Skull giver

The 6GHz band was used before it was used for WiFi. Frequencies can be reassigned, and they get reassigned on a regular basis.

It’s a pretty stupid thing to do that has no use other than annoying random people, but it the WiFi equipment industry can’t deal with changes like these, they need to get their act together. Samsung and Comcast will be fine, and grandma just needs to install her updates like she should be doing anyway.

PNGv4/v5 may improve compression but it won’t be backwards compatible. It’ll get stuck in the same kind of limbo JPEG-XL is. Until that gets resolved, we’ll have to stick with AVIF/HEIFF/WebP.

I don’t really see the need for advanced compression in lossless files. You generally don’t download those in bulk without looking at lower quality previews anyway. Would be nice if the real file supports the same colour space the preview file does anyway. I’ll appreciate it when it lands, but I don’t think I’ll spend the hours converting my photo library to save maybe half a gigabyte of space.

What a weird take. Alpha channels are used all the time. A lot of tools use WebP for them, though. Things like stickers and emoji in chat apps often recode into WebP or force you to figure out how to make a WebP with a certain configuration to accept your pack, but from there on out they rely on alpha channels.

MacOS app icons are a collection of layers with alpha channels embedded into them, stacked on top of each other, or themed individually. Unless you’re blind, any iOS or macOS user encounters alpha channels every time they turn on their screen. On Android, those files are even actual PNGs. On Windows, those are .ico resources, and everything larger than 64x64 is guaranteed to be a PNG embedded inside of an .ico (possibly embedded inside of a .exe/.dll/etc.

WebP has replaced jpeg for most web content already when it comes to compression. This just solves things like “how do I save my HDR images without degrading them every time I hit save”.

Alpha channels are also why a lot of Android apps are full of PNGs. Every app you use will be using a PNG somewhere, probably uncrushed, full of Photoshop metadata.

Of course social media is full of lossy images. Websites can be, too. But plenty of web content is lossless PNGs in ARGB format, because that’s what the person making that shit decided to use, and they don’t care about saving a few milliseconds of transfer time every time you download their content.

Aside from the fact it’s proprietary stuff they own… you can’t just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public.

They don’t need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course. And they can alter their client side software to accept a third party game server and let the fans do the rest. Kind of what the EU has forced Meta to do through the Digital Markers Act.

They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.

No, they have to abide by the law. Apple, Google, Meta, and many other billionaire tech companies have already been forced to alter and open up access to their software. Hell, games companies have already been forced to remove lootboxes in “their property”.

Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game.

And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all. Same reason the cybersecurity legislation mandating the availability of software patches doesn’t affect devices without network connectivity much. An RC car doesn’t need firmware updates, an app-controlled RC car has terrible costs associated with it if you don’t build your code right.

Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal.

I know that. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else’s server after shutdown and you’ll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don’t want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.

Plus, you think the people developing the netcode need to provision a full multi continent cloud every time they test their protocol?

Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it’s not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it’s now just dead.

Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works! After all, the servers have been shut down, so v2.4 is the very last version the developer will need to care about. Barring the mandatory support period for the Cyber Resilience Act, of course. Or maybe they could make backwards compatible APIs, though I doubt game developers still know how to these days.

You can’t mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don’t support anymore.

First of all, sure you can. It’d be stupid, but you can.

Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development

There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, “you cannot sell your game in the EU” is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe “figure out what”'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.

it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible

What upstream APIs? The game has been abandoned. The server code is no longer being worked on. The auth is done server-side on servers they don’t even control. There is no upstream to break.

You seem to take the current state of the game development industry and extrapolate from the game publisher’s point of view what would be achievable without losing money. That’s not how the law works. The law doesn’t care. It the law says “no visible blood in your zombie game”, you either don’t release in Germany or you find a way to comply. Nobody in the government cares about the complexity of remodeling games, all the hard work the colour designers did, the way the shaders were written, it just says “get rid of the blood or fuck off”. In this case, the law would say “make your game work or fuck off”.

Games worked like this for a decade. They can be made to work like this again. “Modern” doesn’t mean “better”, it just means “different” when it comes to game servers. The only thing stopping games companies from doing that, is the financial incentive not to. Threaten 'em with a couple billion dollars of fines and they’ll realign their incentives. It worked great for social media companies and ad agencies.

Some free-to-play video games would definitely fuck off. The companies willing to put up half a dev’s time every month to sync their protocol changes to their self hosted servers will be there to take gamers’ money they would’ve spent on the free to play stuff. There are billions at stake, and games companies are legally obligated to gobble up as many of their billions for their shareholders as they can.

