A crash? I’d say we’re in a plane from which the pilot decided to press the “eject wings” button.

The whole industry is projecting something like negative $200B for next years. They know it’s not worth the price.

People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.

But you can. Hopefully, you know how your language is called in your language, right?

I’m pretty sure nobody’s doing that based on geoip. Client-side, the browser exposes the user’s languages choices. And server side, the HTTP header can help. But geoip is totally unreliable, even a broken salesman would not sell that as a feature.

Well ok they would sell it but get a very heavy glance from the dev team.

The label for the language picker is an issue, but the choices themselves? In the target language. You want French? You pick “Français”. You want Japanese? You pick “日本語”. You want english? You pick “English”.

Supposedly, if you’d rather have a website in a given language, you must have some level of understanding of that language, and picking its name should not be a challenge in any case. If you somehow change a site/app to a language you don’t know, as long as you can identify the language picker, you’ll be able to change to something you understand.

It does leave out the case of a user wanting to change to a language they do not understand, but I do not care for those.

Flash was a security nightmare all round, not counting the security flaws. It was just designed without any security features. It was also terribly inefficient at its core job, that was supposedly vector animation. It filled a gap in a time where browser and standards where not that advanced.

Over time, Flash issues where never resolved, but the bloatness of the software kept increasing. Along the way, HTML got better specs, JavaScript got vast improvement, especially in everyone adhering to roughly the same standard (thanks microsoft for finally caving in…), and so the flash interpreter was highly redundant with the browser itself.

For a while flash editors could export in HTML5 and you’d get roughly the same result, but with a fraction of the resources requirements, so naturally there was little incentive to keep the flash player around.

I’m not sure if “killing flash” could be attributed to their author, or to the loss of interest.

Also note that alternative flash players exists to still play older swf files, and some sites uses them alongside with plain video conversion for flash animations that weren’t dynamic.

Yes. But if you live in the future, you have to wait for dozens of dozens of intermediate to do so! Great!

The PNG format is made of chunks that have determined roles, and provides provisions for newer “standardized” chunks alongside the custom chunks it had supported until now. It is likely that PNG made with newer software that does not use new features, or uses only additional features, will remain readable by older software to some extent.

I find it reassuring that some people are not proud of grabbing random people off the street to send them to their death with a smile.

I’d rather these laws be against abusing and exploiting child, as well as against ruining their lives. Not only that would be more helpful, it would also work in this case, since actual likeness are involved.

Alas, whether there’s a law against that specific use case or not, it is somewhat difficult to police what people do in their home, without a third party whistleblower. Making more, impossible to apply laws for this specific case does not seem that useful.

It doesn’t detract from the parent’s comment at all.

If there’s two things that have been consistent over time with the recent LLM and AI craze, is that it have some good, helpful applications for people with disabilities, and that none of the big players are looking into them. Some are actively working against them. Probably because it’s harder to monetize “living” from a PR perspective.

Interestingly, the two example you shared (Sonic Unleashed and the whole Sonic franchise being bad) are likely a good example of “hanging with the bad crowd”. Unleashed is… not great, in my opinion, but the whole franchise? Please. We’re not talking Sonic06 level of horrible decisions.

Another view on this is, if you enjoy something, and people have to tell you it’s bad just so you know, it can’t be that bad. People enjoy different things, and seriously, the toxicity of large communities is the worst thing ever. At this point, even with what seems to be “unanimously loved”, you’ll be able to find a large enough group of people happy to tell you it’s shit.

With that said, some games are really, really bad. But these games usually don’t need to be pointed out for people to know.

edit: dang, that was full of typo.

That’s the plan. Attack subject that are traditionally seen as taboo/sensitive/whatever, then extend. CSAM content, porn in general, even random bulletin board with cringey content these days, are used as the entrypoint. You target those, people are wary about defending their rights because of the flagship topic, so laws are changed to put some extra layers of tracking, surveillance, etc.

Step two is claim whatever site/service the current government dislike falls under an imaginary category that allows using these layers of surveillance. And these are extra hard to remove once put in place, because nobody wants to break their surveillance toy.

It’s never about the porn, it’s never about the kids, it’s never about our security when a proposal shows up and talks about breaking encryption, privacy, etc.

Stuff we want: protecting kids, having privacy.

Stuff these proposal do: break privacy, don’t care about kids (or anyone else for that matter).

Seems pretty simple to me. Again.

I’m self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.

And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it’s on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That’s not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous. All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.

The two thing I use most, by far, from Google, is gmail and basic search.

Gmail, I’m looking to move away from it now, but I currently have every little addition to it disabled. Basic inbox and tags, no automatic filtering, no categories, no nothing.

Search, my browser is set to open the “web” tab with the query, no transformation, no summary, no “for you”, no AI garbage, no “we thought you wanted video so there’s only video in the replies”. It still works fine.

Basically, none of what they added for years… maybe decade at this point, had held a glimmer of interest from me. It feels like this trend will continue. I just want something very basic that works.

Oh, so it’d be ok to get movies, pictures, books, etc. without asking the right owners for us too? GREAT.

I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can’t tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.