Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It’s a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren’t really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won’t. It also doesn’t help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don’t have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.

While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don’t see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren’t really fungible. It’s not like I’m going to say, “oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I’ll buy Half Life instead”. They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I’m not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn’t really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.

Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.

For a physical machine:
for f in $(lsblk | grep disk | cut -d ' ' -f 1); do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$f bs=4MB status=progress; done

That will remove all your current software problems. You’ll have new ones, but the old ones will be gone.

I trust every AI group to do their level best to separate me from my money. Beyond that, I wouldn’t trust them with a stolen identity.

Oh look, it’s Vietnam all over again. How long before the Administration manufactures evidence of an attack on a US Navy asset and uses that to justify “limited” operations on the ground?

You could try using Autopsy to look for files on the drive. Autopsy is a forensic analysis toolkit, which is normally used to extract evidence from disk images or the like. But, you can add local drives as data sources and that should let you browse the slack space of the filesystem for lost files. This video (not mine, just a good enough reference) should help you get started. It’s certainly not as simple as the photorec method, but it tends to be more comprehensive.

As @[email protected] pointed out, this seems to be a cover for c’t magazine. Specifically it seems to be for November 2004. heise.de used to have a site which let you browse those covers and you could pull any/all of them. But, that website seems to have died sometime in 2009. Thankfully, the internet remembers and you can find it all on archive.org right here. You may need to monkey about with capture dates to get any particular cover, but it looks like a lot of them are there.

Also, as a bit of “teach a person to fish”, ImgOps is a great place to start a reverse image search. It can often get you from an image to useful information about that images (e.g. a source) pretty quick. I usually use the TinEye reverse image search for questions like this.

In a normal world, I’d expect this to get smacked down hard in the courts. But, we can pretty much count on Thomas, Alito and Gorsch being on board with Trump as an overt dictator. So, it just becomes a question about how much leverage the Trump administration has on Kavanaugh, Barret and Roberts. It’s pretty sad that we’re counting on three compromised people to protect the rule of law.

A what now?
I’m just here to read memes and rant about crap no one else cares about. I can’t be arsed to dig into all the random profile crap the developers poured hours of blood, sweat and tears implementing.

If the only place you are seeing this sort of behavior is Reddit, it’s not worth worrying about. If you are so obsessed with what other people are doing on Reddit that you feel the need to ask about it on Reddit/Lemmy, it’s probably time turn off your devices and go touch grass. Always remember the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with pseudo-anominity say a lot of stupid stuff.

You’re one of those folks who are too stupid to understand probabilities and what polls are actually saying, aren’t you?
The polls in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election were actually pretty good. The final aggregate error was right around 3.4 points [1]

Anyone who suggested that there was a clear favorite was lying about what the polls said. That’s not a failing of the polls, its a failing of the media reporting on the polls. Sure, there were some particular, individual outliers. The Anne Seltzer poll comes to mind. But, credit where it’s due, Seltzer published an outlier poll, because that was the outcome of the poll based on then methodology she had been using for a long time. Like with scientists publishing null results, it’s actually really important that such things are published and not hidden, but they are usually hidden.

Go talk to people in the real world, instead of reading articles written by fellow shut-ins, and realize that the narrative is FAR different for the average person.

Then plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. And quite the opposite here, if you’re out talking to people within your own social bubble, you’re far more likely to get a warped view of reality. This is one of the reasons polling is so hard, getting a truly representative sample of the population is hard. It is also likely a reason polls keep underestimating Trump. People with low social trust seem to favor Trump, and those same people are very hard to poll. They don’t often pick up the phone and often aren’t willing to divulge their political choices to strangers on the phone. So ya, expecting the polls to “miss” by 3-5 points, underestimating Republicans isn’t all that out of line.

My prediction is the Dems will pick up just barely enough seats to take back control of the House. Not a snowballs chance in hell of taking back the Senate.

This is funny, because this is very much an opinion which will have been informed by polling. It’s also what most analysis are coming up with:

• House
• Senate

Articles like the one posted by the OP are just pure hopium. Dems may make some gains this year, but a rational analysis of the current polling data tells a bleak story. They might get the House, the Senate is basically out of reach.

Large companies are already heavily involved in Linux. Based on this data some of the biggest contributors this year were Meta and Google. Both companies are at the forefront of enshitification of the internet, but they built their mountains of shit on a foundation of Linux.

I’ll extend the truffle hate to all mushrooms. If I wanted food covered in fungus, I would have waited for it to start rotting.

Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire but I don’t know how that could work.

I doubt this would work. Financially, my family is towards the middle of that chart now. We were lower when we had our first kid and only a bit improved when we had our second. And honestly, it was pretty touch and go whether or not we would have the second. Our first was a handful as a baby and it left us wondering if we could handle a second. Thankfully, he calmed down a lot (or we just got used to the new normal) by the time he was pushing 18 months. After we had the second one though, I fully embraced the “cut my nuts off” solution to birth control (vasectomy). I don’t regret that choice at all. None of that was ever about finances. It was simply about the fact that raising children is hard and takes a lot of time.

Ultimately, I think the decline in birth rates isn’t about finances or selfishness, it’s just a change in social norms. Society has spent decades training people to the “nuclear family”. Movies, TV, and other media has pushed the “2 kids and 1.5 dogs in a home in the suburbs” for so long, that people internalized it. So, folks who do want to have kids shoot for that. Having 4 or 5 kids is now seen as an oddity, rather than the norm.

There is also a much better acceptance of women as something other than a walking womb to be filled. We no longer look at an unmarried woman in her 20’s or 30’s as some sort of spinster to be shunned. Sure, negative stereotypes still exist (e.g. Crazy cat lady); but, it’s much rarer for fathers to be selling off their 16 year old daughters to 40 or 50 year old men as child brides to be kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for the next 30+ years of their life. Women are expected to have full lives now, which may or may not involve raising children. As one might expect, many have taken full advantage of that and simply chose to not have any. This move from what amounts to sexual slavery to being treated as an actual person is going to mean there are fewer women having children and many of them delaying until they are actually old enough to make an informed decision about it.

Depending on which version of Sleeping Beauty you’re reading, this isn’t that far off.

I’m not sure if they have tried a crossbow on the breastplate or brigandine. I do know Tod Cutler has, in the past, created a crossbow specifically to mimic the longbow Joe Gibbs shoots. So, my bet would be on it being pretty similar. At the end of the day, armor really did work and worked well. There is a reason it stuck around so long in history. Even to the point of firearms showing up. Some armor could stop early muskets.

Replace the screen, maybe? And now you have an extra laptop.

Funny enough, they tested something similar. They got a modified compound bow to push the same archer and he shot a replica 15th century breast plate. He also used a 70 pound compound bow to shoot the breastplate several times.

It’s really a lot more in depth and interesting. In this one, they shot a lot of arrows against a target in brigandine, mail, and arming doublet with arm armor and gauntlets. Thanks to the volume of arrows shot, there were hits on basically every bit of it, including one hit to a eye slit in the salet.

Sadly, yes a lot of organizations didn’t get the memo. But this really is the current guidance. In NIST 800-63B Section 5.1.1.2:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.