No, there is no punctuation missing, the headline writing style is just hurting comprehensibility. I’ll expand it a bit.

“A startup, which is set to brick an $800 kids’ robot, is trying to open-source it first”

Every week? Shit, some games expect you to drop by every eight hours!

I’m not really a fan of MMORPGs, both due to the gameplay (MMOs are grindy by nature and the hotkey-driven autocombat of most MMORPGs isn’t interesting enough to sustain that for me) and because of often aggressive monetization.

I do like some MMOs in other genres, though. Path of Exile is an action RPG with drop-in multiplayer and a rudimentary built-in trading system. It’s basically Diablo 3 in good. Plus, its monetization system is one of the fairest I’ve seen so far, with the only MTXes that offer gameplay benefits being on sale literally every other weekend.

Path of Exile 2 (currently in closed beta) is basically the same with a tweaked skill system and a soulslike dodge roll mechanic that you’re expected to use. Pretty decent, a bit slower-paced than the first one.

I should also pick up Warframe again one of these days. The repetitive nature of MMOs isn’t as bad when it’s a mobility-focused third-person shooter. And IIRC, there’s not much you can get with MTX that you can’t also get through gameplay somehow. Plus, it’s also a game that you can just play singleplayer if you want.

It is a well-designed system font. Say what you will about Microsoft but they do know how to make a good font or two.

Remember the classical progression: Marijuana, then ketamine, then Putin.

Ah, so it’s on Izzy. Thanks. Given the wording of Ghoelian’s comment I assumed they were talking about either the main repo or an app-specific one.

Where is that repo? The Github repo doesn’t provide a package source and it’s not in the main F-Droid repo.

Yes, I didn’t know about the fraud allegation when I posted. That definitely shouldn’t have happened. Funko should’ve known better than to pull shit like that and it’ll be interesting to see if Itch sues over this.

My point about AI tools remains, though.

Using AI driven software is willful negligence.

Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.

Of course if you skip the review step you’re doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.

There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and we have strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.

Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.

Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.

You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.

Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.

I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.

Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.

You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.

The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.

Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.

It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.

There is one metric where Intel is better and that’s Thunderbolt. You typically get more full-featured Thunderbolt ports with an Intel CPU. Of course whether that point is relevant is highly dependent on your use case.

Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.

If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.

Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.

Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.

That plus the Chinese economy isn’t as strong as a few years ago so the appetite for expensive cars is dampened. Of course that’s what our manufacturers have bet on because why make an affordable ultracompact if you can just shit yet another SUV onto the market and find a buyer?

Travel back in time and make our economy less export-oriented. The one-two punch of China losing interest in German cars and Trump getting elected and intending to impose harsh tariffs ('cause that worked out so well last time) is definitely hurting business. The export-oriented economy worked out really well so far but right now there’s no sufficiently wealthy market to pivot to so a downturn is very likely.

This goes beyond cars and car-related companies. Hidden champions also tend to make a lot of money from exports although they’re also exactly the reason why those tariffs are going to hurt the USA. A bad export situation in both the USA and China is going to be painful for a lot of companies.

It’s not all doom and gloom but we’re definitely going to have a few lean years in the near future.

Other people might also bring up our long-time energy dependency on Russia but I think that’s only a relatively minor contributing factor.

Ah, so they actually got that implemented. Nice.

Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It’s a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.

Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.

For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn’t even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can’t talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you’re SOL.

Exactly. If this was “Marathon: Return to Deimos” or “Marathon: Battleroid Arena” or even “Marathon Infinity Plus One” I wouldn’t complain. Much.

But just taking the name (and logo) of the original one? The game that started Bungie’s path towards being one of the big names of the FPS genre? That’s like saying they went straight from Pathways Into Darkness to Halo. That’s not honoring Marathon, it’s a soulless recycling of an old IP.

My vent cores feel distinctly unblasted.

Man, I hate it when they make new games that have exactly the same name as an older game by the same company. And this one’s not even a remake. I have no idea if Marathon (1994) and Marathon (upcoming) even play in the same universe but they don’t seem to have much in common gameplay-wise. Ugh.

Makes me wanna install M1A1 Aleph One (didn’t know it does M1 directly these days) and shoot some Pfhor, though.

“You finished a computer game, Atticus.”

The truth was a burning green crack through my brain.

Credits scrolling by, a reminder of the talent behind a just-finished journey. The feeling of triumph, slowly replaced by the creeping grayness of ordinary life.

I had finished a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.