azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon witnesses excellent security⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear that a lot but would that actually work? Sure, you will get a redhat level 1 support employee within the hour for a severity 1 ticket. But does the actual contract (which I don’t have access to) make any legally binding guarantees regarding the time-to-resolution? I seriously doubt it. Which is to say – your legal team will be SOL.

  They also won’t take responsibility for any fuckup on your part if you install a bad driver or deviate from the admin guides in anyway (which is why Legal says for a minor issue you can’t apply a patch from StackExchange, you must raise a ticket and wait 3 business days for RedHat to tell you to apply the patch from StackExchange).
  Getting phished definitely falls in this category BTW. Vendors may or may not help you but they certainly won’t accept any liability.

  It’s still a good enough safety net to have for corporations with no trustworthy in-house expertise as vendors do have an incentive to keep their customers happy and most will help to the best of their abilities (which often isn’t as much as one might think…), but it’s hardly a legal panacea. If you need guarantees against catastrophic financial losses, that is what insurance is for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

  There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

  • Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
  • Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
  • Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
  • Use physical cash
  • Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

  In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

  Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

  Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Virtually every payment processor uses VISA/MasterCard in the back-end. For EU users PayPal can be backed by SEPA mandates instead (direct bank pre-authorization), but otherwise VISA/MC is holding payment processors by the balls in virtually every other market. Without Visa/MC, there is no way to bring funds in or out of your account.

  The only alternative is to negotiate interconnection with banks directly, but that’s a very high bar for broad adoption. It has happened on a small scale (e.g. Payconiq in the Benelux) and the EU is attempting to broaden that to the rest of the continent, but it’s a very tough sell because they have to convince every major bank to support the new standard.

  This is a textbook case where capitalism isn’t the solution because there are only two market actors and a virtually insurmountable barrier to entry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not related to Trump/Congress. They almost unironically got OnlyFans to ban sexual content from their own website a few years back due to the militant actions of one fringe puritanical group. They got memed so hard they eventually backed down, but MasterCard&Visa have been acting as World Sexuality Police for a very long time.

  I don’t think it’s a rational financial decision, AFAICT they just have a puritanical leadership. As a cartel they don’t have to be maximally financially efficient. Their continued existence is an artefact of the 20th century, and their corporate values reflect that.

  Hopefully Wero takes off soon to introduce some competition in the online payment market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  (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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP America⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It was all a lie, wasn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It was all a lie, wasn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

  But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Severance’s Seth Milchick was originally envisioned as a minor character, but Tramell Tillman’s performance changed everything⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But there’s no debate out of that universe. They are people. It’s contrived as hell. I don’t care if some of Severance’s dystopian citizens think it’s Fine, Actually, that’s not thought provoking. Lumon is uncontroversially evil.

  There’s interesting parallels to neocolonialism to be made and the way it trivializes human rights abuses through invisibilisation, but up to now the show hasn’t been interested in delving into that. Most they’ve done is a surface-level critique of corporate capitalism, mildly interesting exploration of cultish behavior, and lots of unexplained mystery of its own sake with unrewarding payoffs.

  When a good mystery is revealed, you’re supposed to go “of course! They basically told us that, I just didn’t pay close enough attention!”. But Severance’s mystery reveals (almost) always come off as cheap thrills drawn out for too long with zero foreshadowing. Ah so Ms Casey is his wife… Okay? And redhead is the CEO’s daughter… Sure? And Cold Harbor is just an iterative improvement on Severance? That’s actually more boring than what was being foreshadowed.

  I’ve said it before but without going too far into spoilers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does an infinitely job on themes of loss and pain and escapism and mystery than Severance ever did or could. I finished it before the show and the similar themes and love of a good mystery really made Severance’s plot look like a crude children’s drawing in comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WHERE ARE MY PRECISION SCREWDRIVERS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon can't go on a field trip⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not books, but the Misfits and Magic TTRPG show from Dimension 20 is everything that HP isn’t. It’s fun and whimsical and the characters are lovable and the writing is great and the world building is astounding and it never misses a chance to take the piss at the many problematic aspects of HP it’s satirically lampooning. I think the first episode is free on YouTube.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Speak American⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you see danger coming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What?

  The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

  The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you see danger coming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can’t metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

  What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Clair Obscur’s Composer Created An Incredible Soundtrack⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The main difference in difficulty between the modes is the parry window. If your problem is the parry window, switch to normal mode.

  I find in normal mode the game is not very hard for main quests, but extremely punitive with the many optional bosses. So if you still want a challenge, they’re right there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study Finds Biking to Work HALVES Risk of Early Death | Berm Peak⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bad news, the people driving cars in that traffic are breathing in the exact same fumes. The cabin air doesn’t magically get rid of pollutants because it went through a paper filter meant to keep out large particulates. The asthma/cancer causing pollutants go through just fine.

  In fact in slow moving traffic where two wheelers are allowed to filter, I’d expect they are getting exposed to fewer pollutants because they are spending less time in traffic. Plus cyclists get improved cardio which helps negate breathing problems.

  Anecdotally the physical health difference between no exercising and mildly exercising while commuting is mind-blowing. And the fact that so many able-bodied office workers couldn’t run a mile uninterrupted due to a car-dependent lifestyle should be terrifying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't see the problem. It's A tree. It's not THE tree.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

  The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

  Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  His anti-war stance such as… trying to incite a war with Iran, only failing to do so because his generals didn’t cooperate? Those same generals he now is going to get rid of because he hasn’t forgiven them for it? That anti-war stance?

  The only times he’s anti-war is when it pisses off Obama and/or makes Putin happy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Don’t infantilise him. He’s not attention-starved, he’s a Nazi.
  2. Did everyone forget Trump already did that during his first term??? I am going absolutely insane. We know he will threaten to nuke anyone and everyone. And right now the odds aren’t looking good that he won’t actually do it. That’s my call. Nuclear war. People called me crazy in 2020 when I called Trump a fascist, and my worst predictions will be proven right again because everyone seems to be dead-set on downplaying the actions of these Nazi lunatics and acting surprised when they pull through with a Nazi promise which only emboldens them.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry.

  It won’t take a century for Florida to sink.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't wash⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I buy my filet américain at my local grocery store. It is made of a beef/pork mix (the fancier the more beef) and usually has an expiry date of T+2 days thanks to the added preservatives.

  Industrially processing raw meat is perfectly doable, much to the Americans’ utter disbelief. Belgium has entire specialized industrial supply chains for the massive local demand of raw ground meat bread spread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The torque better not be too strong with this one⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For hex yes, for Torx no. Your smartphone’s itty bitty screws are quite possibly T4 or similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The torque better not be too strong with this one⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Torx > Hex > Robertson > Pozidriv > Phillips > Slot.

  This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.

  In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stat of the day⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thən məybe Englәsh shəld əwn əp to its dəsrəspəct fər vəwəls.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The phonology of “moth” is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I’m sure linguistics could pick apart). It’s adjacent to “moist”. That’s the kind of name you give something you don’t like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like “fly”, a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

  Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it’s just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

  Guess why? In French they are called “night butterflies”. It’s just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it’s brown, duh.

  This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they’re trying to give children nightmares?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whether it’s 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don’t seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

  Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is “yeah, mostly”. Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

  Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn’t force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

  So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.