DRM sucks, but the time to thrash against it is has passed. It's here, it's not going away, and users expect to be able to use their browsers to watch protected content.
Aren't we talking about the fact that it's not here (on Linux), and some people would like it to be?
The time to thrash against DRM will be when you can't get hardware that boots kernels which were not approved by your government. What we're doing now is trying to prevent that time from coming at all.
Having to watch protected media on a different device is a small price to pay.
I like what Firefox does: it allows me to just disallow Widevine entirely, which is what I do. That still allows others who want to use those things to do so. It's the best of both worlds.
If anything I see mainstream complaints about DRM in games, media, and lesser extent anti-cheat now more than ever, along with all the thrashing of Windows anti-user behavior. It is only natural that they go together. If there is a time to get rid of these, it's the near future.
My take is: you're welcome to the party, but don't be surprised if someone shows you the door when you pull out the drugs. It ain't our type of fun.
I understand various reasons why people are pushing for the adoption of open source software, but it will be counterproductive if it brings the problems of the commercial software world with them.
Yeah, the lack of sum types of any kind in Go is the only thing that I really miss when coming back from Rust. It's, I think, a big part of the reason that Gleam has seen a lot of growth. It has many of the syntactic benefits of Go with the compiler guarantees of Rust (though it's weird in some other ways, like dramatically favoring continuation-passing-style in programmer facing syntax).
In areas with low CoL the cost of building houses and the cost of selling a house has a massive impact on the number and type of homes that get built. If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. There's very strong incentives for builders to take the path of least resistance and highest margin.
> If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't,
Agreed. They will generally build as tall and as dense as they are permitted to because (within reason) it reduces unit cost. Obviously there are limits to that. No one wants to build a high rise in the middle of nowhere.
But within high CoL areas they are generally severely limited on both of those aspects. That's due to zoning laws.
Of course that's not the whole story. Infrastructure has to be upgraded to keep pace with growth. But that's on the local government to plan and execute properly. Right now they largely just say "no".
The profit margin has to be significantly higher than simply plopping that cash straight into an index fund. The risk of a project failure is simply too high.
> If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions.
Right, and that bureaucratic red tape is one of the things that makes the cost of building higher. If the builder expects they won't be able to break ground for two or three years because dealing with the planning commission takes forever, or because they'll have to deal with environmental lawsuits before they can build, then they will need to target higher-end buyers (by building a higher-end property) in order to make a profit. And if they can't do that... right, they simply won't.
> Only problem I find with self-hosted blogs and certain personalities like mine is that I spend more time tinkering with the blog engine than actually blogging.
I personally think that everyone knows AI produces subpar code, and that the infallible humans are just passing it along because they don't understand/care. We're starting to see the gaslighting now, it's not that AI makes you better, it's that AI makes you ship faster, and now shipping faster (with more bugs) is more important because "tech debt is an appreciating asset" in the world where AI tools can pump out features 10x faster (with the commensurate bugs/issues). We're entering the era of "move fast and break stuff" on steroids. I miss the era of software that worked.
Yep, bugs are already just another cost of doing business for companies that aren’t user-focused. We can expect buggier code from now on. Especially for software where the users aren’t the ones buying it.
Disclaimer because I sound pessimistic: I do use a lot of AI to write code.
I really wish we would shift back towards quality and reliability being major selling points in software. There's only a handful of projects I'm aware of that emphasize it and they're both pleasures to use: Obidian (note app) and Linear (ticket tracking)
> But you still believe that quantum computers have a likelihood of being possible to build AND that they can accomplish a task faster than classical?
Not GP but yes. I'm reasonably confident that we will have quantum computers that are large and stable enough to have a real quantum advantage, but that's mostly because I believe Moore's law is truly dead and we will see a plateau in 'classical' CPU advancement and memory densities.
> I feel like it’s going to get exponentially harder and expensive to get very small incremental gains and that actually beating a classical computer isn’t necessarily feasible (because of all the error correction involved and difficulty in manufacturing a computer with large number of qbits)
I don't think people appreciate or realize that a good chunk of the innovations necessary to "get there" with quantum are traditional (albeit specialized) engineering problems, not new research (but breakthroughs can speed it up). I'm a much bigger fan of the "poking lasers at atoms" style of quantum computer than the superconducting ones for this reason, the engineering is more like building cleaner lasers and better AOMs [0] than trying to figure out how to super cool vats of silicon and copper. It's outside my area of expertise, but I would expect innovations to support better lithography to also benefit these types of systems, though less directly than superconducting.
Source: I worked on hard-realtime control systems for quantum computers in the past. Left because the academic culture can be quite toxic.
I don’t know how people claim the science is solved and “it’s just engineering” when scaling up to no trivial quantum circuits is literally the problem no one has solved and hand waving it away as an “engineering problem” seems really disingenuous. Foundational science needs to be done to solve these problems.
Classical CPUs have slowed but not stopped but more importantly quantum machines haven’t even been built yet let alone been proven possible to scale up arbitrarily. Haven’t even demonstrated they can factor 17 faster than a classical computer.
Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.
This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft.
But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for everyone to have a Secure Boot authority outside of big tech. Not even Red Hat/IBM even though they have the infra to do it.
Secure Boot and signed kernels are proven tech. But the Linux world absolutely needs to pull their heads out of their butts on this.
The goals of the people mandating Secure Boot are completely opposed to the goals of people who want to decide what software they run on the computer they own. Literally the entire point of remote attestation is to take that choice away from you (e.g. because they don't want you to choose to run cheating software). It's not a matter of "no one stepped up"; it's that Epic Games isn't going to trust my secure boot key for my kernel I built.
The only thing Secure Boot provides is the ability for someone else to measure what I'm running and therefore the ability to tell me what I can run on the device I own (mostly likely leading to them demanding I run malware like like the adware/spyware bundled into Windows). I don't have a maid to protect against; such attacks are a completely non-serious argument for most people.
Is there any even theoretically viable way to prevent cheats from accessing a game you're running on a local machine without also disabling full user control of your system?
I suppose something like a "reboot into '''secure''' mode" to enable the anti-cheat and stuff, or maybe we'll just get steamplay or whatever where literally the entire game runs remote and streams video frames to the user.
> anti-cheat far precedes the casinoification of modern games.
> nobody wants to play games that are full of bots. cheaters will destroy your game and value proposition.
You are correct, but I think I did a bad job of communicating what I meant. It's true that anti-cheat has been around since forever. However, what's changed relatively recently is anti-cheat integrated into the kernel alongside requirements for signed kernels and secure boot. This dates back to 2012, right as games like Battlefield started introducing gambling mechanics into their games.
There were certainly other games that had some gambly aspects to them, but 2010s is pretty close to where esports along with in game gambling was starting to bud.
There are plenty of locked down computers in my life already. I don't need or want another system that only runs crap signed by someone, and it doesn't really matter whether that someone is Microsoft or Redhat. A computer is truly "general purpose" only if it will run exactly the executable code I choose to place there, and Secure Boot is designed to prevent that.
I don't know overall in the ecosystem but Fedora has been working for me with secureboot enabled for a long time.
Having the option to disable secureboot, was probably due to backlash at the time and antitrust concerns.
Aside from providing protection "evil maid" attacks (right?) secureboot is in the interest of software companies. Just like platform "integrity" checks.
I'm not giving game ownership of my kernel, that's fucking insane. That will lead to nothing but other companies using the same tech to enforce other things, like the software you can run on your own stuff.
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