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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

    To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

    But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.

    Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.




  • Just to be clear, Monster Hunter is 60% boss rush, 30% resource management and 10% gear progression.

    Compared to Souls gameplay, Monster Hunter is more grindy and mission-based and you’re always pointed at the next big thing. Beat a monster, collect materials, craft weapons and armour, repeat ad nauseam. And do everything all over again when you hit High Rank.

    Don’t go into Monster Hunter expecting a Souls game, it’s a different experience.

    That said, I absolutely love the Monster Hunter series and have probably sunk over 800 hours into different entries combined. Definitely give them a go! And if you do, keep in mind that the newer games have some handholding QoL features not found in older games, so keep that in mind when you decide in which order you might want to experience the games.




  • From a Dutch perspective, there’s always 5 new Flemmish words to memorize. You’d think we speak the same language, but we really don’t.

    In some ways, Flemmish is more Dutch than the language anyone from the Netherlands speaks. Which seems especially true when it comes to loan-words from French, which some of you seem to avoid at all costs.

    All of this leads to interesting situations where any conversation with our southern neighbours has a risk of needing a mental double take to make sure we derived the right meaning from your fancy words.

    One example of how crazy things can get is the word for roundabout. The Dutch will generally refer such traffic control measures as rotonde, which is a French bastardization. The Flemmish, in turn, sometimes refer to them as rondpunt. …which the French seem to have adopted when they say rond-point.

    The French definition of rotonde is actually from architecture. Where it is used for dome-shaped constructions, and is originally derived from the Latin rotondus, which just means “round”. Conclusion: Dutch is a weird language.


  • As others are sure to point out: welding bad for health.

    UV radiation that will give you a near-instant sunburn. Combined with IR radiation that will literally burn your retinas if you don’t protect them properly.

    Then theres the fact that you’re dealing with upwards of 1200°C/2200°F molten steel. And depending on your process you also have argon/CO2 gas leaks to worry about. That or the flux fumes or vaporized oxides and various metals will get you.

    But welding is also fun as shit, and surprisingly accessible as long as you’re not doing structural stuff without proper training.


  • I usually associate yoink with playfully stealing something, whereas graaien in this context refers more to behaviour seen in landlords and high level executives. You know, the kinds of people that are so far up their shareholder’s butts that they can’t see the damage they’re causing.

    Let’s just reserve yoink for stealing each other’s hoodies and similar endearing behaviour.


  • And it leads to a neverending stream of newly invented hype words.

    We even have a yearly word of the year tradition, where the organisation behind our most famous dictionary picks one of these newly invented words based on coverage in media.

    Last year’s word was “graaiflatie”, a combination between “graaien” (no direct translation, means to grab, but in a greedy way), and “inflatie” (inflation).


  • Transcoder here, if you’re looking to leverage quality/file size benefits of your codec, you don’t encode with hardware.

    As a rule of fist hardware encoding is better served for streaming purposes where you need to crush a raw 1080p or 1440p stream into something that’s actually a sensible bandwith as fast as possible, especially if you’re streaming 60fps because your algorithm has a time limit of 16ms per frame.

    If file size with preservation of quality is something you care about, you encode as slowly and thouroughly as you can, which is why x264 on your CPU will outperform encoders like NVENC any time.

    When it comes to HEVC, software encoding is only really worth it if you have the time to spare, because x265 takes between 3x and 5x as long as encoding the same footage through x264, with a 15-20% smaller file size at best. It is also more intensive to decode, which is why you still see many files with a H.264 codec.


  • Excellent analysis. Especially this part:

    It will be much more productive to try to solve this with the handful of Browser vendors than trying to regulate each and every consent banner.

    Early cookie banners were a bad experience but they were manageable. But now thing have transitioned into content-blocking modals, dark patterns, forced individual consent/rejection for each and every one of the 943 partners they’re selling your data to, sites that refuse to serve content if you reject tracking and other ways to frustrate the end user.

    I’m done with every piece of shit predatory actor inventing their own way of malicious compliance with the GDPR. You either implement the user-friendly consent API or you get no more tracking at all. Paywall your shit for all I care, at least then you’ll have a sustainable business model.



  • I work in IT, and different definitions of what SaaS means are starting to wreak real havoc on the architecture as a whole.

    We are better served just quitting the acronyms and taking the time to talk about a more detailed description of what the service actually adds in terms of value.

    Amazon Prime is a subscription for shipping, video streaming, gaming benefits and more. Since software is not the primary goal, but a means of delivery for these other services, I will not consider Amazon Prime SaaS.



  • I think it depends on the adoption of Linux on the desktop. When more people get a taste of what freedom of software brings, they are going to want that for their phones as well.

    That or we might just be years away from the next big thing where everyone walks around with AR glasses and the cycle starts all over again with companies competing for a duopoly, and we’re just fucked.


  • Others in this thread have covered most of the points already, but it is mainly software support for certain key things I want to do using my phone, such as online banking.

    I realise most of this is just anxiety about taking the plunge and seeing what it’s like, so if I have money to burn I might just buy a second phone just to see if it’s a viable option for me.

    But yeah, I wish mobile Linux was popular enough for there to be support from key service providers. Though it might be a long shot since “desktop” Linux is still growing and we haven’t yet seen the support shift.


  • It was a big mistake by Google to base the Android Framework entirely on Java. Pivoting to Kotlin because you’ve discovered that working in Java produces nothing but garbage does nothing to fix the situation either.

    Can’t wait for generic Linux phones to be a (more popular) thing so we won’t have to deal with this clown world nonsense anymore.