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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

    That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.



  • Americans: “Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we’re all out of ideas.”

    Thousands of kids died for Americans’ right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

    “American ideals”? All bark, no bite. You’ll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don’t huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

    Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y’all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldAny more?
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    4 days ago

    Classful IPv4 was obsoleted 32 years ago. Only 8 years left before it’s literally older than a standard career.

    It’s fascinating the sheer inertia that leads formally-trained IT professionals to use and perpetuate such profoundly useless and obsolete nomenclature. You’d think that having an incorrect use of the term “class A” and not having any use for classes B and C would tip off academia that they should cordon off classful networking to the “History of Computing” course next to ARPANET.

    Maybe next time someone refers to 10.0.0.0/8 as a Class A network I’ll refer to it as the ARPANET Network. That’s only very slightly more anachronistic (3 years).



  • Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?

    IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.

    Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.

    Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.

    It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
    Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.


  • (They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)

    I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them

    Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).

    I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.


  • It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

    Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

    The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.




  • So my Fairphone is not supported because the security updates aren’t good enough. Serves me right trying to find an ethical approach to mobile computing.

    I understand GrapheneOS’ philosophy but buying a google product to get away from google software is certainly… a choice. Refurbished or not buying a Pixel would serve Google’s interests, nevermind the fact that I bought my current phone a couple years ago hoping to get close to a decade of use out of it.

    Realistically software freedom on mobile phones is doomed until the industry improves the firmware situation. Every project suffers from severe drawbacks because of it.


  • A key feature of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or Louis XIV, keeping the court close like this is an absolutely essential part of holding on to power. For one they’re too busy with the king to have time to get bored and start scheming against him. For two the courtesans are around each other and competing for attention so they scheme against each other instead. We know that Trump listens to his advisors very haphazardly; it keeps them on their toes, constantly begging for attention (even if the end result is unbelievable political flip-flopping, that’s irrelevant to Trump himself).

    People have this image of the Third Reich as super organized, but in reality the top command was a complete mess as everybody was trying to backstab each other and to please Hitler who didn’t necessarily even have a clue what was going on. The utter incompetence of Nazi leadership was always going to cost them the war, but it did keep Hitler in power until the very end even though the outcome of the war was long considered inevitable by his own generals.

    Putin does the same. Remember the feud between Wagner guy and Shoigu? Putin intentionally encourages internal squabbles because it means in an environment where everyone mostly hates everyone, the only consistent loyalty is to him.

    Anyway, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about Mr. biggest-nuclear-arsenal-on-the-planet going at a Hitler speedrun, but the only saving grace right now is that the whole thing is an inefficient mess and a large chunk (but not all) of them are too dumb to be truly dangerous. When he starts exclusively listening to his war hawks or the project 2025 guys… We’re fucked.


  • At the end of the day these are commodity items. It’s reasonable for consumers to buy whatever’s cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.

    The solution can’t come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can’t be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.

    The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don’t often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can’t buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore… So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.



  • Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

    Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.




  • It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

    If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.