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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I wasn’t very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.

    So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the “standard” config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.

    It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say “yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it’s the sex party of the century”.

    “Fixing” those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.

    By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft’s bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven “fixed” the performance issues. It didn’t, it’s just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.

    EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain’t got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn’t install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn’t even enable as I didn’t configure graphics acceleration.



  • 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.


  • The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

    To summarize:

    • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
    • The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
    • That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
    • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

  • Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

    That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

    Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

    Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.


  • I’m as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that’s like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

    Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it’s not like there’s a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

    EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks… How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.



  • 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.


  • France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

    And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

    So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.




  • Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

    Tracking consent prompt with only an "Accept all" button

    Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

    For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

    Tracking consent prompt with a "Reject all" button next to "Accept all"

    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:

    HTML source showing no reject all button

    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.



  • … What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

    Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

    Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

    The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.


  • Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

    However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

    • The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
    • Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
    • The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
    • Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

    Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.



  • 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.