I, too, like Dutch people.

Ok, so it’s effectively the same as P2P, just with some guarantees about how many copies you have.

In a P2P setup, your data would be distributed based on some mathematical formula such that it’s statistically very unlikely that your data would be lost given N clients disconnect from the network. The larger the network, the more likely your data is to stick around. So think of bittorrent, but you are randomly selected to seed some number of files, in addition to files you explicitly opt into.

The risk w/ something like Nostr is if a lot of people pick the same relays, and those relays go down. With the P2P setup I described, data would be distributed according to a mathematical formula, not human decision, so you’re more likely to still have access to that data even if a whole country shuts off its internet or something.

Either solution is better than Lemmy/Mastodon or centralized services in terms of surviving something like AWS going down.

Simplex is ready today, assuming you just want 1:1 messaging.

How sure are you? Assign a percentage chance to it and the cost of exposing old messages, and compare that to the cost of this dev effort.

We know governments are using it, and there’s likely a lot of sensitive data transmitted through Signal, so the cost of it happening in the next 20 years would still be substantial, so even if the chance of that timeline happening is small, there’s still value in investing in forward secrecy.

Monero isn’t like the other three, it’s P2P with no single points of failure.

I haven’t looked too closely at Nostr, but I’m assuming it’s typically federated with relays acting like Lemmy/Mastodon instances in terms of data storage (it’s a protocol, so I suppose posts could be local and switching relays is easy). If your instance goes down, you’re just as screwed as you would be with a centralized service, because Lemmy and Mastodon are centralized services that share data. If your instance doesn’t go down but a major one does, your experience will be significantly degraded.

The only way to really solve this problem is with P2P services, like Monero, or to have sufficient diversity in your infrastructure that a single major failure doesn’t kill the service. P2P is easy for something like a currency, but much more difficult for social media where you expect some amount of moderation, and redundancy is expensive and also complex.

Unit tests aren’t intended to find bugs, they’re intended to prove correctness. There should be a separate QA process for finding bugs, which involves integration testing. When QA inevitably finds a bug, the unit tests get updated with that case (and any similar cases).

only cover cases that you know will work

And that’s what code reviews are for. If your tests don’t sufficiently cover the logic, the change should be rejected until they do. It’s a lot easier to verify the tests cover the logic if the tests are submitted w/ the logic changes.

I did it in a few weeks. I basically swapped discs while playing games, before going to work, before bed, etc. It was tedious, but I got them all.

Now when I buy one, I’ll rip it first before watching.

Are you an IT contractor or something?

AWS is the modern IBM.

That’s basically why we use it at work. I hate it, but that’s how things are.

Absolutely this. We are based out of one region, but also have a second region as a quick disaster recovery option, and we have people 24/7 who can manage the DR process. We’re not big enough to have live redundancy, but big enough that an hour of downtime would be a big deal.

It shouldn’t, but it does. The person who writes the code cares more about its correctness, so I trust them to write better tests.

But I don’t wanna.

Eh, GOG isn’t a nonprofit or anything, so there’s no guarantee they’ll use your money for the cause you want.

Go for it if you want, just remember that GOG is a for-profit entity at the end of the day and don’t owe you anything for your donation.

Why not just buy a game instead? That doesn’t provide as much money to GOG, but it also rewards game devs for providing DRM-free games.

No, if there’s nothing, it’s not using one of the big DRM systems.

There’s a good chance it doesn’t use any DRM, but the only way to know for sure is to install it and try to run it without Steam (rename Steam dir and Steam exe just in case). Some games use Steam DRM or otherwise rely on Steam, so this is to rule those out too.

Yeah, I didn’t have a Steam account until they came to Linux back in 2013 or so. Back then, I bought most of my games through Humble Bundle since most had Linux support, and the rest direct from the dev’s website (e.g. I bought Minecraft and Factorio around their public alpha/beta release). I played a few games through WINE, but not many since it was a pain.

Steam was a game changer, and they didn’t even have Proton yet, so I only bought Linux-native games through them. Being able to finally find games that supported Linux easily and keep them all on an account was amazing! And then they added Proton for the Steam Machine launch, and I could finally play many Windows games as well!

In that time, what has GOG done for me? Offline installers suddenly doesn’t sound as impressive, especially since they don’t come with a compatibility layer, so I’ll have to go mess with WINE directly again to use them for Windows games. With Steam, I can copy the installed files for most games and it’ll work without Steam running, so I can get 90% of the value GOG provides (my “installer” can be a tarball) with a small amount of effort, and also get all of the extra value Steam provides, so why pick GOG?

Here’s what would change my mind, in rough order of preference:

1. GOG brings Galaxy to Linux with a WINE compatibility layer that works with local installer backups
2. 1, but without support for local installer backups
3. 2, but offloads the WINE support to another project, say by adding Steam entries or handing off to Lutris or Heroic or something
4. Officially recognize and support Heroic (or another launcher) on the download page for Galaxy (e.g. “until Galaxy comes to Linux, use Heroic, which is officially supported by GOG support”); the closest they have now is a Heroic affiliate link

I mostly want some indication that GOG cares about Linux gamers. Valve has gone out of their way to support Linux, EGS has done the same to not support Linux, and GOG is somewhere in the middle. I like GOG’s principles here, I just need some level of actual support from them.

Oh sure. I’m just saying the computer interface presented as “futuristic” doesn’t look enjoyable to work with.

Boiling time isn’t related to original potato size, it’s related to the size of pieces you cut. So the first half is irrelevant and the second half is overly verbose.

It’s just this person from what I can tell.

That’s fine, and I’d probably say the same about yours.

My point in all of this is to say that changes should be gradual, and policy makers should adjust based on the results. The main issue w/ people like Brownbeck and Trump is they don’t do that, but instead go full steam ahead on whatever agenda they have planned. Rapid changes in any direction are generally bad in the short to medium term. I think we should steer the ship toward personal liberty, you may disagree, but hopefully we can agree that policy should be an iterative process where we take two steps forward and one step back based on the data.