They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
Well, source code is not sth that you “crack”, you can only reverse engineer it (I think it was done with Doom, also OpenRA) or steal it from the company’s servers. The use for it is also rather niche, so the risk vs gains ratio is not attractive enough to feed dedicated websites. You can also look at fully open source games like 0AD and check out what they did!
Edit: I stand corrected (thrice); Doom was indeed open-sourced, not reverse engineered. Thanks for pointing out!
I was once at a talk by someone in that company and he straight up said that open sourcing it was a mistake. I assume because that meant they couldn’t sell us a thousand versions of it like Skyrim.
No word of whether its ongoing popularity was at all caused by open sourcing it.
There’s no way going open source has done anything but help Doom. I guarantee they’ve made more money from people buying their old games for the WADs to play with source ports and mods than they’ve lost money to things like Freedoom.
The game and the engine are both open source. The game’s assets just aren’t freely available, so you still need an official WAD or an asset replacement pack like Freedoom.
Yeah but that was more of a “if we can’t beat 'em, join 'em” thing and I believe some, if not most of the modders don’t even use the official mappings and prefer the cracked version
It is directly supported and maintained from Google, which then bases Chrome on that project adding some proprietary code. So I think yes, it is doomed
No, that’s the way the fediverse is supposed to work. It would be sockpuppeting for both of your accounts, say [email protected] and [email protected], to have a conversation with each other on a third instance, say !politics, with which both a & b are federated.
Or to both downvote the same things, or to comment twice on the same post in a way that makes it seem like it’s 2 people. Basically if both show up in the same space and you pretend that each is its own person, that’s probably sock puppeting.
Oh the other hand, it’s not sock puppeting if the two identities are active in different spaces. If you use one account to comment on PornHub and a different one to post on LinkedIn, nobody’s going to say that’s sock puppeting.
Honestly was shocked when I first visited. On TV the streets are wide there and everyone has enough to eat.
Visit (and at this point I have spent time in about half their states) and it is a different story. Broken roads in disrepair. Beggars everywhere, fighting for the chance to ask you for food, water, anything. We stopped at traffic lights and a teenage boy shaking with palsy knocked on our windows begging for food. People mobbed me in one city because I was carrying a bag of apples and they hoped for one as my bag split. I was careful never to give, but was still followed everywhere as an obvious tourist. The only place I did not get food begging on every single streetcorner was Manhattan. I am told this is because they deported beggars to the mainland there. Heartless sods in a capital that gets snow told me “there’s less beggars in winter, the cold gets them”.
I think you’re right about the jobs, too. There were roadworkers on those broken roads, using jackhammers without ear protection, or even foot protection. I was told it was because they are “free” to bring their own PPE. They looked injured and sick but determined.
Shops were similar. Waitstaff looked half starved, serving the rich in an obsequious yet hateful way unnervingly like a roleplaying slave. It was disgusting, and ruined many a meal by constant disingenious artificial attention.
You won’t regret visiting, but it is a ridiculously heartless broken place. The most expensive travel insurance too, for reasons most obvious in their medical stories.
Yanks are no doubt going to downvote this to oblivion, but it is how I have so far experienced their miserable cities.
If we passed through Gary I didn’t notice. The map puts it in the suburbs of Chicago anyway, perhaps we drove through at the end of our stay? Spent a bit of time in Illinois, then went through Cincinnatti on the way out toward the coast.
These stories are not any one trip, or any one city or state. This is an overview of everywhere as a foreigner. People were begging me for food and stealing food on street corners from (the illinois bit of) Chicago to New Orleans, from Texas to New York. They tapped windows of the car, they stopped me in the street. It was like travelling through what the yanks choose to call a third world country… It isn’t like that in Australia.
If we passed through Gary I didn’t notice. The map puts it in the suburbs of Chicago anyway, perhaps we drove through at the end of our stay? Spent a bit of time in Illinois, then went through Cincinnatti on the way out toward the coast.
