Ferk

espeak default voice backend is synthesized without using actually real voice samples. So it doesn't require downloading a huge package for each language, which is convenient in some cases, but the outcome is extremely robotic.

You can use MBROLA as backend for espeak so that it uses some voice samples and the result should be less jarring (it'd still be easy to tell it's not natural voice, but at least you'd be able to understand it better). There's a tutorial on this here: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/mbrola.md

Or you can try piper (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper) it's one of the most natural-sounding TTS (here are some samples).

It can be formatted "nicely" with no issue. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy to understand.

What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP().... it's a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn't necessarily match up with what you'd expect would be the flow.

In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren't pedantic enough.

Like, for example, there's this function:

function vc() {
    var a = za.navigator;
    return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
}

Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that's just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there's also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too... and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

And I'm not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem.. it's entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else... but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of "nicely formated" messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.

True. Though I don't think we would be in a hurry for this one, both Mindustry and Shapez have similar concepts and are already open source and quite good.

That's out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {

    setTimeout(function() {
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    }, 5E3);

} else {

    c();
    a.resolve(1)

}

It's possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

And I expect it's likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven't had the time to check it myself, but there's probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.

To his point: if not "discuss", what is the correct approach against fascism? war and murder? dismiss it, try to "cancel it" without giving any arguments so it can continue to fester on its own and keep growing in opposition?

To me, fascism is a stupid position that doesn't make much sense, to the point that it falls on itself the moment you "discuss" it.

I would have expected that it would be the fascists the ones unable/unwilling to discuss their position, since it's the least rational one. So it's certainly very jarring whenever I hear people jumping to defend against fascism while at the same time stopping in their tracks when it comes to discussing it. Even if those unable to reason might not be convinced by our arguments, anyone with reason would. Rejecting discussion does a disservice, because it does put off those willing to listen and strengthens those who didn't really want an argument anyway.

Like flat-earthers, they should be challenged with reason, with discussion. Not dismissed as if it were true that there's a huge conspiracy against them. Whether they listen or not to that reason, dehumanizing them and rejecting civil and rational discourse would play in favor of their movement.

Stating "genocide is bad" should NOT be a statement of faith. Faith is the shakiest of the grounds, if we are unable to articulate the specific reasons that make genocide be bad, then we are condemned to see it repeat itself. So, I'd argue it's for the sake of the victims in Auschwitz that antifascism should not be turned into a religion, but into a solid and rational position that's not distorted nor used willy-nilly.

If they were complaining about cronjobs being created (like the post says), then they must have known what cron is.

I have purchased every single open source game that I've seen listed on steam as paid. Examples:

• Shattered pixel dungeon (and also the original Pixel Dungeon)
• TOME
• Shapez
• Open Hexagon
• Mindustry
• Lugaru
• Mega Glest
• Marvellous Inc
• Hydra Slayer
• HyperRogue

For more FOSS games on steam, there's a decent list collected on this curator (also pointing which ones are only partially open): https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38475471-Libre-Open-Source-Games/?appid=1769170

It doesn't really matter whether it was "targeted" at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. "End" vs "means".

I wouldn't be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there's a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox's. Given that all it's doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there's some indicators even if there's not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.

"you want a government backdoor on GPL licensed code? publish the backdoor for everyone to use, see and exploit/check for themselves. And/or watch as people simply take a version of the software built from a more reputable source without that backdoor instead. Thanks for the money!"

"you want to force all foss projects existing in the global internet across countries to get paid by you or close? enjoy your logistic nightmare as you pay to be made fun of by all other countries while I fork projects with one click"

There are many games that had that mechanic before Arceus.

In particular, Craftopia (which is from the same developers of Palworld) had capsule devices that you can throw to enemies in a "virtual space" while characters "engage in combat" before Arceus was a thing.

Just because they wrote a patent does not make it enforceable... patents don't really mean anything until they are actually tested in court so they are just tools to try and scare people away whenever a company wants to bully with the prospect of a lawsuit.

I feel that Palworld is likely to win this, this actually is an idiotic move from Nintendo and a win for Palworld.. now they will get more publicity, perhaps another spike in sales, and they are finally given the opportunity to prove how they are in the right, so they can shut up all the naysayers who complained about it. I'm hoping all the paranoic empty claims about "blatant asset theft" will be settled once and for all.

It's changing by having a library like wlroots do most of the work.

When you consider the overall picture, "wlroots + compositor" is actually less complex than "X11 + window manager" because you no longer need to consider the insanely high requirements of having to have a team maintaining the spaghetti mess of X11 code.

Wayland-based dwl has roughly the same line count as X11-based dwm (about 2.2k), without having to depend on a whole separate service as big as X11.

But of course, it being a completely different approach, it's likely that for most smaller projects (ie. not Gnome or KDE) it's easier to start a new project than creating a layer to maintain two different parallel implementations.

