I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.
In the FPS genre I’ve found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.
The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.
This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.
I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.
Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.
I have uBlock Origin but didn’t bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).
However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn’t get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason… I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.
Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:
Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.
For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:
First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).
I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:
For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?
Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.
Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.
I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).
Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.
You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.
(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)
Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.
I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.
Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.
That conspiracy theory is so dumb.
The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).
However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.
Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.
Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)
FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like… I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it’s because I haven’t set foot in an electronics store in years but aren’t TVs typically laid out in a way that you don’t see them from the side?
Maybe I’m totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can’t even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.
However now that I think about it, maybe “thick” LCDs can’t go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).
What’s the overlap of the general public, people who buy “fancy sculpture TVs”, and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain’t shit.
Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer’s understanding of “the younguns and their flat-screen television sets” as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.
Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it’s based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.
I can totally see “make it as thin as XYZ” being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).
You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.
IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.
There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.
Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.
They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)
And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.
The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.
Batman fundamentally embodies social justice as an individual violent power fantasy. He’s the ultimate reactionary: use violence to fix individual people’s problems, never address (or even acknowledge) the violence inherent to the social system. (Some authors’ occasional deviations from this core characterization do not make up for it).
At best Batman is enjoyable because anti-heroes are enjoyable (I’ve heard there are some self-aware issues of Batman). At worst it’s painfully unaware, mask-off copaganda (such as the one and-and-a-half Nolan movies I slugged through).
The top comment is a fanfic about Batman explaining social systems to Poison Ivy. Great idea, except that such wokeness is antithetical to his entire worldview. He’s basically a Republican who happens to be against the death penalty for personal/religious reasons.
To be annoyingly nitpicky, how is “unnecessary” defined in this context? Whitespace is usually “unnecessary” but I quite like it for readability.
I broadly agree with you though, the W3C spec changes things.
> Clicks on <br>
> Example is <br />
The actual thing that matters is that the / is ignored so (unlike with XML I believe) you can’t self-close a non-void element by adding a trailing /. But “void elements should not have trailing slashes” is extrapolation on your part; the trailing slash improves readability and is kosher since it doesn’t act as a self-close.
Corporate behemoths are going to keep doing what they do best.
Their ISO-whatever certification says they gotta get that kind of software, so they do. Whether it is found to actually increase business risk does not matter in the slightest, what matters is that a box is checked for the audit.
It’s like Oracle or IBM, who did not contribute anything of value to the world since about 2005 and notoriously have some of the most aggressive licensing lawyers on the planet. But there are lots of companies out there who sort a product segment from Old to New and pick the first result on account of the fact that it’s “established”, “reputable” and “reliable”, every other consideration be damned.
There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.