I'm guessing the joke here is that Hossenfeffer has an underage daughter. They're not suggesting adulterers be reported to the police.
vaguerant
joined 11 months ago
Adding on to this, while this article is fast approaching 20 years old, it gets into the quagmire that is web standards and how ~10 (now ~30) years of untrained amateurs (and/or professionals) doing their own interpretations of what the web standards mean--plus another decade or so before that in which there were no standards--has led to a situation of browsers needing to gracefully handle millions of contradictory instructions coming from different authors' web sites.
Here's a bonus: the W3C standards page. Try scrolling down it.
Grimes has personal beef with Musk over their shared parenthood, but all indications are that she's still all-in on MAGA. She claims Nazis are bad but also parties with open fascists like Curtis Yarvin who plots to overthrow democracy and install Trump as king for life. She fucking sucks. Pity their children.
I'm not an admin, so I'm not qualified to answer that part, but I also came from kbin.social originally. I moved to fedia.io/Mbin when kbin.social and kbin itself died. I've definitely had a much better time on Fedia/Mbin as far as stability. I think that probably comes down to several factors:
- the stability of the software itself
- an attentive admin who's around to kick the tires
- less load on the server/s
For comparison, here's the last successful capture archive.org made of the kbin.social stats page. It lists 64601 users and 115388 threads. Here's the present-day fedia.io stats page which as I write this comment is reporting 5132 users and 9629 threads. Naively extrapolating from these figures, kbin.social was apparently taking >10 times the load that the largest Mbin server is currently. On the one hand, it would be nice to see Mbin grow to the heights of early kbin, but the current situation is far more manageable for these mostly out of pocket/donation-supported projects.
As long as we're filling out our fantasy browser brackets, I'm hoping that the Servo engine and browser/s can become viable. Servo was started at Mozilla as a web rendering engine only, before they laid off the whole team and the Linux Foundation took over the project. Basically revived from the dead in 2023, the current project is working on an engine and a demonstration browser that uses it. It's years away from being a usable replacement for current browsers and the engine is certainly the main project. A separate browser which employs Servo as its engine is a more likely future than an actual Servo browser.
Still, you can download a demo build of the official browser from the web site. Currently, it's only usable for very simple web sites. Even Lemmy/Mbin display is a little broken, and I think of those as fairly basic. YouTube is out of the question. One of the sites that's been used to demonstrate its capability to render web pages is the web site for Space Jam (1996) if that gives you any idea of its current state.
Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here's mine.
We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.
Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it's sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can't go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky's pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else's swimming pool and for no other purpose. It's a very good analogy.
Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:
Overall, I think federation isn't the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don't think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, "federation" was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.
i.e. In Bluesky's terminology, federation is not a future goal they're hoping to achieve, it's what they're already doing right now.
The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because ... damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing ... it's like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There's one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that's fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There's rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there's plenty of other boats to pick you up.
The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it's gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they're still out there floating on the ocean.
SearXNG is pretty lightweight to run, it's mostly run by the same kind of people who host Mastodon and other fediverse instances, often off the same servers. maapl.net is run by Mike Fraser, @mike@thecanadian.social from the image in OP, where thecanadian.social is his donation-supported, Canadian-focussed Mastodon instance. I don't know whether the funding for maapl.net comes out of that same donation pool, but it would make sense.
It's worth knowing that SearXNG (Wikipedia) is an open-source metasearch engine that has many available hosts. At the bottom of maapl.net is a link to a list of public instances. maapl.net isn't actually on the list yet, but there's one other Canadian host, https://searxng.shreven.org/. For any non-Canadians who catch this, there's a bunch of other instances you might want to try, e.g. in Europe.
The advantage of the N64 approach is that it allows both the D-pad and analog stick to be primary inputs. They're both ideally positioned under the thumb, because they're the only input the thumb needs to interact with. It's a tradeoff between the number of available inputs and ergonomics. Every other controller has to compromise on one or the other. e.g. The DualShock is obviously a SNES controller with two sticks slapped in the middle, but since it was an update to the standard (D-pad focussed) PlayStation controller, they're not at the angle where your thumb naturally rests. Successive PlayStation controllers moved the stick up and out slightly to bring it more in line with the thumb.
The Saturn 3D Control Pad along with other "modern" controllers like the Xbox line, GameCube and Switch have the opposite layout, where the analog stick is the natural resting place for the thumb and you crane to reach the less-accessible D-pad. With the benefit of hindsight, this is probably the "right answer", because most games since the fifth generation are designed around the analog stick, with the D-pad occasionally used as four additional action buttons which you either don't need at all, or only use sparingly. I don't know that this style of game (e.g. tactical shooters with squad orders on the D-pad) really did or could have existed in the N64 generation, so the lack of D-pad access ends up being irrelevant to the kind of games that were actually coming out in the era.
If you released a console today with the N64 controller, that would be a terrible idea, because there are the kinds of games coming out that expect you to have four triggers, two analog sticks and reasonably convenient access to the D-pad. But I can't think of any N64 games that were worse because you couldn't access the D-pad. What games needed those extra inputs? What games didn't get made because those inputs weren't convenient? Coming at it the other way, what games were released for the Saturn 3D Control Pad that wouldn't have been possible on N64?
Resident N64 pad defender here. It's fine to dislike the controller, but I'm never really sure if the "I don't have three hands!" complaint is a joke or just based on people who never played any N64 games or what.
You're not supposed to use all three prongs, ever. It's just a hedge-betting controller. Nintendo was afraid people wouldn't like the new, 3D style of game control and would demand a return to traditional D-pad input.
The N64 controller was their solution: if 3D movement is just a fad that dies out, well, move your hand over a couple of inches and forget about the analog stick. Now you've basically got a SNES pad with six face buttons and better ergonomics.
Obviously, 3D took over that whole generation and there's probably less than 10 games that need D-pad movement, so it ended up being fairly pointless in hindsight. But I can't argue with anybody who starts their design process with "What if gamers hate this new style of input?" because when don't they.
I have one of those external adapters talked about in OP. I don't really follow why an external plug is a problem because I don't spend much time looking at the back of my GameCube, but that wasn't the question so I'll move on.
The interesting thing about the GameCube is that, at least on the original production model (DOL-001), it has native digital video out. As such, these HDMI adapters are able to convert losslessly in the fully digital domain. Notably, this feature was dropped on the Wii, so with zero modifications, you can get a sharper image out of a GameCube than a Wii.
At least on my external adapter, there's no kind of post-processing going on, you're just getting the raw, native resolution (usually 480p) pixels over HDMI, so the result is a very clean, emulation-style pixel-perfect image.
Whether that's desirable will certainly vary from person to person, but even if you don't want that, it's a good starting point to do video capture or add any fancy upscaling or filtering that you want with other hardware between the GameCube and your TV/monitor.
I can see a system where you have to scan the QR code in a specific app for that purpose (e.g. a dedicated QR code payment app which approved businesses sign up to, which either includes or remotely queries a database of valid endpoints). At that point though, where you're requiring a dedicated app anyway, you may as well invent your own 2D code system with blackjack, hookers and signing. But yeah, I don't understand how this would work otherwise. QR codes just aren't made for security. They shouldn't be used anywhere security is required.