Recent submissions

Comment · 7 days ago
I envy you. For better or worse, Claude is the author I've read the most in this year. There's a handful of human authors I know well enough so that I would recognize a text that was written by them. With LLMs, it's much easier than with humans, since the current generation of LLMs seems utterly incapable of changing their style.
Comment · 8 days ago
If you don't get any joy out of writing about your personal experiences in your own voice, why bother writing about them at all?
Comment · 20 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I still don't get it. The GB74R.. account number is listed under Final Bank/Beneficiary Bank, which is Citizens Bank NA in the United States. Where does the Royal Bank of Scotland come in? There's no SEPA account number listed for RBOS. Also, Scotland is not part of the EU anymore, so there can be significant fees when wiring money to post-brexit UK.
Comment · 1 month ago
there would still be fees for a wire transfer from a EU bank to this bank in the US, right? And I wouldn't get a donation receipt that would be accepted by the tax man over here anyway.
Comment · 1 month ago
Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).
Comment · 2 months ago
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.

So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.

Comment · 3 months ago
I think this Anubis project is a terrible solution to the problem posed by aggressive web scrapers. Using a web browser with reasonable privacy settings has become a big loss in quality of life already, but the first time I encountered Anubis I got completely locked out of most web servers that deployed it. The situation has improved a little, but I hate that maintainers of great web services have rationalized themselves into believing that creating massive barriers to access their sites is a fair trade-off. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing but negative associations with their mascot.

The FSF has the right idea about all this:

> Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.

> At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-million...

Comment · 5 months ago
don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.
Comment · 5 months ago
As a German, I started wondering if every nation has to experience a fascist catastrophe on its own, before a majority agrees that a fascist takeover is possible at home (surely the peoples who failed to stop all the other fascist regimes were just dumb). Then again, 30% of German voters would vote for the fascist AfD party today, so there's that...

I agree with the premise of the article wholeheartedly. Minor nitpick:

> The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime.

Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi regime after they have already taken over. While support by car companies was relevant, there were far more important supporters of the war effort in the chemical and steel industry.

Comment · 6 months ago
But here’s the crucial part. This article didn't start as LLM slop. It didn't happen because the author actually didn't have anything meaningful to say. It happened because the author chose to "spell check [the article] with AI".
Comment · 11 months ago
I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!
Comment · 1 year ago
This ist what the four essential freedoms are all about.

The hardware aspect is quite irrelevant to the whole point: the hardware only runs with software that does not respect your freedom and there's no feasible way to make the hardware run software that does respect our freedom. And of course our banks and streaming services and whatever else we need also don't offer us any software that respect our freedoms. So no, it's not about hardware, it's about free software. Always has been.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy.

Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.

Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.

Comment · 1 year ago
I did a quick review of the resources that you linked to:

https://portal.opentopography.org/raster?opentopoID=OTSRTM.0... allows to submit a request for data from a specific area through a web form (no REST API), then you get redirected to a page where you get a download link after your request has been processed. Does not give access to the original SRTM data.

http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html exposes SRTM data through a REST API in their own custom format. I immediately ran into rate limiting when I tried to download a small map tile.

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/SRTM_XSAR/ provides free access to SRTM data in the original format. This is a great resource! Unfortunately, the map tiles cover 10x10 degrees, which results in huge files. NASA used to provide 1x1 degree tiles, which was much better suited for on-demand access.

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/TDM30_EDEM/ DLR does provide 1x1 degree tiles for similar data sets like TanDEM-X, but for those they do not provide anonymous access.

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