These stories are not any one trip, or any one city or state. This is an overview of everywhere in the US as a foreigner. People were begging me for food and stealing food on street corners from (the illinois bit of) Chicago to New Orleans, from Texas to New York. They tapped windows of the car, they stopped me in the street. It was like travelling through what the yanks choose to call a third world country… It isn’t like that in Australia.
I’m not going to tell you all the things you mentioned are impossible. I’ve read your other comments too. I’ve seen homeless women crying in the street, people with obvious mental or physical problems begging. Homelessness - visible homelessness - is terribly common. As far as crime goes, I don’t know, maybe people target tourists? My rental car visibly full of luggage was broken into in San Jose once, and they stole a bunch of electronics. Learned my lesson on that one. Apart from that I’ve wandered around some rough areas on occasion and in 36 years I’ve never been victimized in person.
Anyway, one last point: according to official stats, the rate of homelessness in Australia is nearly 3x that in the US, although I imagine that Australia probably counts homelessness differently, so it’s hard to compare, but 3x seems like a big difference for simple differences in methodology to account for. That said, I’m sure Australia has better services, so it may not be as visible to the average person, and less of a struggle for those experiencing homelessness. Hard for me to believe things are all that much better in the land of Murdoch, though.
Come visit Australia sometime. I am certain no children will knock on your windows begging for food and water when you stop at traffic lights (which happened both in cities and the occasional local township) even if you have a rental car (we were borrowing cars from locals, rentals are often too pricey for me). No one will try to steal your bag of groceries either.
Where the hell did you go to see all that? I’ve lived in the US for half a century and never seen any of that. There are some states that need to figure out how to pave roads that will last more than 2 years, but many states have figured that out.
The roadworkers? Three seperate sites in chicago, then similar seen again in New York State, and in Louisiana. Other places too but they stood out.
Knocking on our windows to beg for food and water? Everywhere on the east coast. The kid happened in New York State, but similar happened in Pennsylvania, in tenessee, in illinois, in Louisiana, and everywhere really.
I was mobbed in Pennsylvania during the notorious Apple Incident, it happened again to a friend in Charlestown with a large bag of peaches, but when we were telling this story to a bunch of other Aussies they told me a chilling tale similar that happened to a girl of their number in Tenessee. The third one happened to strangers, but they had no reason to lie to me.
I don’t rightly know what to tell you, but we saw so many beggars everywhere except manhattan. We did not like getting restaurant meals, tried to stick to takeaway, because waitstaff were upsetting everywhere we went. And if you haven’t seen the massive holes in your roads, society and infrastructure in your time there, it’s likely because you are overused to them.
America is terribly full of the desperately poor.
Edit; I have learned not to talk of the incidents that happen once, if I can help it, as I get told they are “isolated incidents” or “just happen in that state”. The girl with the dog crying in louisiana, the orphans we met in ohio, the shaking window knocker, poor bastard… That said, those isolated incidents also add up to a larger truth. All of them were due to a lack of health care or social care. All could have been cured with a little kindness, or the yanks being a little less blind to their fellow man. It is a very harsh place.
My guy you shouldn’t have visited New Jersey… In all seriousness though, this is at least partly satirical right? There are definitely some tough spots in America like most places, but when I went to Europe and Scandinavia it was about the same.
Hilariously it wasn’t as awful as anyone jokes about when we went to New Jersey. Lived there a week and the people were nice. Great little ethnic supermarkets, smiling people, but yeah just like everywhere else, constant begging. Chicago was more like that stereotype really…
I haven’t spent much time in Europe, but people there didn’t beg me for food, cry in the street, tap on my car windows begging for food and water, or attempt to steal my bag of groceries anywhere I have been in Europe. They did all those things in many different coties and even small towns in America. Not the same, in my opinion.
