Squad servers are operated by the community, mostly by gaming clans and similar organizations. But Squad uses a "server license" system where server owners must meet certain criteria (for example a minimum level of moderation) in order to be allowed to operate a server. Supporting the DLC is sure to be a requirement.
This system existed in Project Reality too, I believe in that game it outright prohibited you from even having access to the server executable without a license while in Squad it only applies to being listed in the client's server browser.
> This system existed in Project Reality too, I believe in that game it outright prohibited you from even having access to the server executable without a license while in Squad it only applies to being listed in the client's server browser.
You could decompile the Python code in PR. The PR devs could "blacklist" servers if they wrote magic strings in chat etc with their BF2 user names.
Perhaps I'm out of the loop, but the EU attempting to make it illegal to distribute web browsers that don't include certain features is unexpected (and deeply worrying) to me.
The position paper linked in the article above says:
> This is because through Article 45.2, the legislative proposal, in effect, mandates that browsers automatically include Trust Service Providers (TSPs) in their browser root programs.
I haven't read the law in question but I would take "mandates" to imply that doing the opposite is somehow prohibited by the proposed law.
But all large browsers happens to be American. It makes sense that EU wants to regulate this rather than hand over all decisions related to trust to USA.
For example, imagine if all big browsers everyone uses where made in China, and mostly just trusted Chinese CA. Do you think that would be a problem? Do you think the rest of the world would just let that happen instead of starting to regulate it? That is the situation EU faces right now with American browsers.
I never asked EU to do this for me, and don't want it. No government should have this power. Who did? I don't remember a single party having this in their program.
If you don't like it then you can ask your country representatives to block it for your country, EU doesn't have the power to enforce anything locally. And if all of EU doesn't like it then you can vote out the people who did it and they will give new recommendations next cycle.
EU is safe in that way since the people making the legally binding laws to enforce them aren't the same people making the EU laws, so everything has to go through at least two levels of elected representatives to actually take effect. This means that if EU wants to spy on you then your country can block it, and if your country wants to spy via this system on you then they have to get approval from EU at least. Either way EU is an improvement over just having your local representatives.
Wrong since at least 2009. The EU has the right to force regulations and directives - if the country doesn't implement EU law correctly, the EU can sue the state, stop the flow of donations and place sanctions...
Why should the EU? Mozilla doesn't decide that, it gives you the option while suggesting a standard to make surfing the web feasible, but you can revoke that trust at any time. The EU wants to change that.
In Ireland 92% of adults are vaccinated and 75% of the population overall. The "low" vaccination rate among children has more to do with the delays in approving the vaccines than any kind of resistance. I have been told this is among the best vaccination rates in Europe.
Despite this the government has just pushed back the return to normality yet again. They drafted a "vaccinate our way out" plan that would almost certainly fail because it allegedly requires some fraction of the populace in excess of 92% to comply. When it failed, they accused that fraction of spoiling their plans. And then, rather than accepting their failure and moving on, they began punishing the entire populace for it for an indeterminate amount of time.
Perhaps in other countries with higher rates of vaccine hesitancy the story is different. But in my mind, the responsibility here lies with those who made getting our lives back contingent on an outcome that was never realistically going to occur.
The type system is so strict that if it compiles it will almost always run. Nil is a type that must be explicitly ruled out before you can use a potentially nilable value.
But it avoids the manual memory management/borrow checking/pointer vs. reference vs. value unpleasantness of Zig/Rust/C++.
It's probably most comparable to Java/C#, but something about the design of the syntax and standard library makes it much more appealing than either of those for me.
The memory management can be quite suboptimal. I wrote the same program in both at one point (an experimental language transpiler) and the Crystal version would spiral up into the 10s of GB when converting a very simple file while the C++ version wouldn't even hit 1 GB.
No doubt there was something I could have done to coax it into behaving, but in C++ that was unnecessary. RAII and ordinary standard library containers were enough to make it work.
This was a while ago, so perhaps things have improved.
I didn't follow it super closely but if I recall right Nest bought a competing brand of smart home devices (Revolv). They kept it around for a year or two and then in 2016 turned off the servers that mediated between the phone app and the device, bricking the devices.
Except didn't Leela Zero (the closest thing we have to Alpha Zero anyone can actually use) beat StockFish, then StockFish was upgraded to use neural networks in a few edge cases and otherwise keep doing what it was doing and now StockFish is back on top? Seems like a Waymo-style approach is actually on top there.
I'd welcome anyone trying to explain this idea to me along a number of axises, because I really do not get it.
