The same argument applies to ad-sponsored media too. In fact, have you noticed that it was a very long time since a major paper did an exposé of the very sleazy online casino business? I wonder why.
>? how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?
Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media? Plenty of examples out there in the world where those currently in power can't just cut funding to major institutions, I think that's the norm rather than the exception in fact.
>Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media?
Surely laws are immutable system and cannot be changed ever. It is always perfectly designed without loopholes, and especially so when ones who design the system could benefit from them.
Absolutely not, no one claimed so either, and frankly, why continue discussing with you when you don't seem to be curious about a honest and straightforward conversation? Screw that noise.
Normally, in democratic countries, you have a process for changing laws. Enshrine your public media in those, or even better, in the constitution, and you've pretty much protected it short-term at least. Add in foundations or whatever concepts your country have, to add more layers of indirection, and it's even more protected.
You can really see how well such system works by observing USA right now.
Only way you could have any form of public financing of such endeavor without conflict of interest is to have multinational organization funded by every country.
Or you end up with BBC.
EDIT: to elaborate even further - you didn't even address the problem that ones designing this system would have to work against their own best interest. just wishy-washed that part away.
I'd say the US is a pretty shit example, given it's run by corporations right now, and lacks a judicial arm of the government that actually enforces the country's own laws. But to each and their own.
Again, with an open mind, go out and read about how publicly funded media works outside of the US (and UK, since you seemingly have a set mind about BBC too), and there is a whole rooster of different methods for funding these kind of things, yet letting them be independent. Some of these institutions are over 100 year old, yet still independent.
I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out how they made that work :)
More like made it dysfunctional - i live in EU btw
Laws are system made by people who live within that system - it is a part of resource distribution system. Lawmakers do work in their own interest, and so far the only way we found to make a system work for benefit of everyone is by putting those vested interests at odds - hence non-bipartisan democracy.
This is basically a game theory problem, and when faced with prisoner dilemma you're saying 'it would all work if everyone chose to cooperate' If your solution to political problem is 'if only everyone did X' you don't have a solution but wishful thinking. Sure this can happen, but it is not a stable system, not one that can be moved from place A to B.
You keep saying i have set mind about those issues - yet you refuse to address underlying logical assumption by saying that (non-distinct) X made it work, without even providing an example of working solution - i don't think it's me who's arguing in bad faith here.
> Still - I hope EU will just have a decent program financing or contributing in any shape or form to development of OSS.
I think at this point we're beyond that, we already have these programs and they seem to be expanding. EU-STF is one such example, then there are other organizations supported by the EU in various ways, that also helps fund OSS, like NLnet Foundation.
Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? If we leave aside all of the bureaucratic bs, political connections and corruption when it comes to obtaining these funds (for the most cases), how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?
50K EUR is OK to start. There's no point in trying to outspend the top private firms.
Like many other people said there are already thousands of unpaid volunteers doing quality work.
If the EU wants "domestic" stuff they need to mandate/incentivize it. It's not like if shit hits the fan the local employees cannot run the local stuff of non-EU companies. (Therefore the important thing is to have full control locally, no outside-EU kill switches allowed - eg. what Uber had and used.)
50k EUR is a salary that only someone coming fresh out of the University will accept and only someone who has no other choice, e.g. someone not quite competitive on the market. If you want to make a difference then this is not the pool of people you're looking for.
> Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"?
Yes, they currently fund people working full-time on contributing to FOSOS. If that's no "beyond decency", I don't know what is. Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue?
> how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?
Because most of us experts actually care about what we work with, not how much we get paid. Once you reach a certain level of income so you're financially safe, increasing that generally doesn't increase your happiness that much, so most of us focus on being fulfilled in other ways, mainly about caring about the work we do.
As someone who used to work full-time in FOSS, it is a great feeling to contribute to something not just because it pays, but because it actually improves something in real life. I can't speak for everyone, but this is still mostly why I do FOSS.
I think fundamentally there seems to be a difference between "European FOSS" and "American FOSS" where the latter focuses more on basically CV-driven FOSS projects, with the hope of the FOSS leading to you somehow getting paid more in some for-profit company. While European FOSS seems to mainly be concerned about making things sustainable, grow a healthy community, and remaining FOSS long-term.
> Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue?
No, you cannot build a serious product to compete with globally established products only by using the 50k EUR grant since serious products of larger scale (impact) necessitates more than a single expert.
How do you build an alternative cloud or alternative database or alternative AI model with a 50k grant? Or how do you attract 10, 15 maybe 20 people to work on it? How much money do you consider would be enough for these people to be "financially safe".
> Because most of us experts actually care about what we work with, not how much we get paid.
Most? I believe not. Most experts in the field are working for a beyond average salary and not for the FOSS projects. You need a leverage to attract those people to leave their jobs to contribute to something bigger (in terms of society) and yet this leverage is, as you say, "experts care about what we work with, not how much we get paid". This is laughable and at the same time worrying because you're genuinely convinced that this is an attitude everyone should follow. Such an ignorant view, sorry.