If you want something that's more or less compatible with openbox, there seems to be this project, labwc, which claims to be inspired by openbox and compatible with its config/themes.. though I haven't personally tried it.

Also keep in mind that openbox (and I expect labwc too) doesn't include any "panels" / "taskbars" or anything like that... and it's likely your X11 panels might not work well if they do not explicitly support Wayland (but I believe that, for example, xfce-panel now supports both).

Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh.. but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).

Where would the money come from then? donations? Or do you mean they should shrink, fire people and downscale.

I think it's too late for them to switch direction, not without a lot of people getting laid off. Though maybe that will ultimately happen if they finally end up bankrupt.

Content curated by "the core geeks and nerds" might appeal to "geeks and nerds", not to those consumers.

They want "consumer" content. And if one day they get tired of it then I doubt any amount of "steak" would have stopped them leaving anyway, since that was never what they were looking for. It's not like reddit has to be the only place they visit in the internet, nor is the internet their only source of consumption. Just because you go to a snack bar does not mean that's the only place you go for meals.

Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.

It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.

So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.

The reality is that if it wasn't for Jimmy, it's likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can't work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn't wanna be his friend.

So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D

Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich.. but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?

Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.

I don't care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.

You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking... but the opinions of the people running those things don't matter so long as they keep being reliable.

If you are into open source, give Remnants of the precursors a try, it's a modern spiritual successor of the oldie Master of Orion.

That's ok if we are talking about malware publicly shown in the published source code.. but there's also the possibility of a private source-code patch with malware that it's secretly being applied when building the binaries for distribution. Having clean source code in the repo is not a guarantee that the source code is the same that was used to produce the binaries.

This is why it's important for builds to be reproducible, any third party should be able to build their own binary from clean source code and be able to obtain the exact same binary with the same hash. If the hashes match, then you have a proof of the binary being clean. You have this same problem with every single binary distribution, even the ones that don't include pre-compiled binaries in their repo.

I have contributed to other projects without really needing to get involved in their community in any personal/parasocial level, though.

I just make a pull request and when the code was good it was accepted, when not it got rejected. Sometimes I've had to make changes before it getting merged, but I had no need to engage in discussions on discord or anything like that. I've been in some mailing lists to keep track on some projects, but never really engaged deeply, specially if it goes off-topic.

If I find that a good code contribution is rejected for whatever toxic reason, then the consequence of that is the code would stop being as good as it could have (because of the contributions being rejected/slowed down), so it's then that forking might be in order. Of course the code matters.

The thing is that being "willfully ignorant" has served them well, so it makes it the smart move when the goal is "line go up".

Give me money and call me stupid, why would I care what a few "smart" people think when millions of "stupid" people give me all I want?

The article talks about how they are ok with using AI for things outside generating images, texts and so. For example, they are fine using the rudimentary AI of any typical enemy in one of their games. So I expect procedural generation that does not rely on trained bayesian network models is ok for them.

It looks like they just seem to be concerned about the legality of it... so they might just start using it as soon as the legal situation for AI models is made safe.

I'm ok with not considering it "public good" when something has a license that sets conditions and it's under Copyright of a particular private person/entity. But if you do need to ask consent to a private party for the use of something in a derivative work of certain conditions, then I don't think it makes sense to call it a public good.

I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it's much clearer and it's guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don't suppot tar archives, they'll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

It's also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they'll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it's a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.

Nonsense video, underlying problem is monopolies and private companies who develop the standards, not what browser you use.

It's the other way around. Which browser you use is what directly determines whether monopoly and private companies develop the standard you use.

You could write a standard independently of those companies, but then if everyone chooses to use browser engines from companies that don't follow it, what's the point?

If everyone uses a particular browser then whatever that browser implements becomes the standard. It's all about what browser you use.

If the standards are fully open, transparent and not concerning then it would make no difference if you use chrome and firefox because everyone would use same basis.

If what you want is everyone using the same basis, then what you need is to get everyone to use the same browser engine (which is what is happening already).

However, focusing on that is likely to not result in it being "fully open" as long as the popular browsers are not interested in openness (in particular with a MIT-licensed basis that is allowed to be privately altered, extended and corrupted in proprietary forks by those popular browsers who don't have to be "transparent" on what exactly they changed).

If what you want is for it to be "fully open", then you'd want people to be more careful and choose a browser with a "fully open" basis, instead of using whatever is more popular. It's still all about what browser you use.

I think it's more that executives think the average consumer is stupid and cares too much about IP branding. And I feel they are not completelly wrong. Though I think the OGL fiasco showed the D&D fanbase might be smarter than that ...hopefully.

This.

I don't understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible... I'm not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual ...or in marketing stunts.