1. What does 3D space add? If I want to shop for some item it's more convenient for me to look at a list with pictures and text than to wander through a 3D store. It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc. The Internet won through being more convenient, I don't see how this isn't a step backwards.
2. What are we going to do about UGC kitsch? Second Life and more recently VRChat and NeosVR have provided demonstrations of what a metaverse combining content from thousands of creators of mixed skill levels is like. While I can appreciate it on some level, the fact is it's hideous. Are the operators of metaverse-Amazon really going to let their in-store aesthetics be ruined by a low-poly neon-purple wolf wandering through it while I'm trying to browse? If they are, why? If they aren't, how is this an interconnected metaverse?
3. Why is anyone going to respect the interconnectedness of the metaverse? Websites successfully resisted the Semantic Web. Businesses don't want to point the way to their competitors. Games want to constrain what the player character can be to fit a specific power level, tone or art style. Fortnite, for all of its metaverse cred, does not allow players to upload their own avatars and has never (to my knowledge) added a portal which when entered closes Fortnite and opens another game.
To address (1), I think shopping in what may end up being the "metaverse" will look somewhere in-between a current 2D lists with pictures and current aisle based stores. They don't need to be exact replicas of current stores, and the geometry doesn't even need to be Euclidean. There are a few things that we can take from real stores to possibly make metaverse shopping more enjoyable and efficient.
Think of some of the reasons people still shop in stores:
* They can interact with products and see their true size.
* Our brains are great at memorising and imagining 3D spaces. We can remember where in the store certain products are located, and so shopping can be more efficient than searching for every item. Of course, search could still work in the metaverse, but is not necessary.
* I feel like its easier for me to know if I've seen everything in a real store, because I know I have walked down each and every aisle.
* 3D spaces seem more natural to navigate with other people - they can move around the same space, pointing at and grabbing hold of products
More generally, I think your point:
> It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc
could also have been made 20 years ago when physical stores were hesitant about moving online; it cost money to build a website and take photos of all of their products.
The non-euclidean idea I like, something a bit like a physical store but it reconfigures based on traditional search terms (perhaps supplied via voice). But that's incompatible with memorizing 3D spaces and also with knowing that you've seen everything. But both of those are probably more to do with scale than anything else. I'm not sure I could remember where I saw a good product within a 3D Amazon because it's going to be the size of a small city and constantly in flux. The multiplayer thing is a definite strength too.
>could also have been made 20 years ago when physical stores were hesitant about moving online
Indeed, but what we've learned since then is that consumer convenience is king (see: dark patterns in cookie prompts). Businesses were wary of the Internet transition but the force of convenience pushed them into it, I don't see a matching spike in convenience here.
It's a hype-filled word. The metaverse is not interesting especially if it's operated by FAANG companies.
Virtual Reality is a Sci-Fi thing. I'd rather have Augmented Reality so I can have reviews on products while I browse a real/physical store without taking out my smartphone (which is getting slower and slower as time pass by).
IMHO, VR will never be a thing, not with the current technology at least.
I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress".
> I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress".
It's not either/or. I enjoy VR experiences. I enjoy sunshine, fresh air and travel.
For me VR is just an obvious upgrade to a flat screen for viewing spatial content and environments. I don't always need it but the fact that I can grab a headset from the shelf and view something properly rather than peering at it through a small rectangle seems to me to be a good thing.
I dislike 360deg videos because there is always something happening where you're not looking, and you miss a lot. Using a VR headset doesn't solve the problem.
Cinema will never be VR. This leaves video games and simulations, both are expensive to make and play.
VR will never be as popular as a smartphone or a movie, it will always be a niche.
And the moment when every one has an oculus rift (or whatever headset) with a computer able to use it with enough FPS is far far along the road. So far we might turn in another direction before getting there.
> I dislike 360deg videos because there is always something happening where you're not looking, and you miss a lot. Using a VR headset doesn't solve the problem.
I'm not a fan of 360 video (it's very flat compared to true 6DOF VR and the resolution is currently very poor) but I think you're being unfair.
This is a creative failure - not something intrinsic to the medium. Watch a carefully made 6DOF experience and tell me that this problem isn't solvable. Wolves in the Walls or Gloomy Eyes are amazing examples of guiding the viewer through a volumetric scene.
> This leaves video games and simulations, both are expensive to make and play.
Considering I disagree with your previous statement I obvious disagree with this too. I'm also fairly sure you're missing a broad swathe of content but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "simulations"
> VR will never be as popular as a smartphone or a movie, it will always be a niche.
