What! A! Surprise!

I’m shocked, I tell you, totally and utterly shocked by this turn of events!

I actually got some somewhat more recent AAA games from GoG (a store which I favour because of their No-DRM rule, though there’s a handful of games were it’s “kinda”) and I literally can’t get around to them because I’m just enjoying 15 year old games or Indie title as I tend to favour open-ended games.

Why should I buy, say, “must register and log-in to Rockstar services” Red Dead Redemption from Steam if my entertainment needs are fully fulfilled already and there’s even a backlog of “bought them but haven’t got around to try them” games (including stuff like Prey) plus a bunch of Indie infinite-replayability games (like Terraria and Rimworld) which I haven’t played for long enough now that they’re fun to play again?

This is not just to illustrate the point: I’m genuinely not getting around to play something like Prey, much less buying the original God Of War (available from GoG hence DRM-free, unlike Ragnarok) because I keep just having fun from a mix of really old games and far less “graphically impressive” open-ended Indie games.

Of course Neue-Nazi-loving Blinken would be hard at doing Modern Holocaust Denialism to support his favorite ethno-Fascist genociders.

It depends on the quality of regulation in your country.

When the regulation isn’t properly done or enforced, for example when living above a restaurant you get things like excessive smells (they’re supposed to have their own chimney all the way to the top of the building) and higher fire risks (they’re supposed to have specific fire safety facilities above and beyond what a normal habitational unit would have).

Around were I am - in Portugal - living above a restaurant being a good thing or not very much depends on the municipality were you’re living since some are quite corrupt or just plain incompetent and Justice around these parts is a slow, innefective and unreliable joke.

PS: Mind you, shops on the ground floor of appartment buildings around here are pretty standard, it’s just that specifical example of yours of a restaurant might not be such a great thing to live above when the regulations that are supposed to protect everybody else aren’t sufficient or aren’t enforced. Most other kinds of shop don’t really have that problem.

Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.

Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart’s bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).

If Rockstar’s management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won’t even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.

Yeah, but unless less they’re from a Portuguese or Spanish language speaking country their keyboard won’t have a ç or a ~ and it’s a pain in the arse to type that name correctly in a keyboard without those such as an UK keyboard (as I know from experience).

So give them a break.

They were on TV over here (Portugal) doing a press conference were they explained the devices were made in Hungary by a company which licensed the brand name from them (a Taiwanese company) so the manufacturer’s name (which I totally forgot) is definitely out.

Specifically in Hungary, same country that has been voting with Israel in the UN and also has a Fascist government.

It sure makes manufacturing involving explosives much more easily to go ahead if the local government has approved of it.

I’m curious what this will do to the “Made In EU” brand in the rest of the World.

Well, that’s the funny bit: the government in the UK aren’t the Conservatives, they’re New Labour who are Neoliberals, hard Neoliberals even by the standards of the rest of Europe.

Nowadays the difference between Conservatives and Liberals is really just the subset of Morality that’s used in Identity Politics. They’re certainly not different on Economics, not on Quality Of Life for the many, not on a good Future for our Children (which provides a Selfishness-drive reason be an Environmentalist) and certainly not on Environmentalism as a Moral posture.

We get some loud confrontational bullshit from both around various “-isms” all the while they’re both doing what’s best for the most wealthy of society and screw the rest (both present and future) and definitely screw anything that has no money and not capability for action such as Nature.

You see that exact same shit in the US, by they way, as well (in not quite as extreme) in most of Europe.

Meanwhile the UK still keeps on sending weapon shipments to an actively Genocidal Israel (they recently stopped but 20 out of 300 kinds of such exports).

It didn’t took long to disprove the hopes of anybody who thought New Labour would be anything but a slightly less hard Right than the Tories.

The talkie-talkie of the US government not matching their walkie-walkie.

What! A! Shocker!

I’m sorry but your point is anchored on an old Propaganda myth of Israel.

Israel’s lack of safety comes from them having stolen Palestinian land and continuing to steal Palestinian land, for decades.

If safety was their prime objective, they could stop stealing Palestinian land, give back at least some Palestinian land and compensate the victims for the rest (I am assuming here that Israel would keep some of the originally stolen land to continue to exist as a nation).

They have chosen not to do that and instead they have chosen to use force against Palestinians to stop their just rage at having their land stolen and have chosen to Genocide Palestinians to finally take away the rest of their land.

Safety is not the primary reason for the actions of Israel. Safety is an excuse and at best a second or third order reason derived from their real primary reason:

• Israel did this (as they did most of what they did to Palestinians for 7 decades) because they want to steal all the Palestinian land.

It’s wonderful how the expression “humble Arch Linux user” manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.

I disagree: as a Bachus of Programming I have successfully managed to at the same time both be a God of Programming AND having no clue what’s going on.

(The real joke behind the joke is that today I’m doing Shader programming so that’s quite close to reality and I could definitelly do with large amounts of wine or at least beer).

Here too the Schrödinger’s equations apply: a programmer’s state during coding is a superposition of both of these states until actually trying to run the code, at which point it collapses into one of the two states.

• Get a cheap old fashioned alarm clock (we’re talking about something that costs maybe 10 bucks).
• Put it out of reach so that you have to physically get out of bed to turn it off.
• Configure it to go off at the appropriate time with the nastiest sound (usually they have an “alarm with a radio” and an “alarm with alarm sound” modes and you definitely want to have it in the latter mode, not the former).

It’s a pretty horrible way to wake up if you went to bed late (protip: stop drinking coffee and using a computer after 11PM to deal with the whole only falling asleep late part of the problem) and that’s why it works.

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Being a tool user doesn’t make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.

Worry not! Biden will expedite a new weapon shipment to replace the bullets used by the brave Israeli soldiers protecting their great nation from that evil Hamas-loving antisemite!

Above a certain level of seniority (in the sense of real breadth and depth of experience rather than merely high count of work years) one’s increased productivity is mainly in making others more productive.

You can only be so productive at making code, but you can certainly make others more productive with better design of the software, better software architecture, properly designed (for productivity, bug reduction and future extensibility) libraries, adequate and suitably adjusted software development processes for the specifics of the business for which the software is being made, proper technical and requirements analysis well before time has been wasted in coding, mentorship, use of experience to foresee future needs and potential pitfalls at all levels (from requirements all the way through systems design and down to code making), and so on.

Don’t pay for that and then be surprised of just how much work turns out to have been wasted in doing the wrong things, how much trouble people have with integration, how many “unexpected” things delay the deliveries, how fast your code base ages and how brittle it seems, how often whole applications and systems have to be rewritten, how much the software made mismatches the needs of the users, how mistrusting and even adversarial the developer-user relationship ends up being and so on.

From the outside it’s actually pretty easy to deduce (and also from having known people on the inside) how plenty of Tech companies (Google being a prime example) haven’t learned the lesson that there are more forms of value in the software development process than merely “works 14h/day, is young and intelligent (but clearly not wise)”