Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Posting from a kbin.social account to avoid the lemmy.today issues – on lemmy.today, the current behavior looks like the messages in the queue go out when the instance is restarted, but not until then. It’s running 0.19.1.

    I am not the admin there, but wanted to make that available in case other instances are affected and trying to diagnose similar behavior; federation problems themselves can cause communication problems in trying to understand the issue.




  • Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.




  • The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

    They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don’t believe that that’s what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

    EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

    EDIT2: Okay, here’s an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

    https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

    In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

    Yeah, so it’s just that these “mezha.media” guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.


  • But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it’s not like the US says “if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him”.

    EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

    https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

    Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

    Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying “you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe”. Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that’d kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

    thinks

    If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it’d be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it’d basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don’t know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company (“Valve Germany”) or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

    I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

    I’m a little suspicious that this isn’t a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it’d create too many issues.

    EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that’s exactly what the situation is.


  • Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

    Wait, outside Europe?

    Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can’t geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

    I remember that the EU didn’t want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn’t heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.





  • If you have an Nvidia card, I understand that it’s a significant performance improvement.

    I mean, I wouldn’t do what he’s doing myself, but I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who feel entitled to pirate the mod. Someone can go out and do their own free, open-source mod to do DLSS if they want, or they can just buy his, and Bethesda announced that they were going to put out an update with native DLSS support anyway, so everyone is going to wind up with support at some point anyway at no cost. He’s just providing the option to get functionality sooner at some cost.

    There are a shit-ton of people who make free mods for Bethesda games, and nobody is gonna complain if people use those for free.





  • tal@kbin.socialtoAndroid@lemdro.idAndroid helps Apple "Get the Message"
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    1 year ago

    The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like

    SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.

    If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.