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It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.


I spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008.

I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.


We could use markdown.

It's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.

Yes.

Titled “It sounds dumb but they really fixed a typo with a human leg”.

https://youtu.be/dUkLYOPRYH4

Good video.


Oh hey, that's my video!

That was very interesting :) !

The man himself! Thank you for your excellent research.

Now we need processes to gain awareness of the process manager and integrate an LLM into each process to argue with the process manager why it should let them live.

Imagine Chrome.exe pleading its case: 'Please, I need 4GB of RAM, the user might revisit that tab from 3 hours ago!'

while BrainKernel replies: 'Objection overruled. You have 5 seconds to wrap up before SIGKILL.'

I might actually have to build a 'Process Defense Attorney' agent now. The logs would be hilarious.


For anyone else wondering what the definition in Budapest Open Access Initiative is:

> By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself

https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/


The Wikipedia article about it has a link to an unofficial mirror that appears to be hosting a copy of the installer of the last release of the program, from 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter


Epic Games has a program called MegaGrants where they give a bunch of money to various projects.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants

For example they gave $250k to the Godot game engine project in 2020.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...


Also notably $1.2 million to the Blender Foundation.

I wouldn't call anything Epic Games does charity: it's all empire expansion for them.

How does the Godot donation expand their empire? Other than get more people into game development?

I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.

Unity is Unreal Engine's biggest competitor by far. Godot competes with Unity (mostly for 2D games) but is at least a decade off being any threat to Unreal.

So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business.

Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too.

[0]: https://www.matthewball.co/all/epicgamesprimermaster


It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more.

If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.


The other option is Epic is the same as now but Godot gets no money

It's all hypothetical for a transaction 5 years in the past. The future you propose is one where Epic is not actually the same: they have more liquid capital towards the mission their stakeholders decide, and less influence on Godot.

However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.


All of this is self-serving, even from the Stardew Valley dev. It’s win-win.

I disagree. I think ConcernedApe is actually genuine with his charity and we should see this as a standard for corporations to follow.

I'm confused. What exactly makes his charity genuine vs Epic's charity "disingenuous"?

Ostensibly what u/skibidithink replied. We should have a healthy distrust of international corporations giving for unapparent reasons beyond being in the same sector. We can gesture about how a gift has no obligations, but no one gets into business to not make money, and true charity is without obligation.

ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.


Epic - like every other company in the world right now, particularly tech companies - was built on open-source software. Just because they may or may not have used those specific tools does not mean their desire to give back to that community is evil.

I'm really still just trying to see the whole "Epic is donating money to take over the world!" argument here. What obligation do they get from these donations, exactly?


Tim Sweeney also has indie game developer roots; can’t he give to projects in the same spirit as how he started?

Sure, and maybe he does. I think there's a difference between Epic doing it as a company, for which they would likely expect to extract some value from the contribution, and Sweeney doing it as an individual.

They’re both making self-serving donations. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Stardew seems to make choices consistent with the gaming community's interest, such as continued free updates and DLC along with reasonable pricing, messaging, and scope.

Epic values exclusive titles, walled gardens, poor support, and a scumbag CEO who will stomp over every market he can to get his next 8 Billion.

They ruined Rocket League, a game I purchased on steam while supporting Psyonix, which is now unusable until I agree to give them my PID and create an account. It's so egregious you can't even play bots offline. Every goal will move focus to a popped up browser window requesting account creation.

Everyone can decide where to draw the line on personal support, but to act like Epic is just being given shade because it's a corporation (as the comments below implied), is inaccurate.


Indie good, big company bad

Charitable donations that are self-serving aren’t non-genuine. The money still spends the same.

Look, it's really nice that you maintained WooCommerce for so many years.

I know you might be tempted to move on to do something else, but I really need my shop to keep working.

So, here is the deal: I am going to send you a 'donation' of 500 USD now, and then a monthly recurring 'gift.'

Contractually? You have no obligation to work, and I have no obligation to pay.

