Not distraction, scapegoat. Fascism needs an “others” demographic to blame for citizens’ hardships, and they have realized that it’s more effective to have multiple of them so voters can cherry-pick whichever they feel more strongly about.

No entitlement necessary.

People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.

What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse¹. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.

What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers² and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers³. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.

The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.

If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.

¹: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.

²: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.

³: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.

All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.

You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.

The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.

Enough for a single, uninsured ride to the hospital. What a deal! /s

“OK, I unplugged the computer. … No, I still hear air moving. … What? You mean the footrest? Why would I unplug that?”

There’s a whole lot of entitlement going on in that thread.

If the maintainers didn’t want to merge it because they had bigger issues to worry about, that’s that. Whining about it and trying to pressure them with prospects of “becoming obsolete [if you don’t merge this]” isn’t going to make a convincing argument.

They should either shut the fuck up and learn to RTFM, or maybe consider putting their money where their mouths are by actually paying to support the projects they seem to so desperately think they have a right to influence the direction of.

With large email providers’ spam lists being largely left up to ML these days, it might help solve the right problem. At least, until they bribe the providers to add them to an exemption list.

They’re political victims of the Democrat Epstein HOAX.
— Republicans, probably

I feel like maybe the human DNA has degraded too much in 2 or 3 generations.

Ancient Greeks notwithstanding, being non-heterosexual was considered a disease to be eliminated or cured until people finally accepted that it was a natural part of being an animal. Would you say being gay is a consequence of flawed genetics, or would you like to try phrasing that remark a bit differently?

As a developer as well, I agree that they can get fucked. Bloated crap that wastes bandwidth and ruins first-time-to-paint on mobile devices by necessitating downloading and initializing a multi-megabyte bundle of npm packages.

As a user of the internet, I need websites to work, however. I would have disabled JavaScript entirely by now if it weren’t for the fact that doing so renders what feels like half of the entire web unusable.

Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.

Not without either breaking most SPAs (Single-Page Applications) or writing userscripts with site-specific logic.

The classic way of doing this crap was to make a placeholder page navigate to the article page. That leaves the redirect page in the history stack so when the user presses the back button, it just opens the page that navigates them forward again.

The modern way is to use the history API with history.pushState to add a history entry while listening for the popState event to check if the user pressed the back button. Unfortunately, both of those features have a legitimate use case for enabling navigation within a SPA. Writing an extension to replace them with no-ops would, in the best case, break page history in SPA websites. In the worst case, it would break page routing entirely.

You might be able to get away with conditionally no-oping their functionality based on heuristics such as “only allow pushState if the user interacted with the page in the last 5 seconds,” but it would still end up breaking some websites.

Add another to your list. It also started happening to me recently.

I didn’t want to make it sound too scary 😉

Seriously, though, git really needs an option to treat --force as --force-with-lease. In the exceedingly rare occasion where I might want to completely overwrite a branch, it should be extra explicit by having to type something like --force-and-overwrite.

One of PyFed’s selling points was that it was easier to work with than Lemmy. It’s going to be amusing when that takes a 180 turn and people start complaining.

Python is great for prototyping and iterating on small projects or as glue for modules written in C and C++. What it isn’t great at is linearly scaling on a single node. When the day that throwing more powerful hardware at the problem stops being an option, Kubernetes is going to walk through that door and fuck any semblance of simplicity up.

Solution:

git commit --amend
git push --force

Problem:

The process of discovering best practices on how to keep a clean git history is a goddamned challenge.

I’d be surprised if it’s not easy to transpile a Markdown document into the format

By hand—if you have experience writing roff typesetting—it is.

Having a program do it for you… you’re going to get something, but it won’t be correct and you will need to fix most of it.

A few problems come to mind:

1. It’s a macro-based typesetting language. As a consequence, there’s a one-to-many association between representations in Markdown with some equivalent in roff. A Markdown paragraph is just a paragraph, but in roff it could be an un-indented paragraph, a paragraph with first-line indentation, a paragraph with line-wrap indentation, or a paragraph with a left margin.

2. Rendering a man page, you have multiple different implementations of man and multiple different implementations of *roff (roff, troff, groff, nroff). The set of macros and features that are available differ depending on which implementation, resulting in one-size-fits-all solutions targeting the lowest common denominator.

3. Ironically, the one-to-many association goes both ways. With Markdown, you have code fences, quotes, italic text, bold text, and tables. With lowest-common-denominator manpage roff, you have paragraphs and emphasis that will either be shown as bold or inverted. If you’re lucky, you might also be able to use underlines. If Markdown tables are no wider than 80 characters, you could preprocess those into plain characters, at least.

4. Despite being more structured with its typesetting, the contents of a manpage are mostly still unstructured. The individual sections within the page and its use of indentation and emphasis are entirely convention, and not represented in the source code by anything more than just typesetting macro primitives.

It could work out if you generate both the Markdown and man page from something with more explicit structure. If the plan is to go from a loose Markdown document into a manpage, you’re going to end up having to write your Markdown document almost exactly like a manpage.

Don’t forget to add incompetent leadership to that list. If feature needs to be shipped by some arbitrary deadline and the engineers are forced to rush through the design process, you end up with a patchwork hack of tech debt that leads to more tech debt.

On █████████, Jeffery Epstein’s communications with ████████████ and ██████████ confirmed the █████████ of ████████. In a private █████ exchange, ████████ discussed the █████████ of ████████ for ███████. The ████████ was then scheduled to ██████████ with █████████, and would then meet up with Bill Clinton at the █████████ of ██████████. Flight logs for flight ██████ corroborate the meet up between Bill Clinton and █████████.

Further investigation into ████████ revealed the █████████ with █████████ and Bill Clinton. █████████ Obama ████████████ purchase █████████████ Bill Clinton ████████ and Do███████████████. ████████████████████████

I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:

Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.

Oh, no. I’m saying Microsoft owning your operating system and using it to push their data-harvesting software as a default browser is a monopolistic practice, whereas using Chrome by itself is just reinforcing an existing monopoly. The same goes for Mac and Safari or Android and Chrome.

Neither option is good, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish a corporation for their active attempts to subvert competition in a bid to establish their own monopoly in place of the current one.