Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

  • 0 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•A self-hosted wiki that can integrate with a fediverse instance
    12·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•There is still no Linux app store
    2·
    1 year ago

    Well, whoever does that for closed-source software is going to basically have to do what they have done. Probably some kind of cross-distro fixed binary target, client software to do updates, probably some level of DRM functionality like steamlib integration.

    If it’s not Steam, it’s gonna be something that has a lot of the same characteristics.

    Personally, I kind of wish that there was better sandboxing for apps from Steam (think what the mobile crowd has) since I’d rather not trust each one with the ability to muck up my system, but given how many improvements Valve’s driven so far, I don’t feel like I can complain at them for that. A lot of the software they sell is actually designed for Windows, which isn’t sandboxed, and given the fact that not all the infrastructure is in place (like, you’d need Wayland, I dunno how much I’d trust 3d drivers to be hardened, you maybe have to do firejail-style restrictions on filesystem and network access, and I have no idea how hardened WINE is), it’d still take real work.

    Their use of per-app WINE prefixes helps keep apps that play nicely from messing each other up, but it isn’t gonna keep a malicious mod on Steam Workshop or something from compromising your system.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    7·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    61·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    32·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories.
    527·
    1 year ago

    They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

    they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

    That sounds like it’s a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won’t work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

    they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

    I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

    the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

    If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

    less secure,

    If your home directory is “not secure”, you’re probably in trouble already.

    Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

    EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don’t start with a dot in people’s home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

    • A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user’s home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

    • WINE apparently has decided that it’s a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

    • Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

    • A few logfiles