I would expect no less from this administration. It’s a master class in establishing a kakistocracy.

The cold war era propaganda and policies have really fucked everything up. There’s a straight line between them and today’s Republican/MAGA party that runs right through Reagan’s economic policies. MAGA sits at the crossroads of that and the festering racism that was never dealt with following the civil war. Unfortunately America’s world police mentality (and CIA fuckery, another result of the cold war) has spread those policies and attitudes to a bunch of other countries (who all for some strange reason have a dominant conservative media company owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence right?).

Japan has struggled with horrendous xenophobia for pretty much their entire history so this isn’t really surprising even if it is disappointing. Unfortunately we’re seeing a rise in far right parties around the globe and there are depressingly few liberal governments left. If this keeps up it’s not going to take much to ignite WW3 with all these nationalists taking control.

It’s a workaround for the historical trash fire of JavaScript in the browser. Since nobody could agree on a way to do something other than JS in the browsers they came up with this gradual replacement where initially WebAssembly was just a special version of JS, then they turned that into a bytecode interpreter. The end goal was to let you use any language as your browser scripting language but the implementation isn’t there yet. It’s pretty painful to do anything with the browser APIs via WebAssembly because you’re still using the terrible JS APIs rather than something more ergonomic for the language you’re using and you need to write JS shims around all your non-JS code.

Basically it’s a start, but it falls short of what’s needed. Since you end up needing to write a bunch of JS anyway you’re mostly just creating more work for yourself rather than being able to avoid JS in the first place.

That said, by accident it’s also created something close to a universal bytecode since a very wide variety of languages support compiling to WebAssembly.

Any police testimony not accompanied by some kind of recording should be inadmissible in court. Likewise any evidence collected while a camera isn’t recording should also be inadmissible. Police have shown again and again that they can’t be trusted and they’re almost always a less reliable witness than some random bystander. It’s about time we actually started treating them that way.

Oh no. Anyway.

As far as I’m concerned DHS can stay unfunded indefinitely and we’ll all be better off.

It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.

The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.

Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.

Sure but it’s also a badly done lawsuit for that. It’s a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn’t are that that’s a much smaller group, consumer protections don’t apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There’s also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I’m not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.

As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn’t anything Valve can do about that, rather it’s everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.

It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.

Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won’t be able to keep buying exclusive releases.

I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.

This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.

The best thing anyone could do with it is get them to rm -rf / their server.

It wasn’t over half. He won with 49.8% to Harris 48.32%. It was an incredibly close election (which is rather damning but that’s a different discussion).

If you can bypass it in the middle it is by definition not end to end encryption. The entire point of end to end encryption is that only the endpoints are able to decrypt the messages and everyone in between only has access to the encrypted messages. If that’s not the case that’s just normal encryption not end to end.

Translation: please keep pouring money into the bubble

What you’re describing is literally the KGBs playbook and no it doesn’t work in anyone’s favor but the ones spreading propaganda. All you’ll end up with is an even less informed and apathetic populace and we’re already struggling with that problem. That works in favor of dictators and fascists. Democracies on the other hand require an informed and engaged populace in order to function.

You’re suggesting the solution to AI slop spewing racism is more AI slop somehow “debunking” racism? How would that work exactly? This sounds like a propaganda wet dream.

You should look up how Russian style propaganda works. It isn’t by lying convincingly but rather by flooding all channels with so much noise that it requires major effort to determine what’s true and what isn’t. When you’re drowning in bullshit most people will give up and just decide to believe whatever agrees with their personal opinions rather than whatever the reality is and it’s a lot easier to manipulate vibes than it is reality.

This is why you never enable SMS based MFA. TOTP is well established and just works. If you need even more security FIDO2 devices like YubiKey are a thing.

Absolutely not, Trump is going to get his bribe. The only one who gets a freebie is daddy Putin because it sure would be a shame if he started leaking the files he has on Trump.

Sure it’s a useful skill but not one in significant demand. We have an absolute glut of MBAs and a desperate need for anything but an MBA so why are we paying people to get more MBAs?

The point is we don’t need more MBAs, we need people educated in useful skills. Should every MBA program be closed? No probably not, but we definitely have way more than we need. Cutting funding for things like MBA scholarships and closing down the majority of those programs will go a long way towards moving the majority of potential future MBA students into useful programs. We need less managers and more engineers, fewer CEOs and more chemists, hell fewer analysts and more plumbers.

There are many problems with modern capitalism and even if we never handed out another MBA degree again that would not even remotely solve everything, but the MBAs are making the problem worse. It’s a minor thing but it’s an easy thing to do and it would make a difference small as it is.