the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products

Genuine question, but doesn’t this just mean that Israel paid for a Microsoft Azure subscription and used it to host web services? Like, anyone can do that. What am I missing here, exactly?

They say Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship, but how did they do that, exactly?

Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?

My IT department uninstalled it from my work laptop, and told me not to reinstall it because - and I quote: “The only browser IT officially supports is Google Chrome.”

What makes this doubly stupid is that I’m a web developer. I literally can’t test my stuff on another browser…

No one outside of China has their data stored there, though. Every tech company that complies with China hosts the data in China and usually makes the Chinese version of their software work differently as a result. The Chinese government isn’t able to just see everyone else’s data.

Someone else in this thread mentioned that going to about:config and typing telemetry will apparently show that some things are still set to true despite unchecking the settings in the Privacy section.

Note: I’m not the guy you originally replied to, and I haven’t personally tested this. Just pointing out where you can allegedly find those settings if you’re interested. (I personally don’t care and think this whole thing is overblown by the community, for what it’s worth)

The UK government’s obsession with being a Big Brother is so damn frustrating. A preview of what other governments will try and become in the near future, unfortunately.

Not daily, but their canvas feature has a feature that lets you embed previews of your files into the flow charts you make. It’s pretty nice, since you can have shorter files entirely visible with everything else. Makes it pretty good for software development and project management, in my experience.

Careful not to go overboard with it, though. I feel like a lot of people fall down the “productivity pipeline” when using it, where they end up procrastinating by trying to optimize every little thing and end up doing nothing at all.

Any good web crawler has limits.

Yeah. Like, literally just:

• Keep track of which URLs you’ve been to
• Avoid going back to the same URL
• Set a soft limit, once you’ve hit it, start comparing the contents of the page with the previous one (to avoid things like dynamic URLs taking you to the same content)
• Set a hard limit, once you hit it, leave the domain altogether

What kind of lazy-ass crawler doesn’t even do that?

Honestly, I don’t even believe it’s inefficient. There’s plenty of documented/recorded evidence of child labor around the world. Sometimes, all you really need is a pair of hands, and kids are physically capable of doing it. Countries with shitty labor laws are ripe with child labor abuse.

That’s not what his video showed though. They don’t change the URL, they open another tab, which then overrides the cookie/session variable that is used to determine who the referrer is. It’s still scummy, but it doesn’t seem to be swapping links outright.

This gist of it from the WAN show was this:

• They were unaware that it was intentionally not looking for the best deals (thus, scamming the consumer)
• They stopped advertising Honey because of the referral hijacking
• A ton of creators knew about it, and had already dropped Honey (people just talked about it via DMs, not publicly)
• This all happened when YouTubers were getting shit on for even doing ads/sponsors, and they didn’t want to make a video that was basically “stop using this thing that saves you money because it takes my money” (see first point)

Nope, that’s a misconception/misinformation. That’s just for Steam Keys (i.e. you can’t sell Steam Keys cheaper than on Steam). Everything else is fair game.

Yeah, it’s also ignoring that the issue with Apple’s “30% cut” isn’t that they take 30% of game sales. It’s that they’re forcing you to use their payment processing service to put an app on the store, and then they take a 30% cut out of that, even though third-party payment processing providers take much smaller cuts than that.

Physical stores also took a 30% sales cut, because there’s value in getting people to see your product. It’s literally been the standard storefront cut for decades. Microsoft and Sony take the same cuts for their console sales/transactions.

Valve does a lot more for companies than just put eyes on their games, too. They’re pushing for Linux-compatibility with Proton, they provide you with networking libraries and infrastructure for multiplayer servers if you use SteamWorks, Steam will optionally update your game’s SDL libraries so you have up-to-date controller bindings, etc. It’s not like they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs and taking 30% of your money for nothing.

I’d argue Microsoft and Sony do comparable work for devs on their platforms too.

The whole argument against the 30% cut is so fucking dumb.

People who genuinely believe game prices will get lowered if stores take a smaller cut are delusional. You can literally look at the Epic Game Store and see that it isn’t even remotely true. The only games on there that are cheaper than on Steam are the ones Epic invested in specifically to entice developers/gamers to use their services. The ones that don’t have exclusivity deals are the same as on Steam.

Edit: changed “take a cut” to “take a smaller cut”.

I feel like Trump’s probably going to axe whoever is finally tackling these monopolies, unfortunately.

Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.

It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.

The big problem with DNS-based ad-blocking is that it doesn’t prevent redirects. Sure, you’ll get redirected to a harmless blank page, but then you need to go back to the previous page. You don’t have that issue with uBlock.

You’re given a pen/pencil and asked to fill out a box. Nothing prevents you from writing stuff, but whatever. It’s not like it matters.

To be fair to myself, you can vote for anyone. It just won’t necessarily count since it’ll spoil the ballot.

Microsoft’s naming strategy is just the American Economics wheel from South Park, but with names on it. Of all the big tech companies, they are easily the fucking worst at naming shit.

Canada has a housing crisis and is tilting right

Yeah. Trudeau’s not super popular anymore because of all his scandals, open corruption, and his handling of the economy and immigration (I expect the Trump win will probably solidify his base somewhat, though, once people start comparing the opposition to Trump) and the NDP’s never going to win a majority with Jagmeet at the helm (NDP voters aren’t too thrilled about how far up Trudeau’s ass his tongue regularly goes). That basically leaves the Bloc (which only cares about Quebec) and the Conservatives. No one outside of Quebec votes for the Bloc (no one serious, at least).

The most damaging thing Trump ever did was show the politicians of the world that you can pretty much just do whatever the fuck you want if you spread divisive hate and propaganda hard enough. The Cons weren’t anywhere close to what the Republicans were before he got into office. In our case, the economy usually did get better under them. Unfortunately, they’ve been steadily becoming more and more extreme over the past couple of elections. It looked like they were trying to be more moderate when they had Erin O’Toole, but there were still some morons among them that were eager to show that they’d gone batshit insane, so they’re back to doubling down on ol’ Canadian Ben Shapiro now.