Finally, a position we can all agree on. 😅

The words are from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but aren't the images stills from The Neverending Story?

Is this one of those '"Use the Force, Luke" -Gandalf, with an image of Harry Potter' type memes?

Or am I going mad? 😄

Waiting for Spez to weigh in with his typical subtlety and even-handedness... 🍿

Classic modern tech company formula. If any records or targets are broken, mass layoffs must happen.

I think MBA schools have forgotten the golden rule of economics: you get what you incentivise for. Guaranteed unemployment isn't it.

This dystopia is sofa king boring.

For those who haven't read it: it's Stripe, their payment processor, behind this. Kickstarter isn't doing a Tumblr; they're just handling it like amateurs, rather than just yeeting those puritanical morons.

Microslop going full "the beatings will continue until morale improves" with their ensloppification of everything they touch, I see.

I think my irony meter just broke. The company that takes freely published papers* and paywalls them for extortionate profit is mad that that someone else is making money off free content?

I propose a trial by mortal combat. It's the only logical solution.

*You'll be hard pressed to find a published researcher who thinks well of the Elsevier distribution monopoly, and it's even harder to find one that won't send you a PDF copy for free if you just ask for it.

I asked this question many years ago on a Usenet group, and the answer was along the lines of what we're seeing is many millions of years after those orbits began, and that they all eventually flatten out due to the gravity of the other objects in orbit.

So you could have 2 objects at roughly the same orbital distance but perpendicular to one another (eg. one orbiting the star's poles and the other around it's equator), and over time the small amount of gravitational force they exert on one another will bring them roughly into the same plane.

Hopefully someone better versed in the topic can come along to explain it better than I can.

Found this to be an interesting read, and well written. Thanks for sharing it.

Parts of the Internet now only searchable on specific sites now? What next - charging a monthly subscription to use Google?

This needs to be regulated before the Internet becomes like streaming TV.

This is what FAFO in public looks like. Gold!

Reason number - oh, hell, I've lost count at this point - why anything mobile app store owners say about their service should be taken with a grain of salt.

I'd love to see DOI automating a copy of each entry to archive.org. This would improve the likelihood of them remaining available.

Sure, it would make grifters like Elsevier mad, but scientific knowledge worth a DOI entry shouldn't be limited to a for-profit organisation.

Edit: Worded first para badly. I meant anything assigned a DOI ID, regardless of where the work is hosted.

As the saying goes: capitalism, shareholder value and such things seem as inevitable today as the divine right of kings once did...

First line of the article:

Two of the biggest deepfake pornography websites have now started blocking people trying to access them from the United Kingdom.

This isn't (yet) the UK blocking access to them as part of a Great Firewall of Britain thing. This is the sites themselves blocking visitors from the UK, the same as porn sites for various US states.

As with porn sites, it'll be using the geoIP tag of your IP address, which is notoriously unreliable, especially near geopolitical boundaries.

Using a VPN or even a third-party (rather than your ISP's) DNS server will often get around them. However, doing so will eventually probably get you in trouble.

You make good points about them being contractors and the CV aspects. I'd not thought of that.

But it's not just in gaming. It's all of the tech space, or at least those run by American companies, and applies to full time staff. The last decade or so of my tech career is a mirror image of it.

Though it's hard to tell if it's layoff FOMO, AI changes, or AI being used as an excuse. Something's changed in recent years.

Our fault for not being born into rich families, I guess? :\

ARM was European. Until its shareholders agreed for it to be acquired by SoftBank.

That's a large part of the problem, I think: shareholders and "number must go up!" mentality can change a company's nation of ownership/influence overnight. And a private European company can choose to go public on a foreign stock exchange (eg. Spotify).

If a viable competitor to Intel or AMD was to come into being in Europe, there's currently nothing* stopping its shareholders selling the company to non-European venture capital whenever they want (eg. ARM).

*There is usually a competition or monopoly regulator, but they typically have no teeth, have been captured by industry interests, or have to bow to political pressure.

Game Pass sounds great, but the average game play time is ~2 weeks. You're paying $240–480/year to skim the surface of multiple games.

That's a lot for what is essentially a demo experience. There are better ways to approach gaming.