia page for the Claymore mine and chooses to show the sentence "The M57 firing device (colloquially referred to as the "clacker") is included with each mine".

"lua_pcall example" brings up a thread titled "PCall function?" on the Roblox Developer Forum in DDG. In Google it brings up the page "Calling Lua Functions" from the official Lua manual.

Many of these are still usable. There are some articles about perspective in fiction writing further down but none that address the topic quite so directly. The clacker search on DDG has pictures of clackers (which Google does not) which you could click on and investigate to work out the name of it. The Lua DDG search has the right page as the third result. But those little imperfections do add friction and make me reach for the g! flag for those trickier queries.

I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.

I'm very skeptical of this. I feel like I've been hearing this sort of idea for my entire life and it's never come to fruition. In this case specifically a closed, centralized, anti-cheat protected ecosystem like Fortnite seems like the least likely place for it to crop up. Minecraft would have been more likely, the operation of Minecraft servers is very decentralized and it has a lot of modding.

But really it seems like this mostly boils down to adding a spatial component to things computers can already do. Watching a movie trailer premiere with your avatar standing in front of a big screen in Fortnite vs. with YouTube's premiere feature, browsing a virtual item store by walking through the shelves vs. searching listings with filters/keywords, etc. And I'm not sure how much that really adds. In the video premiere example you've made something that's many times harder to run both for the host and the viewers (as it now involves 3D rendering and physics) and it's a worse experience too. The screen is displayed in a subsection of your real screen, your character's head is in the way, games tend to command full control of your mouse so it's harder to multitask, etc. I don't think the flatness of the modern web is a limitation but a strength that enables more powerful interactions than 3D space (a good filter/category system beats spatial shelves for shopping any time) and preserves portability.

VR could perhaps change this but even VR hasn't really embraced it. I'm yet to play a VR game where the main menu isn't a series of flat panels hovering in front of you which you interact with by means of a laser pointer.

If I had to guess it's uncertainty. If coronavirus infects half the world by the time it's run its course that would be 77 million people dead, on top of however many normally die in that time frame. I have no idea how likely a 50% infection rate is but it's a lot more likely than an equivalent 11x jump in the rate of deaths from smoking over the same time span.