He / They
Yeah, I refuse to call anything ‘indie’ that is not in fact independent of a publisher. We already have A, AA, and AAA to denote budgets and scale. Rebranding ‘indie’ to mean ‘A’ or ‘AA’ games from third-party studios under a publisher is drinking the publisher kool-aid. Sony especially pushed this angle.
I literally burned some DVDs last week…
“We needed some more Lebensraum” - Israel
I’ve tried. SO many times. It’s just so damn clunky. I ended up using Krita (also FOSS) instead.
That’s why our instance has no downvote mechanism!
No, the Hastert Rule (which Johnson would absolutely invoke again) would mean we’d need a supermajority in order to force it to actually get voted on. A simple majority can’t force a floor vote.
The Speaker usually has de facto control over floor votes on pending legislation (via the United States House Committee on Rules). The Hastert rule says that the speaker will not allow a floor vote on any bill that does not have majority support within their party—even if the majority of the members of the House would vote to pass it.
The rule keeps the minority party from passing bills with the assistance of a minority of majority party members. In the House, 218 votes are needed to pass a bill; if 200 Democrats are the minority and 235 Republicans are the majority, the Hastert rule would not allow 200 Democrats and 100 Republicans together to pass a bill, because 100 Republican votes is short of a majority of the majority party, so the speaker would not allow a vote to take place.
It can be bypassed with a discharge petition but those are incredibly rare, and as we saw with the Epstein files, at the point that a party thinks they’re likely to lose to one they’ll figure out another route to forestall (like SCOTUS or having the FBI redact everything that hurts them).
We never started. Laws did, because the government ceased to be “by the people, for the people”. We have to fix that first.
From the blog post OP linked in a comment:
We made an unrelated change that caused a similar, longer availability incident two weeks ago on November 18, 2025. In both cases, a deployment to help mitigate a security issue for our customers propagated to our entire network and led to errors for nearly all of our customer base.
It seems that the method they have of specifically propagating new security configurations to their servers is not a gradual or group-based rollout, it pushes certain changes to all servers at once, so uncaught bugs end up hitting everything instead of just some initial test group.
In particular, the projects outlined below should help contain the impact of these kinds of changes:
Enhanced Rollouts & Versioning: Similar to how we slowly deploy software with strict health validation, data used for rapid threat response and general configuration needs to have the same safety and blast mitigation features. This includes health validation and quick rollback capabilities among other things.
“Fail-Open” Error Handling: As part of the resilience effort, we are replacing the incorrectly applied hard-fail logic across all critical Cloudflare data-plane components. If a configuration file is corrupt or out-of-range (e.g., exceeding feature caps), the system will log the error and default to a known-good state or pass traffic without scoring, rather than dropping requests. Some services will likely give the customer the option to fail open or closed in certain scenarios. This will include drift-prevention capabilities to ensure this is enforced continuously.
Valve has hundreds if not thousands of highly and expressly pornographic games on its platform, so I don’t think this can be chalked up to the Collective Shout folks’ spectre somehow looming over Valve. As another commenter pointed out, according to the devs’ own timeline, Valve’s rejection happened prior to the recent successful Collective Should payment-processor targeting.
I suspect that EGS and Humble probably halted sale at the last minute due to the added press naming them as distributors prior to launch, often in articles that included Valve’s response asserting that it contained questionable content related to minors, and them going, “hey what? Hold on a sec, we don’t know anything about that.”
If you were about to sell a bunch of cars, and a major dealership announced they wouldn’t sell them because their trunks were all full of cocaine, a couple days before launch, you’d probably delay your launch to double-check as well.
Unfortunately, the developers’ own initial press statements where they sort of feigned innocence ignorance (after they had already changed the scene presumed to be in question, meaning they at least had some idea that was likely the issue) probably didn’t help their credibility in other platforms’ eyes, as far as being business partners goes.
So large skyscrapers, large nuclear plants, datacenters, etc would be state owned. Actually more…. This would be hundreds of the largest companies. This means the state would commandeer a company when what, the market cap hit a billy? The nav? That actually seems kinda crazy to do
Not state-owned, just state-managed. We already generally subsidize power plants, but for other large projects it could provide both funding and oversight of the build.
When it comes to really large companies themselves, if there’s a cap then they would just stop being such large companies, not be taken over.
