this would be nice. the amount of skills and knowledge I’ve forgotten after painstakingly learning it is too damn high.

Every time I see something about tinder it’s just worse and worse. why would I want to use it?

waterfox is just a fork of firefox with seemingly no real benefits. I’d rather stay on the original build.

It’s the only non-chrome browser. And the only browser I can customize and that does what I want. I’ve been waiting for arc to release so I can try it out, but it seems like the development on it is taking literally forever.

I have pretty strict criteria for a browser, and really only firefox meets them. Chrome is way too locked down for me. And firefox has slowly been getting worse unfortunately.

The issue with procedural generation is the game has to be built for it from the ground up and in a modular way. AAAs try to make themselves appealing by using novel new high quality assets that aren’t modular.

I haven’t played starfield so idk what they ended up doing, but from the sound of it they have pre-made assets/areas that they then place onto pre-generated worlds in a randomized way.

To make one of these “areas” procedural in itself, they’d then have to code a whole system for that. With AAA/3D the hard part is making modular environments without it looking repetitive or ugly.

My point isn’t so much that it can’t be done in a AAA game. But rather that it’s risky to do (not all players like it), and you have to structure your development around it. Lots can go wrong, there’s stuff you gotta sacrifice to make it work, etc.

If starfield is on the old bethesda engine then that’s even more of a reason. You can’t just plug and play an entire procedural generation thing in there without some fairly large overhauls or just gluing on an unrelated system.

In practice, bethesda probably took the lazy route: using their existing engine without major changes, then just making new assets for it, throwing stuff about a bit randomly, and calling it a day.

That’s the thing about procedural generation is: it’s a lot of effort and sucks up a huge part of the game’s development and comes at some pretty strict costs (repetitive looking environments/gameplay, reduced novelty, larger programming dev time to make it work). It can be done, but for a cost-cutting AAA studio they’re not gonna bother.

You can, but randomizing chests+locked doors is kinda complicated, and the more “interesting” your generations the harder it is to code and the more dev time it takes. And for a AAA game release you can’t really do that.

Key+Lock randomization is something that has been solved, and has been used most notably in procedurally generated zeldalikes. But that’s still niche indie territory, and not used for major game releases.

“1000+ planets are dull on purpose”

No, they’re dull because no human team could make 1000 planets worth of interesting content in a single game development cycle.

as people say for hate speech laws: “if you aren’t wanting to show children anything sexual, then there shouldn’t be a problem. what do you wish to show kids that you think may be considered sexual?”

naturally gov overreach is a concern even for speech but that doesn’t stop people from trying to regulate speech.

I think ultimately though with the system in place mentioned, it wouldn’t completely block access to educational materials as parents could easily show that stuff to their kids if they so choose.

Personally I believe that there should be at least some attempt to protect kids from seeing adult content online. Ideally of course it’d be parental responsibility, but having some sort of system in place would be good. I think the tech around porn as it currently exists is deeply harmful, both for children and for women. I’m not against porn as a thing, but like… come on, we can’t just be spreading around videos without any sort of filters and removing it from the control of the people featured in the video.

There’s not a good technical solution for these problems just yet it seems. I think the idea of age verification on-device, and then sending an 18+ or minor flag to apps/sites/etc. would be a good solution. We already click on a “I’m 18+” button, and this is functionally the equivalent but having age verification going on completely offline. Yes, people could bypass that with technical knowhow, but the point isn’t to stop adults, it’s to largely prevent kids from seeing this stuff.

I was wondering their reasoning, here:

We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety.

Basically, they don’t disagree with mandatory verification, they just wish for it to do so in a way that doesn’t violate the privacy of adults legitimately accessing the content.

Their suggestion for this is:

The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.

Essentially, do age verification on-device, and have the device send the okay to view signal to the site. This is something websites cannot implement on their own, until device/os developers implement such. I agree this is a good solution, but I think it’ll be difficult to push tech companies to do this without further legislation.

I think it might be good to seek the EU to require tech companies to implement such a on-device feature, which will naturally roll out to all tech devices.

Edit: these quotes are from the porn company, not the court.

what happens if you don’t have a phone number? you’re just prevented from having a bank account?

that’s good to know. I’ll just switch everything over to google authenticator then.

phone numbers are typically tied to your name/identity, and phone companies can locate you using their towers and such. Giving a company your phone number is identical to giving a company your full legal name and address.

there’s quite a lot of services that want phone for verification/2fa/whatever. whenever I run into them I usually just refuse to use the service altogether.

websites explicitly said to get one or the other so I did.

do all authenticators work for all services?

I like the app setup rather than shoving everything into a browser. But I’m not a fan of this 2fa stuff. I get the point is security, but let me decide which app/method to use, and whether I want to use it at all. Otherwise it’s just annoying.

they want your phone number so they can track you.

No offense to companies but I’m honestly sick of companies forcing 2fa. Every single one seems to have a different shitty way of doing it. Like why on earth do I need two different authenticator apps on my phone (authy&google authenticator)? Some do sms/phone number, but then yell at you and prevent you from doing 2fa if you have a “bad phone number”. This happened on discord where I’m locked out of certain servers because I can’t do phone verification, and I can’t do it because discord doesn’t like my phone number. Twitter was the same way for a long while (couldn’t do 2fa/phone verification due to them not liking my number).

From the article it sounds like they’re doing authenticator app or sms. I’m guessing sms won’t work for me, so app it is. I decided to dig to see which authenticator app they use and they list: 1password, authy, lastpass, and microsoft… no google?

Honestly, even email requirements for accounts is annoying because you know it just ends up spamming you. is the future where we’re gonna have to have 30 different authenticator apps on our phone?

It’s actually not copyright infringement at all.

Edit: and even if it was, copyright infringement is a moral right, it’s a good thing. copyright is theft.