I am an American all aboard the “America has some serious issues” wagon, but dude not wearing ear protection was doing so against every single rule. If he got caught by the wrong person him and his boss would be in deep shit. Everything else you said is pretty accurate though. At least for big cities, the type of place tourists go. Just remember 90% of the country is not there. You visited the worst places in the country. It’s still bad though. It is a dog eat dog country and very little help for the needy. The help that there is takes so many hoops to jump through that some people with any problems just can’t do it and they don’t have any advocates.
And probably the biggest, project Gutemberg. Searching Cervantes gives you only one book, Don Quijote, though in many editions, and both English and Spanish which is a bit limited.
It’s twitter except for the old guy instead of the new guy. If you left twitter for bluesky then you are likely just going to run into the same issue down the road where the old guy sells it for tons of money to whoever will pay. Those willing to pay are likely not great at managing a social media platform.
I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn’t. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very “don’t like, don’t read”, but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I’m cool with that, but I can’t do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn’t have that atmosphere.
I know folks usually skew that way but it’s server to server. Frankly, I don’t use any warnings because I can’t be bothered and my instance is fine with it.
That misunderstanding proves how we need to review the user experience of federated projects, or at least do a much better job of explaining it to everyone.
When everyone migrated there were a lot of “helpful” newbies enforcing rules that simply don’t exist. There are too many people like that still but not so many you can’t mute them all.
They have a sandbox environment federating with 3rd party servers where other devs can participate in testing, and in the main public beta environment they just switched away from one main server to like a dozen (still no 3rd party there) and moved user accounts around, so they can test the federation code for stuff like performance and effects of account migrations, etc, in a live environment.
They’ve said they won’t open up federation with 3rd party servers on the main environment until they have moderation tools which can handle it, so they’re working on that also now.
tl;dr: A notable marketshare of multiple browser components and browsers must exist in order to properly ensure/maintain truly open web standards.
It is important that Firefox and its components like Gecko and Spidermonkey to exist as well as maintain a notable marketshare. Likewise, it is important for WebKit and its components to exist and maintain a notable marketshare. The same is true for any other browser/rendering/JavaScript engines.
While it is great that we have so many non-Google Chrome alternatives like Chromium, Edge, Vivaldi, etc., they all use the same or very similar engines. This means that they all display and interact with websites nearly identically.
When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way. If the Chrome/Chromium based browsers reaches a nearly unanimous browser marketshare, then Google can either ignore any/all open web standards, force their will in deciding/implementing new open web standards, or even become the defacto open web standard.
When any one entity has that much control over the open web standards, then the web standards are no longer truly “open” and in this case becomes “Google’s web standards”. In some (or maybe even many) cases, this may be fine. However, we saw with Internet Explorer in the past this is not something that the market should allow. We are seeing evidence that we shouldn’t allow Google to have this much influence with things like the adoption of JPEG XL or implementation of FLoC.
With three or more browser engines, rendering engines, and browsers with notable marketshares, web developers are forced to develop in adherence to the accepted open web standards. With enough marketshare spread across those engines/browsers, the various engines/browsers are incentivized to maintain compatibility with open web standards. As long as the open web standards are designed and maintained without overt influence by a single or few entities and the open standards are actively used, then the best interest of the collective of all internet users is best served.
Otherwise, the best interest of a few entities (in this case Google) is best served.
The important factor here as far as what an individual uses is the tracked metrics. When a browser looks at a website, it identifies itself and its engine. Therefore actually using an engine other than Chromium is important because it goes into use stats across all websites the individual visits.
And like with all collective endeavors, while an individual contribution is insignificant, the whole is made up of those individual contributions. It also only takes a few percentage points of users for a business to in theory want to avoid excluding those users and thus keep them developing for multiple browsers.
Or to recap from history, Internet Explorer has no incentive to follow web standards and web design was a stagnant table-based layout until Netscape shows up. Wouldn’t have complete separation of text and style the way we do today if css never took off.
When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way.
There’s no reason they can’t decide not to behave that way.