Probably true but I'm fine with that.
> And the moment when every one has an oculus rift (or whatever headset) with a computer able to use it with enough FPS is far far along the road. So far we might turn in another direction before getting there.
Why is "everyone" an important benchmark? Smartphones were interesting even at the point where they were still niche and they would have remained interesting had they stayed that way. As long as a medium has enough makers and consumers to be self-sustaining then that's ok. I think VR has demonstrated a staying power way beyond the original nay-sayers. There's great work still being made and sales are still increasing.
And I still enjoy it and want to contribute to it.
I think you nailed it. The virtual world as described here is one designed for VCs to make money. The virtual world that would be interesting is one created by hackers who find it facinating and then those VCs can fund some startup that maybe figures out a way to make money in this world.
When you say sitting at home in a virtual world, I think of online meetings, which could be improved by having a more real-like world, rather than talking to a wall with Harry Potter like moving pictures of people.
I was thinking of 2D sprites, but yeah. We are not talking about making real, just putting people at different distances in order to make these meetings a bit more natural.
A lot of this new Metaverse hypes stems from the idea that AR glasses will be the next mobile and with AR you need 3D space.
Interconnectedness is really just a hyperlink, but instead of going to the link by clicking a link, you go through a space. That space could be a portal or it could just be moving from one area to another, a web equivalent would be that you're scrolling a website and after scrolling for a while the content is loaded from another server.
AR I have less difficulty understanding, the benefits of a real world HUD seem fairly obvious. That said, most of the projects held up as "metaverse" seem to involve "opaque" 3D worlds: Fortnite, VRChat, Neos VR, etc.
>Interconnectedness is really just a hyperlink, but instead of going to the link by clicking a link, you go through a space.
Hyperlinks are much easier to implement. There's no requirement to have your game engines interoperable and translate seamlessly between the two as the transition takes place. And even then traveling via hyperlink between websites is hardly a seamless experience already. Inter-site hyperlinks are also not that popular. Social websites of course deal in them in large quantities, but your average business website avoids them like the plague. I don't think there's a single hyperlink on Amazon's website that leads out of their ecosystem.
VR isn't AR. AR is just the real world, but when you shop you also see the current price of the same product on Amazon[0]. When you see your coworker you get the same floating name-tag that you see when you Zoom them.
All that has real world value. You also get the more advanced stuff, like seeing what your living room would look like with that IKEA couch before you buy it. Maybe you don't even need a computer screen, since your AR device can just show one whenever and whereever - great for movie nights with friends when you don't have a projector.
VR is great for gaming, porn and video. Maybe interactive learning too, idk.
[0]: Allowing the app maker to make a fortune by stealing your shopping habits, which most people will not care about.
What part of criminalizing the obvious course of action that everyone is taught to do (find evidence of illegal activity, give it to the police) makes any iota of sense to you?
I feel it's a little disingenuous to describe millions of innocent people being surveilled as "the offenders" because there are a handful of actual offenders among them.
There's a small number of victims, a small number of offenders (but much more than "a handful"), and hundreds of millions of other users. This change is in the direct interest of victims, direct opposition to offenders.
Most normal people probably support the measures in solidarity with group 1, HN generally doesn't.
...And direct opposition to those hundreds of millions of other users. Trying to fit this to a victims vs. offenders model is a deliberate attempt to turn those hundreds of millions of other users into uninvolved bystanders. They have been pushed out by the lack of space in the model for them and their right to not have their door kicked down based on the results of an algorithm and database they can't audit, which are susceptible to targeted adversarial attacks and authoritarian interference respectively.
If drunk driving laws were enforced by mandating a breathalyzer in every car and nobody really knew how the breathalyzer worked and also it maybe doubled as an instrument for the government to catch you doing fifteen other things then I might consider that a fair comparison.
But yes, there's a lot of drive-by engagement in this thread, thank you for at least engaging with it directly.
Having private devices randomly snooped for forbidden materials is fine, okay. So why limit this to phones?
There are kidnapped children being locked inside homes. If you don't open your doors and accept weekly full home inspections, I think it's safe to say you support offenders and hate victims if you oppose this. I mean, we're all against people kidnapping and abusing children.
There's a small number of victims, a small number of offenders (but much more than "a handful"), and hundreds of millions of other home owners. This change is in the direct interest of victims, direct opposition to offenders.
This system existed in Project Reality too, I believe in that game it outright prohibited you from even having access to the server executable without a license while in Squad it only applies to being listed in the client's server browser.