Chicken is not beef. Pork is not beef. Fish is certainly not beef. I hate chicken. Pork isn’t bad but can be hit or miss. The only meat I hate more than chicken is fish. So no, I can’t just eat other meats. Even if that wasn’t the case there are also people who are allergic to chicken. We had one of our friends over recently and we have to make sure nothing we serve has chicken in it because of their allergy.

You’re also missing the point entirely. I neither need nor want AI. Nobody needs AI. 90% of what AI is used for now could be done without AI using half the power and just as quickly. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that’s fundamentally the wrong way to do things. All this AI crap is purely being driven by marketing departments that are just frothing at the mouth to find some way to justify slapping “AI” into their ads.

The problem is all those other things are useful, unlike AI. AI is a gimmick and a distraction. It wasn’t so bad when it was a novelty being experimented with, but now that corporations have decided it’s the hot new thing and are racing each other to find the most pointless places to cram it in it’s out of hand. It’s approached fundamentally wrong, instead of looking at a problem and asking “could AI help with this?” companies are starting with AI and then asking “now what problems can we invent to justify using this?”. The result is a bunch of power gets wasted solving problems that aren’t actually problems or could have been solved much more efficiently in traditional ways, and yes that’s bad for the environment.

Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I’d love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it’s something like 75% of the way there).

The issue also isn’t Mozilla trying to make money, it’s Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There’s also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it’s completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.

Try IronFox on android.

Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It’s easier to count the decisions they’ve made that aren’t terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.

Yes, in a perfect world the EU would require banks to support Taler for transactions in euros and presumably also provide the necessary infrastructure for that support. Doing so would allow you to seamlessly (and transparently) convert back and forth between Taler and Euro as needs require just like is done with cheques and credit cards.

It would honestly be the smartest play by the EU since they would avoid reinventing the wheel. That said I doubt it would happen because even at the best of times government of any type rarely makes the best decision. If you’re lucky they still make a good decision, just not the best one.

Yes, that was me. Unfortunately much like GNU Hurd, Taler is less of a project than it is a thought experiment. It lacks a sufficient number of people pushing it to become a viable project. It exists, but as far as I’m aware it’s never been used seriously in the real world outside of some proof of concept type deployments at a university. Without a champion, ideally a major business or significant public figure, it’s likely to continue being far more conceptual than practical.

Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.

The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).

It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.

So that’s kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don’t actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).

At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn’t a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it’s about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn’t matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that’s a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).

This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.

You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).

Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.

I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.

That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.

It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.

They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.

The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.

Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.

Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.

Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.

It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.

Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don’t restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn’t denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it’s illegal in.

Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I’m not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are “illegal transactions”. In theory Steam does have age gating, but it’s the same “are you over 18?” easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.

Uh… What’s the tea app?

Edit: from what I can gather based on the last link attached to this post it seems to be some kind of app for women to talk about men they’ve dated. Why that needs drivers license uploads is a whole other question and definitely should have raised some massive red flags for anyone thinking about using it.

It looks a lot like their smart TV interface which has always been less functional than their web or mobile app interface. They’re probably trying to cut the UI down to just the bare minimum that the majority of casual users regularly use. In part I’d assume to reduce the maintenance overhead, but I’m sure it likely will also make things harder for ad blockers.