The EU already mandates minimal service life for things like security updates. I don’t see why it won’t make it past courts. Hell, under EU laws regarding warranty, games publishers are probably already forced to either run game servers for a minimum of two years (or offer alternatives such as full refunds). This concept is just extending the mandated warranty in a sense. As for the software itself, manufacturers are under tons of regulation when it comes to support and availability of replacement parts in various industries. Entitlement does play a role, but that may very well be in the fact that consumers are simply entitled to access to the goods and services they purchased.

Also, there’s nothing stopping companies from releasing alternative servers when their main servers turn off. Games used to come with dedicated servers for free. Companies just decided not to do it anymore because they can make more money with their current strategy. While the games are being sold, these companies make hundreds of millions or even billions of profit. The cost of their servers remaining available is just part of their profit forecast.

None of this will fail because it would be impossible to make happen. The real question is probably if consumers have more power than the video games lobby. I doubt they do. The proposal goes against the financial incentives of video game publishers, so they’ll try to convince lawmakers not to bother. If their attempts fail, there’s a chance certain games won’t make it into the EU if such a law passes, or that certain content won’t be available, but it’s not like nobody will make games anymore.

A more realistic scenario of a law like this will have game publishers state an expiration date on their software. They already have to when it comes to security updates, but they’ll probably have to put a sticker on it like “this game/DLC will stop working after 2026” and let consumers decide whether to buy the product or not.

I don’t think the science is out on that. For instance, your capacity to fall in love with someone is influenced by their smell as it contains information about their immune system (and, by extent, their immunological compatibility with yours).

Most humans have a need for companionship. It’s the reason solitary confinement is considered torture in most cases. Our brains and bodies are rigged to prefer companionship over being alone most of the time. Put a human alone in a room with a plastic ball with a face drawn on it for long enough, and that plastic ball will be given a name, a personality, and that human will get upset if you dare “hurt” the plastic ball. In a much more dystopian twist on that experiment, people have started “befriending” LLMs now that they’ve grown to have the ability to remember a couple hundred keywords about your user account. The human mind craves being around others.

However, I don’t think whether you like someone or not is purely a function of what they provide for you. You can enjoy the presence of your friends even if you’re sitting in a room silently scrolling on your phone, or watching a TV show.

Their opinions and behaviour towards others definitely also matters. Shared experiences also factor into this stuff somewhere; someone you would normally detest who might’ve been with you through bad times/some traumatic event might end up becoming a friend. Years and years of positive experiences can also make you find excuses for things you would reject in others (which is why even the worst people can have their families and friends protect them). Your friends may have turned into terrible people over the years, and you will find ways to defend their behaviour to yourself and others just because they’re your friends. Similarly, someone you know well might do something terrible out of the blue, and you will recognise that as an outlier event (mental health crisis? sign of illness?) rather than distancing yourself from them like they’re some weirdo in the street.

Maybe ask yourself this: if your friends got hit by a car tomorrow, and suddenly lost their ability to hold an interesting conversation, make witty jokes, or play video games with you, would you stop caring about them? If not, then there’s clearly more to your relationship with them than the basic experiences they can provide.

I don’t think most Europeans would think their royals are classy at all. Even if we stripped them of their power now they’d just be rich people living in large houses their family could already afford anyway. They’re basically government pawns we keep around for tradition and to make deals with vain foreign leaders. China does something similar, but they used pandas. If you’re a good little friend of the totalitarians, you get to have a panda in your zoo.

You think the leaders of shit holes are going to be interested in presidents? Nah, they meet presidents every day. If you want to placate them, you take our the big guns. You go “Who’s a big boy president? That’s right, it’s you! You can have a sleepover in a real palace just like in the Disney movies! Everyone thinks you’re such an important big boy!” These leaders aren’t rational-thinking, they’re coming from (sub)cultures where displays of wealth and status mean something, and I bet nothing makes a vain guy happier than to say they made a king entertain them. They feel like they’re such big shits pushing around our stage puppets.

You’d think those foreign leaders would feel belittled but sending royalty to shitholes works great, politically. The national news broadcaster has this trick where they’re officially “royal Dutch news” (because of weird laws, you don’t need to be related to royalty in any way to be granted that title as a company) and yelling “royal Dutch news” instead of “Dutch news” when trying to ask questions actually works. Even in countries with presidents. It’s extremely stupid but it’s been proven to work.

I don’t think the royals are anything special but I also don’t think the political circus around electing a president and the endless drama that follows will be any cheaper (or better, for that matter). With the way things are going in this country, I’ll take King Wimlex over President Wilders, thank you very much.

I don’t see why not. Based on the spec, a server submits a request signed by a keyId which the receiving server caches or obtains, but the new server is also queried for the keys belonging to the actor. You cannot reuse the old key IDs (probably) because it’ll stay in the cache, but you can just add new keys of your own.

