I think the current bunch and their idiot flunkies are already the kind of people one would not want to have access to any information that could be used to blackmail or harass a person.
People who have old ladies arrested for demonstrating against mass murder of children due to their ethnicity, are NOT morally upright people who when in power would never abuse information about who watches what porn.
Well, credit to Steam then.
I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.
I’ve tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.
Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I’ve only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.
Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won’t run in Linux no matter what I do), it’s very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don’t just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.
In my experience, it’s not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.
I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.
If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don’t think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK allowing DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).
Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn’t actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.
I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice making gaming under Linux nowadays a vastly better experience than before, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux, a good laucher using Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well as Proton.
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
One thing is the Political self-proclaimed Liberals mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, a very different thing is the Political Ideology of Liberalism.
“Liberals are Fascists” definitely applies to the mainstream politicians in at least the UK, US and Canada who say they are “Liberals” and have “Liberal policies”.
When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn’t even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn’t even have a written Constitution).
In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK’s Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.
As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it’s only gotten worse since.
Hooliganism is members of the Working Class fighting other members of the Working Class or Foreigners due to nothing more than tribalism and enjoying violence.
It has zero to do with pushing back on those with power over them or standing up for one’s principles.
Hooliganism is actually a perfect example of the one of the ways the elites in the UK control the “lower” classes by having them discharge their anger at each other instead of going against the powerful.
There is going to be insane technical debt all over the place in a few years…
Everytime I see this kind of hype pop up I think back to when there was this great announcement from Silicon Valley about a “revolution in transportation” and it turned out to be the Segway.
It doesn’t matter what they claim if they simply can’t get the people to babysit the AI codebase or the AIs for less money than the original ones who didn’t have to deal with AIs and their output used to cost.
As a pretty senior dev who spent a lot of my career as a contractor mainly coming in to unfuck code-bases seriously fucked up by a couple of cycles under less experienced people, if I was pitched work to unfuck AI work I would demand a premium for my services purelly because of it being far more more fucked up in far harder to follow ways than the work done by less experience humans (who at least are consistent in the mistakes they make and follow a specific pattern in how they work) even without any moral considerations (on principle I would probably just not take a contract with a company that had used AI like that).
I mean, I can see their strategy work for junior devs, but that kind of reducing the power of specialized workers was already being done against junior devs using “outsourcing”.
Interestingly as an European I didn’t even thought about school buses when I read the shitpost and instead a regular public transport bus was what popped into my mind, which in my mind is actually a pretty essential job.
Public Transportation is no joke!
Sorta.
The cultural clashes between people with different cultural backgrounds are to be expected, and the bigger the percentage of people with different backgrounds the more it happens (hence why in the days of countries having 5% immigrants, the idea that “immigrants are a problem” had very little traction). This is just how things are - you can think it’s closed minded of most people (and, by the way, in my experience as an immigrant myself, that includes many if not most of the immigrants), but people are as they are, so we have to deal with it.
Further, judging by the studies I saw in the UK back during the Leave Referendum, immigration does push down salaries in one category only - unspecialized workers. Economically one might think “well, it’s alright then”, but socially the ones suffering are already the worse off amongst the locals plus this is happenning under Neoliberal governments who are actually pulling down Social Safety nets and privatising essential services. This is probably why the Middle Class is often pro-Immigration whilst the anti-Immigration Far-Right Populists end up finding most of their traction amongst the Working Class - immigration benefits the Middle Class because immigrants barelly compete with them for the jobs whilst the mere presence of immigrants pumps up the Economy and lowers the cost of many services (so there is more business for the kind of work done by the Middle Class and services are cheaper for them), but the picture is very different for the Working Class.
(This is why you see a lot of the non-mainstream “Thinking Left” in Europe who bought into Identity Politics is failing to gain any traction and even dissapearing whilst the far-right booms - unlike the old Left these people are from the upper levels of the Middle Class and don’t really see as a problem things which the Working Class sees as a problem and is increasingly hitting the lower Middle Class too, so ultimatelly they fizzle out because they do things like supporting “Open door immigration” because for them it’s not a problem but, de facto, those policies do end up making life worse for a lot of those lower down the economical ladder who would otherwise as they lose trust in the mainstream politicians gravitate towards those parties and instead end up captured by the simple anti-immigration messaging of the Far-Right).
Last but not least, judging by my own country Immigration is the “solution” used to plug the low birthrate problem which is itself caused by decades of policies which lowered quality of life and pumped up realestate bubbles - the very politicians who are causing the problems that make the locals have fewer children, then claim that “we need Immigration because of an aging population” - Immigration is literally the tool used to keep countries going a little longer whilst the pillaging of the wealth of the many carries on. The poor immigrants have no blame for this - they’re just people looking for a better life, same as the locals - but Immigration Policies do have the blame on this and fake-Leftwing (neo)Liberals have purposefully confounded Immigrants (the people) with Immigration (the policy) to portray being against the latter (and, even more, against the artificial need for the latter and who gains most from it - which aren’t the immigrants) as being against “poor defenseless people”.