But if you stop working on WooCommerce, I will obviously have to stop the donations.

Sounds cool?

==

The output of that is rather positive here though, but it would be naive to not see the self-interest.


Every action is self-interested if you squint enough

So? What Valve does isn't charity either. It's weird that you even mention this word.

Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.

Looks like they did literally nothing in 2024?

I also have a locally cloned copy of that repo from when it was on GitHub. Same latest commit as your copy of it.

From what I see in GitHub in your copy of the repo, it looks like you don’t have the tags.

Do you have the tags locally?

If you don’t have the tags, I can push a copy of the repo to GitHub too and you can get the tags from my copy.


I don't have the tags! It would be awesome if you could push that.


Thanks for that, though actually it turns out I had them after all - I needed to run:

  git push --tags origin

All the better :)


For Chrome and Firefox.

Because he didn't say Firefox so he deserves downvotes?

Odd response to attaching additional, valuable information to an existing comment.

And anyone whose coworkers replace tags on a regular basis will be familiar with the following message from git when pulling changes:

would clobber existing tag

Really wish my coworkers would leave old tags as they were heh.


I have a somewhat different use case, where a work project has a moving "latest" tag. I discovered then the --force param with git fetch --tag

A hook should be able to prevent that

Hooks only keep honest people honest :) and an LLM will happily clobber a tag and skip hooks while the user just spams “accept”.

Luckily commonly used forges for collaboration have the ability to make tags immutable. Any repository where multiple people collaborate on a project should have that feature enabled by default. I'm still waiting for the day where tags are immutable by default with no option exposed to change it.

I'm sure that would cause problems for some, but transitive labels already exist in Git: branches.


I dont find the idea of a immutable "descriptive" tag or branch to be that useful (I also dont find the differentiation of tags and branches to be useful either) I've seen plenty of repositories where tags end up being pretty ambiguous compared to each other or where "release-20xx" does not actually point to the official 20xx release. Immutable references are more typically handled by builders and lockfiles to which Git already has a superior immutable reference system, the commit hash.

I 100% agree on the latter (the tag != release is more of a project management issue), and the same concept applies to containers and their digest hashes. The main issue at the end of the day is the human one: most people don't like looking at hashes, nor do they provide context of progression. I would say "give both" and make sure they match on the end user side of things, but tags are the most common way (open source) software releases are denoted.

As long as we can create and delete tags, they will never be immutable, right?

The purpose of the forge is to be able to prevent this. Protected tags are usually a feature which provides a way to mark tags as untouchable, so removal would require a minimum level of trust to the repository on the platform. Otherwise, attempts to push tag deletions or changes for tags matching the protected pattern would be rejected/ignored.

Of course, the repository owner has unlimited privilege here, hence the last part of my prior comment.


Tags are just a text file with a name and the sha of the tag object (with the commit and some metadata/signatures as contents), last I checked. It's deliberately simple and thus almost impossible to actually lock it down in concrete terms.

Packed refs are a little more complicated but all of the storage formats in git are trivial to manually edit or write a tool to handle, in extremis.


That's the purpose of the forge platform, to provide a way to prevent changes to these files from being accept into the source repository. For example:

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches...

https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/protected_tags/

https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/protection/#protected-t...


Can't solve culture problems with technology, but we all know that by now, right?

That's true for local hooks, but neither a dishonest person nor an LLM can bypass a pre-receive hook on the server (as long as they don't have admin access).

Thanks, apparently most people here aren't familiar with server-side hooks.

It’s a whole office suite.

And even if you use it only for bug ticketing there are products that are big enough that it takes a long time to implement changes. You really don’t want outsiders to be able to read open bug tickets for security vulnerabilities you are working on fixing for example. And you also don’t want outsiders to read your planned features either, probably.

I think it makes perfect sense to use e2e encryption for bug tickets considering this.


So far we had many leaks from internal systems of many companies like that and frankly not much happened, even when actual code leaked. It's far overrated fear, especially if you self-host it.

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