But if you wanted to make a process for a company to grow beyond the $1B cap, my personal preference would be a system where depending on the level of impact to peoples’ lives, either something like monthly auditing of financials and business plans, or for companies operating in areas with a higher potential for harms, something closer to a Fannie Mae-style conservatorship, that would directly advise the company on minimizing risks (and potentially actually prohibit actions outright if they clearly were harmful). Ownership, stocks, profit, etc, would all still be private. We actually already embed IRS auditors in companies if they’re caught doing tax evasion, and I think of this more as a logical extension of that. We’ve tried voluntary compliance with laws and regulations, and too many of the very large companies are happy to flout them, and use their wealth to help them do so.
You quoted the wrong part, then. The company cap that Phoenixz proposed was $1 billion, not $10-20 million. Companies can easily build larger-scale projects with a billion, and projects that are going to run over that should probably be weighed against public interest and publicly-funded and managed, if they’re beneficial.
personal net [worth]
personal
Privately owned power plants aren’t built and owned by individuals with their personal wealth. Ditto for 99% of large buildings. And we can do without the personal skyscrapers, yes.
Corporate wealth needs its own set of guardrails and limits.
Guarantee that their lawyers told them they were a huge, illegal, indefensible liability, and it was better to axe them than potentially pay the per-work copyright violation penalties.
Ten years was the total time for everything under the “larger overhaul”. The frontend website portion is not broken down.
I don’t think society is actually more prudish; you couldn’t have had 80% of the shows that are made now, 50 years ago. I think there are just several things that combine to make it appear otherwise (note that these are all 100% my opinion):
Corporatism has run rampant, and corporations detest liability. Independent movie stores didn’t have to worry about being noticed by political groups, but big chains did, and big corporations’ shareholders only care about stock prices are much more reactive to ‘threats’. And big corporations killed most independent stores, even before digital took over. Digital is all big corps.
The US has sanitized violence in media to such an extent (e.g. superhero movies where logically thousands of people die, or where all violence is ‘bloodless’ but not cartoonish) that I think sex has become the only metric by which to delineate ‘kid’ vs ‘adult’ media for a lot of people. That has a feedback effect on large media creators, who will be less likely to depict sex in anything not squarely targeted for adult consumption, which in turn makes any sexual content in e.g. young-adult media stand out even more, which will get it outsize attention by the wannabe morality police types.
Prudish political groups made a lot of strategic inroads into positions of policy influence by using “protect the children” rhetoric, with sex being the #1 thing they actively demonized. It’s much less common to see pro-sex groups making any kind of public messaging or policy impacts, so it can seem like the prudes are the majority.
WRT the current thread: Steam doesn’t ban sexual games at all; at this point it’s one of if not the largest adult games distributor just thanks to its user base. They even implemented a ‘private’ feature for games so people could buy adult games on their Steam account but hide them from others, to encourage people to buy adult games. This particular game is really just an unfortunate case of edgy content accidentally running up against a legitimate guardrail. I won’t be surprised if Valve does walk back the ban soon based on the amount of media coverage.
92 million dollars over cost on a 4.1 million dollar project is not incompetence and mismanagement.
Doubling the cost of a project should have triggered reviews or an audit. 23x’ing the cost of a project is either corruption, or such gross negligence with public funds as to be criminal all on its own.
Most stores choose not to sell X rated (later NC-17) movies.
It’s a game where people are put in animal masks, chained up, and ridden around naked.
what the studio calls “grotesque, subversive imagery” of a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as animal livestock.
To pretend that said “grotesque, subversive imagery” is not in this case functioning on it’s proximity to sexual degradation, is disingenuous imo. I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to wade into an “art vs shock-sploitation” debate.
Minchin said the total cost “includes the previously stated $4.1m required to redesign the front end of the websites”.
“The remaining cost ($92.4m) reflects the significant investment required to fully rebuild and test the systems and technology that underpin the website, making sure it is secure and stable and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from our observing network and weather models,” Minchin said.
So 92 MILLION dollars on SQA and maybe some pentesting? Bullshit. Pentests run $50k-$400k for single-domain websites like this, and $400k is on the very expensive end.
Even if you paid 30 people $200k apiece for 4 years to work on this, which is more people and at higher salaries than would have happened, that would still only come to $24m, less than a third of the cited cost.
There is no possible way for this to have legitimately cost this much. There was corruption of some kind involved.
That’s true, but EFF needs to speak using terms people are used to seeing in order to reach as many people as possible. They always discuss the de-anonymization aspect of these laws, just not usually in the headline.