Step 10 of the key verification algorithm explicitly instruct the server to ignore the old key and fetch a new one, in case the other server has done a blind key rotation.

In other words, the ActivityPub spec only verifies that an account was the source of a message at the time a server submitted or forwarded an event. It does not validate that an Update with new text contents belongs to the same server that once Created the object.

Of course, I expect ActivitiyPub software to (mis)implement this spec in different ways. Some software will be protected against domain hijacking, others will leave domains once registered completely useless in the future for common actor names in ActivityPub.

There is, but the protocol is designed that you can’t buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.

There is public/private key authentication, but the server is queried for its current keys when verifying content. This allows lemmy.ml to forward lemmy.dbzer0.com content to any other server without knowing the private key, because the receiving server will call back to the original server (if they key is not already cached) and use the user’s public key to verify the message.

Once the domain expires and a new person buys the domain, that new person is in charge of what keys a domain lists or not. That, combined with the fact blind key rollover is permitted, leaves it up to programmers of individual servers to decide if they accept the new keys or not (the spec says they should).

https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md has falsehoods about phone numbers.

Country codes are variable. Even the “I’m about to dial another country prefix” (usually + resolves to 00 but that depends on country and carrier) is variable. Phone number lengths are variable. Phone numbers are often written in non-Arabic numerals. Phone numbers can have specific digits in the middle of the number to reroute the call to another carrier.

You can try to parse phone numbers if you’re writing a specific phone number parsing library, but you’ll need to keep up with the ITU documents, the numbering plans of all countries and satellite providers, and provide support for older standards going back to the 60s. You’ll need to deal with edge cases that your language probably doesn’t even have names for. And most importantly, you’ll have to guess what country the phone number is from based on context clues such as the user’s language or location or locale because phone numbers can be and are reused across borders.

Phone numbers are worse than time zones. Don’t parse them yourself unless you’re building an international phone interconnect.

Kids shouldn’t even be on social media, but at least the corporate ones are covering their ass against lawsuits well enough that they try to moderate content.

The Fediverse is not a place for kids. Servers catering especially towards kids are DEFINITELY not for kids, because that’s exactly the kind of server I would build if I were a pedo.

The legal requirements for hosting content for kids are a massive headache that you definitely don’t want to take on as a volunteer. The Fediverse can’t even comply with the GDPR, let alone COPPA and its many international alternatives that actually see enforcement.

Of course I was a kid on the internet too and very few websites care about lying about your age, but if you do that and see the occasional dick, fetish porn or gore, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Plus, the Fediverse is full of misinformation, lies, and propaganda, from every side of the spectrum. Moderators can only do so much, and some moderators straight-up post misinformation and propaganda themselves. Best not to expose kids to any it that shit until their brains have developed a bit more.

Note that because of the way federation works, the domain can be bought by someone else who can then use the connections and links to lemm.ee images and posts to peddle spam and other nonsense. It’s not a problem as long as the domain name stays under control of the lemm.ee admins, but if they don’t renew their registration then anyone can pretend to be the old lemm.ee server.

Best for lemm.ee users to delete images from their posts and comments now so whoever grabs the domain in a year or so can’t use it to inject weird shit into your old posts as easily. Of course they still can create new accounts for all.the old account names and post in your name if they want, but the user private keys should prevent that for individual posts if the other server software is smart enough to validate them.

Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don’t really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won’t do more than make you pee.

The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it’s poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.

Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn’t change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.

So far the only companies making you use one are the multiplayer gaming companies that are using TPMs for hardware IDs to ban cheaters and expensive corporate software using them for remote attestation on hardware the company owns.

If you’re salty about the whole Windows 10 thing, you’ve got until at least October 2027 until Microsoft drops support for it (security beyond the 10 year window announced at the launch of Windows 10 cost like 5 bucks a month though) or you can install an OS from someone who’s still willing to maintain support for old hardware, like Google’s ChromeOS or maybe Linux.

It’s only really a problem if you’re unwilling to pay for (or pirate) updates and are afraid to separate yourself from the large corporations building your current OS.

Oracle has a generous free server offering. You will need to trust Oracle not to turn off your server because a business customer needs it, though. Availability of their good free tier also fluctuates and you need to figure out their weird IP/firewall/security config.

You need a domain name to effectively federate, too. There are free options available for those too, but they’re not very reliable.

We pretty much had this when the first reliable Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge came online. The Fediverse side protested and made the entire system opt-in, making it practically unusable because people that don’t have a favourite Linux distro don’t know what a fedi is and why they should bridge to it.

When this goes live, I expect people to treat it the same as every other sizeable social media joining the Fediverse, with outrange and block lists.

To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

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