There are several other programs like STF funded by the EU (often mediated via NLNet), and for example Servo gets some amount of its funding via NGI (an EU Commission initiative): https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/
> AFAIK it's software RE work, and nothing done in the console hacking scenes is truly cleanroom at all
There's a wide gradient of how much effort people put into reverse engineering consoles in a legal way vs. just copying code straight from their decompiler and slapping an open source license on it. libogc is very much on the "didn't even try" side of that gradient, it's been known since pretty much forever, and even their documentation is straight up copied from Nintendo's SDKs for part of their libraries.
What's new here is discovering that even the parts people thought were developed "fresh" and not just straight-up asm2c'd from Nintendo are actually stolen from other open source projects in a way that tries to conceal the origin of the code.
Whether you'll find that "more morally reprehensible" or not will largely depend on your personal morals, but clearly for some people that seems to be the case...
Yes, libogc is a dumpster fire and the dkP org would be better served by rewriting a libogc replacement (w/ a different API) from scratch, quite honestly.
What I find odd is the timing, I highly suspect he learned about it many months ago.
> There's a wide gradient of how much effort people put into reverse engineering consoles in a legal way vs. just copying code straight from their decompiler and slapping an open source license on it.
English has no literal word-to-word equivalent to this - this french "à" is used to describe the main property of a noun, and the translation in English when no original word exists is via a nominal group or a concatenation of nouns. An "avion à hélice" is a propeller plane, a "bateau à vapeur" is a steamboat, or an "étui à lunettes" is a glasses case. So a "train à grande vitesse" is similarly just a high-speed train.
"of" in English here sounds like you're describing what the object is made of instead of its property. A "boat of steam" is made of steam, it's not the same as a steam boat.
You don't translate it, that's the point. Train à grande vitesse means high-speed train. There is no "of", "at" or "with" there.
Similarly, pain au chocolat does not mean "bread of the chocolate" or anything silly like that. "Chocolate bread" would be the closest translation but since this is ambiguous in English we just use the French word as a loanword.
You won't learn anything by trying to find an English analogue for words like à in French. It will probably actually set you back. You just have to learn it how natives learn it. It's French because it's French. There is no other definition and you can't draw on any other language for guidance. This goes for all natural languages.
It's not the "of", it's just that "grande vitesse" means "high speed", it doesn't have the undertones that "great" has in English. Unless I'm overinterpreting the meaning in English (French is my native language, not English).
> It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people.
How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating.
The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to properly enforce laws on the internet. Even for completely egregious violations there's no way to do anything once you track down the website to a bulletproof host in Russia or Ukraine or similar countries that don't cooperate. After 20 years of getting nowhere the courts have to find new and creative ways to enforce laws. I think everyone agrees that ideally this shouldn't be DNS blocks or IP blocks but rather these services getting removed from the internet and/or having to implement regional blocks to comply with laws. But there's just no way at all to make this happen right now.
> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating.
Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options.
We've recently seen this happen in real time with TV/movie streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want, whenever you want", the users will come. But then the investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the number of subscriptions required to access everything goes up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so appealing anymore.
I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just going online and finding a pirate stream.
From the revenue extraction POV, the optimum price is such that user is unhappy to pay it, but is still paying, while raising the price even by a small amount would convince the user to cancel the service.
This means that the companies are constantly testing this edge, and check whether too many subscribers start to fall off the edge when the price rises.
Customer satisfaction is priced in: the customer is still satisfied enough to keep paying, by their own free will.
Entities like corporations aren't conscious and have no morality. They often discover and apply such things much like the biological evolution discovers and applies things. The closest proxy to morality that affects corporations is law; I assume here a completely legal, free interaction where the customer is not even held by an imperfect, monopoly-dominated market, like suburban internet access, or, well, sports events broadcasting.
disagree. in the US my family would need to sign up to 5 different streaming platforms to be able to view everything that we watch. So that’s 5 separate accounts i need to create, 5 separate apps to install, and i need to remember which app each TV show or movie is in on my apple tv.
And then sometimes only 1 or 2 seasons of a show are available for free on amazon prime, and i need to pay PER EPISODE for the remaining content. It’s also fun when a show my wife wants to watch is not available in our region - even if we wish to pay for it.
Talk about a garbage experience!
There’s a reason _some_ people with the technical chops set up something like plex or jellyfin, and source the content (via torrents or usenet) using sonarr, radarr, etc (the “ARR” stack). For some its cost savings. Others just can’t be bothered.
We can argue about the ethics of doing so all day, but it’s truly a failure on the industries part that they make things so complicated.
Just because you lack the capacity to understand something does not mean you are morally superior for it. It means you need to re-evaluate yourself and find why you cannot understand the fallibility of service providers.
i’m not doing it to save money. really. streaming is cheap as it is. But “content rights” are a dumpster fire. I refuse to use 5 different apps to watch tv / movies. the only one i pay for is apple tv+, because the quality is fantastic and i want to reward that.
I don’t understand why the rights holders can’t partner with apple, netflix, whoever, and offer EVERYTHING in their catalog. And just let me pay for it! In a single app. Kind of like how i used to be able to walk into a blockbuster and pick any DVD.
anyway we clearly disagree. i personally don’t feel guilty worrying about how Hollywood actors will get paid. Have a nice day. :)
Netflix gained popularity because they sold their service artificially cheap at a loss for many years to build market share and Kill off their competition, and that's it.
That's because they don't declare taking out long term bonds as part of their p/e calculations, just the cost of servicing the loan.
Netflix were borrowing circa $4 billion dollars a year to license content until two years ago. There's nothing wrong with that, but you aren't making a genuine profit.
> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating.
It's both. The re-broadcasters may be violating the laws and laws themselves could be unjust, nonsensical, yet existing and enforced because of a group of greedy benefactors actively keeping them that way.
So basically the problem is reduced to "how can Italy fight against a crime happening somewhere in Russia or Ukraine"? Imagine there is a TV broadcast from Russia, how can Italy forbid it? They can definitely disrupt it (by electronic jamming), but not forbit it. Similar to Internet, the difference is the medium of transmission, not the facts of the matter.
In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were watching adult content at night from the same source. There was no way to stop that.
> As always with nuclear there are a few taboo topics. One of them being fuel supply.
It's not taboo, the answer is just extremely simple: mining needs people willing to work in a dangerous and exhausting field, so when practical, rich countries tend to prefer outsourcing this (capitalism does not tend to reward ethics). It's very practical for uranium because nuclear reactors need a tiny volume which is trivial to ship and to store. Most countries with a nuclear program keep a stockpile of multiple years.
Mining uranium in other places is very feasible, as are other more expensive options like extracting it out of the ocean. After all, with nuclear the cost of the fuel is a tiny amount of the actual cost of power generation. This is not happening because there's really no need to. In the past, there have been uranium mines in pretty much every european country, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Euro...
(Refining/processing is a different story. But that's more obviously a "money/care" problem - there's no possible physical constraint for refining/processing as there could be for mining.)
This is a common misconception: there are some exceptions for certain types of media, but for example downloading copyrighted software (including games) without authorization is not legal in Switzerland. And some of those exceptions are more constrained than others.
> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.
I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).
Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band
Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.
I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.
I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).
Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.
My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.
Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.
Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.
They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up
The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.
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