Unsurprisingly this shit has eventually resulted in increasingly more people losing trust in the mainstream politicians and believing in populists preaching the simple message that “immigrants are bad”.
Nah.
The European Parliament is impeccably democratic, its members selected by direct vote of EU citizens under a Proportional Vote system
The EU Council is way less democractic, being just made up of representatives of each local government in Europe with zero representation for any political forces not in government. It’s like a giant First Pass The Post system with electoral circles the size of countries, only worse so since citizens don’t directly vote for them, they vote for the people who nominate them (they’re government ministers, and local governments tend to be selected by local parliaments, who are the ones who are elected). Also in practice there is very little oversight over their actions since the Press barelly talks about them.
The EU Commission is even less democratic than the EU Council, since its members are nominated by the latter, so it’s even more indirect. It’s supposed by tradition to be one comissioner per country so nowadays there are a lot of commissioners for “irrelevant thing” and the whole thing is the result of a massive game of horse trading and cronyism, especially the head, with the result that plenty of comissioners are complete total crap - the only time my country had somebody as the EU commission head, it was the most crooked Portuguese politician ever to hold an international position (almost the opposite of the current head of the UN who is also a Portuguese) and the once he left after having done everything he could to favor the Finance Industry in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and went to make millions working as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs he ended up as the only ex-EU Commission president ever to have his EU building access credentials revoked, as he was illegally using it to just enter the buildings whenever he wanted to do do some behind-closed-doors “lobbying”. It looks like Germany is currently suffering from the same problem of having put an incompetent crook as EU Commission head.
Unsurprisingly, most of the “unbelievably authocratic” shit comes from the Council or the Commission.
Frankly I can see why the Council is as it is - it makes sense to have a place were the various governments of EU nations get represented - but the Commission should be entirelly chosen by the EU Parliament, just like local parliaments chose governments in all european countries which don’t have a strong presidential system.
Well, as I said, Steam already supports all the national payment systems in Europe and yeah, since I’ve switched away from PayPal in GOG, my game payments have also been done by scanning a QR code from the banking app (which goes via an intermediary but ultimately gets turned into a SEPA transfer).
Sure, Steam could add bank transfer payments. They don’t need to as in Europe they already have the VISA/MasterCard/PayPal mafia problem solved, but it would be nice if they did (actually the whole split between payment-system and bank-transfer disappearing and it becoming a single mechanism is probably a good idea).
The lack of a pan-European payment system that’s accepted anywhere in the World isn’t a problem for Steam, it’s a general problem for Europeans wanting to avoid using VISA/MasterCard/PayPal in all their payments no matter where the seller is located (plus even in Europe a bunch of things such as car rental often require a Credit Card). It’s solved for the likes of Steam, but not for other sellers (for example I buy eBooks books from a US based seller who doesn’t support anything but PayPal, VISA and MasterCard and the same when I buy stuff from AliExpress),
When it comes to Steam, the problem of them being dependent for payments on VISA/MasterCard/PayPal is outside Europe, not in Europe.
As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.
(I actually tested it when writing another post and the Steam payment processing flow first asks you the country you’re paying for and then lists the payment systems for that country, and there I could see the standard national one of the country I gave)
GOG too also supports all the European national payment systems (I know because I switched to using those after the whole VISA/MasterCard/PayPal censorship crap happened).
Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t, plus it’s a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”).
I believe Valve already supports all the local payment systems in Europe, though they’ll only show it to you if you’re in one of those countries (the payment processing flow asks you which country are you paying from upfront and then uses that to display the various payment systems available for that country).
Same for GOG, by the way.
The problem is mainly that to sell to anywhere in Europe a seller has to integrate with the many local payment systems out there, which is a lot of work for a small seller.
That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.
Mind you, you often can pay stuff online in Europe via bank transfer if it’s within the Eurozone (and the fact that it works from anywhere to anywhere in the Eurozone for the same cost as a local transfer, rather than just locally in each country is exactly because SEPA has been standardized and the regulator has forced banks to charge the same for transfers between different countries in the Eurozone as they do for transfers within their own country), but it’s not reliably available in sellers and is a bit more convoluted than pure payment systems (basically you have to use your bank’s online site or app to transfer money to the account the seller provides you).
No actual payment systems are standardized across Europe yet, though various country-specific ones have been getting together and setting up cross-compatibility, but none of those covers more than a handful of countries.
Somebody is going to be getting a Non-executive board membership or millionaire consulting “gig” from one of Tiel’s companies or one from one of his friends…
By this point in time in Britain that kind of I thing has been going on long enough to almost be tradition.