Instant coffee is actually freeze dried and yes should dissolve completely, while grinds will never just disappear in the water.
But then there’s that.
A couple of weeks ago we went abroad and asked a friend of mine to watch our apartment because I had flowers that needed pollinating. In exchange he could stay at the apartment. Since he’s a Ukrainian refugee who has to share a room with a questionable dude he gladly took me up on that offer.
Now, we are coffee snobs, my husband’s youtube history is full of James Hoffmann. So we have a manual espresso press at home, a hand filter, a french press, two moka pots, and a senseo pad machine (for guests; our filter machine just broke).
When we came home, we found a can of instant coffee. Jacobs, to be precise, and everything in Ukrainian. Dude brought his instant coffee to our coffee infested place. Knowing that he has been here for a while and drinks a lot of coffee, I asked him how did this can last him so long. He got it imported. He freaking imported Ukrainian Jacobs instant coffee into Germany.
And then we start reading the can’s text a bit more profoundly. It is a mix of normal instant coffee, i.e. freeze dried, with a bit of finely ground coffee mixed in. It does not dissolve completely. It takes ages for the grind to settle to the bottom. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea. I don’t know what the purpose is supposed to be. But they advertise it heavily on the package.
Also, I tried a cup and it does taste like shit but to each their own.
Tldr: instant coffee usually is freeze dried coffee that will dissolve completely but there are some unholy products designed by questionable people that contain real grind coffee for no reason.
Nespresso machines are definitely pressurized and temp controlled. Keurig, less so.
I read something somewhere once (great source, right?) regarding Keurig temps, and they weren’t consistent or optimal. And the pressure is more like a hose with an attachment as opposed to a pressure washer.
Some K cups will empty out when you use them, too. From what I’ve run into, that’s typically the fancy flavor ones. But some are just coffee grounds that get a suboptimal water flow at suboptimal temps going through them.
Someone can correct me on what I’m remembering though.
Recommendation: report the pop-up as a bug with the provided link. Just act confused and claim to not be using an ad blocker. Muddy the waters and make life hell for their devs.
The devs aren't the ones making these decisions. That's like chewing out a customer support rep because their CEO did something you didn't like. Aim your anger more carefully.
How, though? Just like chewing out a customer support rep, the goal is to make it so either the employees constantly bring it up to their managers or they quit and the company can’t find workers because it’s so miserable.
Are the SWEs responsible for the decision? No. But if they find it too miserable to continue, they will quit and the people responsible will eventually have to respond.
That’s really the only way to direct your anger at a CEO… Through the pocketbook. It’s unfortunate that it’s through the front line, but that’s part of the job.
As a SWE you have responsibility for what you do. “Golden handcuffs” isn’t a cover to help wage wars against users. If it becomes an undesirable posting, they’ll either have to pay more or worse engineers will end up working on it.
Judging from how many SWEs are in the US, its basically this or loose your job. And that’d be a bit bad because of how many different pricing crisis there are at the moment.
Judging from how many voters are in the US, it’s basically a totalitarian dictatorship or die.
That like of reasoning is kinda broken. We need people to take responsibility before things go too far. Google engineers can get jobs anywhere, they don’t need to be doing this shit if they don’t want to.
I would wager a guess and say that many joined long before they got this bad, probably because back then their visions and values were a lot more aligned
Nowadays I rarely see more than hectic startups and Big Tech, both of which have massive downsides which affect people outside of their field too.
Additionally, especially at the HQs of Google and others, many SWEs live in vans on the street because rent is too high, they cannot just work somewhere else as that won’t actually change the situation
He’s very edgy, I don’t like his content. If I want someone to talk about tech, I’d rather they just talk about tech and not make wojack thumbnails and constantly making fun of politics.
If he only knew anything about politics, it wouldn’t be so bad. He seriously applauded Elon Musk for “fighting” against media bias by “the far-left democrats”. 🫠
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