This triggered for me when trying to download a podcast from Hardcore Gaming 101. The detection is clearly very accurate and good. I had no shame disabling it.
Anyone interested in the development of the ARPANET and its transformation into the Internet we know today owes it to themselves to read Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon - it’s a great read and the audiobook isn’t bad either.
I don’t have a problem with this. I am seeing systemd as a system management layer and as such it makes sense that it should manage as much of the moment-to-moment operation of the system as possible. It seems like a lot of people are upset because it’s a new thing to learn that’s being forced on them by their distro.
I used to feel the same way. I’m only a casual linux user and I didn’t want to climb this particular mountain but having learned just a little about it, created some of my own units and played with the tools the sense of alienation dissipated and I was fairly happy with it.
I suspect most of us are upset not at learning a new thing, but dealing with brand new bugs in new unexpected ways. Learning a new thing has never really been a problem -- fighting instability in new software has always been the issue.
Speaking as a distribution developer, I can say that systemd has bitten me in multiple ways due to upstream bugs that are either ignored or left to rot for quite a while. I've had to resort to patching them, or working around them, which makes things very difficult to live with, especially given the pace of systemd development and feature additions.
The older software had a number of bugs, yes, but they were well known and battle tested. In short, it's not "I don't want to learn" -- it's "the new shiny has a slew of unknown bugs we can't easily identify and fix".
Very much agree. I'd add that the reaction of the systemd developers to security and functionality bug reports has been...decidedly mixed, which is enough to make me very nervous.
For me personally, it's also that systemd keeps expanding and expanding, which both makes more things dependent on their security profile and reduces choice in the ecosystem. The number of different boot/init systems I might need to use is pretty limited and I might be OK with just one (especially since systemd /is/ really good at it). The number of DHCP clients, firewall systems, DNS clients, and so forth is decidedly not so limited, and results in a nasty choice of "use the systemd thing and hope it supports all the features you need" or "rip out the systemd thing and replace it and hope that works and continues to work" or "install something that sits on top of the systemd thing and thus has to interact with it in strange ways that may bite you unpredictably". Each of those is a recipe for a lot of Maalox moments, and it feels like the response to that concern is, "Aww, you're just being a worry-wart."
Older software should always have fewer bugs simply due to maturity. Ie. progress isn't free. The best way to mitigate that is where distros like Debian stable come in. They help gate these developments, releasing more well tested versions of the software and fixing any critical issues that come up with it over the time of the release.
In my opinion the problem with Kinect was that it was necessarily a 1-1 mapping between your performance and the character on-screen. The Wii, in comparison, could only sense broad gestures. The direct mapping of kinect requires a great performance by the player to make a great performance in-game. This isn’t what gamers are used to - they’re used to a kind of ability amplification through the controller, where they press a few buttons or waggle the Wii remote and Spiderman does a sweet backflip.
Playing Kinect games was either frustrating because the game would not recognise your gestures, overly complicated because there were too many possible gestures and no obvious affordances to the user other than ‘move your whole body somehow’, or simply too physically difficult for some players to perform.
It’s ironic that such a high fidelity input device actually limits the kind of games you can design for it. Some of the best Kinect games were those that used the input data for purely cosmetic purposes.
I've met Ling and I know a bunch of people who worked on her site over the last decade. She's definitely an interesting character, and very good at marketing.
Wow. Amazing that it works almost perfectly with JS disabled. I really like the menu/navigation functionality as well, at least on desktop. Surprisingly good website despite its appearance.
Not just on the Arc either - the inline assembler was also available in BBC BASIC on its predecessor, the BBC Micro. I remember you had to put the asm code in a FOR loop so the interpreter could do two passes - one to locate all the labels and one to assemble the result, I believe.
That BASIC also had proper functions and procedures as well as special fast integer variables in zero page, it offered easy access to the whole machine from graphics to sound to ADCs and tape or disk IO. It was also very fast for the time, and the manuals that came with the machine were excellent.
The inline assembler was also available on the predecessor to the BBC micro, the Acorn Atom. (I'm proud to say I still have mine even if I haven't fired it up in years).
One of the most famous games on the Micro was Repton, which the 16-year old Tim Tyler wrote mostly in BASIC, and then gradually optimised into inline assembly.
For those not aware Captain Disillusion is an impressively well produced youtube series mimicking the vibe of 90's kids TV, but for an adult audience. The Captain uses Blender for the 3D effects in his videos, and did a great presentation at the Blender conference last year [0].
I think the actual problem isn’t the idiot (the issue isn’t that different from having access to a printing press a few years ago - in order to reach a considerable audience in both cases you would need a good amount of capital in the first place), the problem is the fact that it’s hard to tell for ad consumers if these ads are right or wrong, these ads are also shown inline with the usual flow of information they accept as true and that the users are rarely informed about how well targeted these ads are.
But misinformation in advertisements is illegal in many countries and so is misrepresenting information as actual information rather than it being ads.
Provable misinformation is legal, which is a much higher bar. That's why we'd consider it insane if someone took (legal) ads at face value and believed all their claims.