The only individuals I'm interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I'd rather use a more private platform.

And when I want to read a public post I'd rather it's well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it's curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don't have to waste my time going through tons of content I'm not remotelly interested on.

Only if they use it the same way and within the same context. But isn't that what always happens when a new gaming system/idea explodes and clones start poping up? I don't think that matters much, in fact competition might actually be a good thing.

Yes, I don't think it's just about the execution of Win32 code, but also the possibility of MS using marketing techniques and dirty manipulation methods to give themselves advantages within the Windows platform to sway the general public to their store in a similar manner as how they push their browser, their MS Teams communication platform, their One Drive Cloud Storage, their search engine, their data-collection tech, their assistant, etc.

My worry is that the other 20% might actually come from other forms of partnerships and integrations not unlike what they probably had in mind with this, and that dropping Google might actually make them more dependent on seeking this kind of initiatives, not less.

I don't know how many people you actually need to maintain a browser. But if it's actually possible to do it without any kind of money from any of those sources in a way that can be sustained, then it would make more sense to make a fork (or alternative, like Ladybird) and just use that.

Like I said, I think it's too late for Mozilla to shift course, I don't expect they'll ever do that. At least not until they are forced by a competing project if it happens to become successful (or a similar huge wake up call that leaves them no alternative).

Yes, that's why im saying that this kind of problem isn't something particular about this project.

In fact I'm not sure if it's the case that the builds aren't reproducible/verifiable for these binaries in ventoy. And if they aren't, then I think it's in the upstream projects where it should be fixed.

Of course ventoy should try to provide traceability for the specific versions they are using, but in principle I don't think it should be a problem to rely on those binaries if they are verifiable.. just the same way as we rely on binaries for many dynamic libraries in a lot of distributions. After all, Ventoy is closer to being an OS/distribution than a particular program.

You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn't mean potatoes are political.

Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

In the end, the only thing that's political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.

Saying that I dont trust a homophobe is not “sharing my political opinions”

That's true.

However, you did not just say that. You mentioned how he supports some homophobic politics (ie. regulation against gay marriage), which you (and I'm sure a lot of people, me included) disagree with. That's politics.

You also shared your opinion about why you think privacy is important for our society. That's also politics.

I'm not saying that what you said is wrong... I'm saying that what you said is political. Sharing political opinions is ok. It's not like talking about politics is somehow a bad thing. At least not in this context. A lot of what surrounds the choice of a web browser like this is political.

No it is not, this is a myth. As you also can use free software on closed OS, which happens to be the standard

Why does it "happen to be the standard"?

Because people use it. At the end of the day, usage is what determines what's standard.

Whether a particular person can opt to go for something non-standard (eg. Linux) doesn't make what I said any less true.

And the problem is that the non-standard person can't expect the same level of support (eg. Linux drivers for obscure hardware).. because devs and companies won't care so much for any deviations from what's standard.

The point is that user generated or govt establish frameworks can b used as basis

That would be useless if people (both end users and web developers) don't use it.

The Mozilla Foundation created their own browser. Yet they are dying since they are getting abandoned by both web devs and end users. Creating your own does not solve the problem.

If web devs design for Chrome and Chrome adds Chrome-specific deviations from the standard, it's gonna be extremelly hard to keep up, which is what is happening with Firefox.. they can't keep up, they keep receiving reports of problems because websites are developed for Chrome.

This is already the case, you can choose not to use FLoC. Nothing changes here.

Yes, In there I was just describing how things work. As I see it.

Please learn the difference between Browser engine and web standards, nonsense you talk here

Web standards are just a set of rules that hipothetically Browser engines follow.

In practice, however, no browser engine actually follows the standard 100%, since they all have their very own extensions or try different optimizations that result in differences of implementation.. Google keeps adding their own spin on things at a pace that is hard to keep up for any other browser.

If it were possible for web standards to be really, truly, and fully respected, then indeed it wouldn't matter what browser you use. But that's not what the reality is. There are websites that work and look different in Chrome than in Firefox.

To each their own. For me, a good lore and dialog is what makes a good RPG stand out.

If I want action and reflexes, I'd go play an action game. If I want strategy, I'd go for a puzzle game, or a 4X, deckbuilder, etc. But in a proper RPG what I look for is good lore, engaging story and some level of freedom that makes me feel I'm having an impact in that world. If AI can help with immersion and/or dynamic changes, I'm all for it. Of course, for that to happen they need to make sure it does stay in character and does not hallucinate something incoherent.

If there's an AI chatbox that actually can stay coherent and be set up as a game without feeling like you have to input too many instructions to the AI to push the narrative (I think AI Dungeon gets close) then well, you could almost consider that being an RPG already. After all, the first RPGs were all text based. So I would already consider that the first iteration of AI-based RPG game. But translating that to a live 3D environment would be the next step.