> No, you cannot build a serious product to compete with globally established products only by using the 50k EUR grant
Who said you have to? Software is not a "winner takes all", you can solve a niche problem, get paid OK for it, and have a better standard of living than the average person in your country. This is widespread in Europe already, not sure why it's so foreign to so many.
I'm sorry, but that you and your peers seem to select professions and work positions solely based on monetary profits is what it is, but don't try to give the impression it's like that all over the world, because it isn't. It's probably more common than you think, but your environment might lead you to believe it isn't. For that, I feel pity for you.
Lol, imagine relying on underpaid volunteers in mission-critical software infrastructure. How about actually giving good encouraged people pay they deserve?
> Lol, imagine relying on underpaid volunteers in mission-critical software infrastructure
Why would anyone imagine that, when no one has suggested that?? How about coming up with arguments against something, if you're against it, rather arguing against some imaginary point no one made.
Discussion around grants here is the critics of insufficiency of EU grants to fund proper alternative software supply chain.
"imagine" is just ironical note for what is happenning in reality(you are advocating for (subjectively) improper financing model which expects to provide over-the-market quality with under-the-market cost)
Did you miss the topic that is being discussed, as in:
> The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors.
> you and your peers seem to select professions and work positions solely based on monetary profits is what it is
No, I have never done that and I couldn't have done it because of a very simple reason - there was no market at the time I was starting with my profession and what I am still doing today is a direct consequence of what I found appealing most at that time and during my Uni days - bleeding edge computer science and computer engineering coupled with the bleeding edge hardware.
> but don't try to give the impression it's like that all over the world, because it isn't. It's probably more common than you think, but your environment might lead you to believe it isn't. For that, I feel pity for you.
You live in a fantasy world. And the only issue I have with that is that you spread your claims as something that is (EU) universally true, which is not. Please leave your utopistic comments elsewhere and not on this topic where it's relevant to stay objective.
> Please leave your utopistic comments elsewhere and not on this topic where it's relevant to stay objective.
There is no objectiveness in cultural assessment. They didn't express their opinion as something that is universally true, or at least I wasn't able to read it that way.
They did because they imposed their opinion in such a way that my opinion on the subject is trying to be made as something marginal or not usual, and theirs, consequentially, as something more universal. Therefore, I disagree.
I get your pain point, but the stated objective is "Sovereignty" so having a fully localized OSS ecosystem that is anchored (can't be bought or moved) and operates independent of outsider (US, China, Russia, ...) upstream is in that case non negotiable.
Whether the EU will ever produce the necessary public investment to achieve this remains an open question.
> I think Bavaria developed their own Linux distro instead of using an established one
Yes, with all their configs, packages and certifications that were needed. Not really a problem.
> It failed horrendously
Because Microsoft came in, promised to relocate their HQ to Munich, and surprise, it was decided to come back to Windows. This was after reports found that although it took longer than expected, adoption was widespread (only a small minority of desktops remained on Windows for the few Windows specific apps they had), things were working well, user happyness was good, stability was good, and tons of taxpayer money had been saved.
I don't know details, but my guess is was more the latter.
The problem is that instead of having people assigned to working with Debian to make Debian useful in a government setting, they just did their own fork/distribution.
Yes, the former involves a lot of Debian politics and isn't as fast because other Debian members might insist on proper/more generic solutions.
>I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?
If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.
Security services qualitatively have as many fuckups to their name as they do successes. I was listening to a podcast last week about British undercover police fathering children with the women they were undercover with. If the position of the anti-Chat-Control people is that we should reject not just the backdoors but also — on the basis that they just can’t be trusted — the whole idea of a national, secret security service, then they should be open and say so.
There's democratic deficit in the whole system as this issue wasn't part of most internal election campaigns, effectively circumventing democratic process, due to lack of input from citizens themselves.
EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.
The EC has no democratic control, their members are not elected, only the commissioners are "approved" by the european parliament. Its actions are also obfuscated and mostly non-public (as we saw in the ChatControl case, for instance), so citizens hardly even know what's happening.
The president is responsible for the secretaries of State actions, and more generally their respective parties.
No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.
Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
I'm suggesting that there are enough layers of interdiction, that you can easily 'wash' political fallout and push legislation that would otherwise get you voted out of office in local elections.
I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
This is just one example showing that circumventing any legal block, without ability to control every form of communication, does not achieve it's goal.
And if any government can control all such forms of communications, we are already beyond saving.
>This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI...
Because the phrase "AI first browser" is meaningless corpospeak - it can be anything or nothing and feels hollow. Reminiscent of all past failures of firefox.
I just want a good browser that respects my privacy and lets me run extensions that can hook at any point of handling page, not random experiments and random features that usually go against privacy or basically die within short time-frame.
>Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
Unfortunately, companies prioritize profits over everything else, and sometimes that is at the expense of what should be the morally right thing to do. They can only be pursuaded against this by regulation, which they're also in a position to influence at their will. To say nothing about the usual government incompetence and tech illiteracy, which is another factor for technology products specifically.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
>No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.
But that is orthogonal to the goals of many governments, as I'm sure they have access to most of them either by official or unofficial channels/backdoors.
>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
>We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
Nowhere in that does it say “we did zero benchmarking and just went with hearsay”. Basing things on industry data is solid - looking at the steam hardware surveys if a good way to figure out the variety of hardware used without commissioning your own reports. Tech choices are no different.
Do you benchmark every single decision you make on every system on every project you work on? Do you check that redis operation is actually O(1) or do you rely on hearsay. Do you benchmark every single SQL query, every DTO, the overhead of the DI Framework, connection pooler, json serializer, log formatter? Do you ever rely on your own knowledge without verifying the assumptions? Of course you do - you’re human and we have to make some baseline assumptions, and sometimes they’re wrong.
They made a decision based on existing data. This isn't unreasonable as you are pretending, especially as PC hardware can be quite diverse.
You will be surprised what some people are playing games on. e.g. I know people that still use Windows 7 on a AMD BullDozer rig. Atypical for sure, but not unheard of.
My PC now is 6 years old and I have no intention of upgrading it soon. My laptop is like 8 years old and it is fine for what I use it for. My monitors are like 10-12 years old (they are early 4k monitors) and they are still good enough. I am primarily using Linux now and the machine will probably last me to 2030 if not longer.
Pretending that this is an outrageous decision when the data and the commonly assumed wisdom was that there were still a lot of people using HDDs.
They've since rectified this particular issue and there seems to be more criticism of the company after fixing an issue.
It was a real issue in the past with hard drives and small media assets. It's still a real issue even with SSDs. HDD/SSD IOPS are still way slower than contiguous reads when you're dealing with a massive amount of files.
At the end of the day it requires testing which requires time at a time you don't have a lot of time.
This is not a good invokation of Chesterton's Fence.
The Fence is a parable about understanding something that already exists before asking to remove it. If you cannot explain why it exists, you shouldn't ask to remove it.
In this case, it wasn't something that already existed in their game. It was something that they read, then followed (without truly understanding whether it applied to their game), and upon re-testing some time later, realized it wasn't needed and caused detrimental side-effects. So it's not Chesterton's Fence.
You could argue they followed a videogame industry practice to make a new product, which is reasonable. They just didn't question or test their assumptions that they were within the parameters of said industry practice.
I don't think it's a terrible sin, mind you. We all take shortcuts sometimes.
It's not an issue with asynchronous filesystem IO. Again, async file IO should be the default for game engines. It doesn't take a genius to gather a list of assets to load and then wait for the whole list to finish rather than blocking on every tiny file.
There are two different things when talking about application behavior versus disk behavior.
>wait for the whole list to finish rather than blocking on every tiny file.
And this is the point. I can make a test that shows exactly what's going on here. Make a random file generator that generates 100,000 4k files. Now, write them on hard drive with other data and things going on at the same time. Now in another run of the program have it generate 100,000 4k files and put them in a zip.
Now, read the set of 100k files from disk and at the same time read the 100k files in a zip....
One finishes in less than a second and one takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on your disk speeds.
"Industry hearsay" in this case was probably Sony telling game devs how awesome the PS5's custom SSD was gonna be, and nobody bothered to check their claims.
the "industry hearsay" from two replies above mine is about deliberate data duplication to account for the spinning platters in HDD (which isn't entirely correct, as the team on Helldivers 2 have realized)
HD2 started as playstation exclusive, and was retargeted mid-development for simultaneous release.
So the PS5's SSD architecture was what developers were familiar with when they tried to figure out what changes would be needed to make the game work on PC.
If what they were familiar with was a good SSD, then they didn't need to do anything. I don't see how anything Sony said about their SSD would have affected things.
Maybe you're saying the hearsay was Sony exaggerating how bad hard drives are? But they didn't really do that, and the devs would already have experience with hard drives.
What Sony said about their SSD was that it enabled game developers to not duplicate assets like they did for rotating storage. One specific example I recall in Sony's presentation was the assets for a mailbox used in a Spider Man game, with hundreds of copies of that mailbox duplicated on disk because the game divided Manhattan into chunks and tried to have all the assets for each chunk stored more or less contiguously.
If the Helldivers devs were influenced by what Sony said, they must have misinterpreted it and taken away an extremely exaggerated impression of how much on-disk duplication was being used for pre-SSD game development. But Sony did actually say quite a bit of directly relevant stuff on this particular matter when introducing the PS5.
Weird, since that's a benefit of any kind of SSD at all. The stuff their fancy implementation made possible was per-frame loading, not just convenient asset streaming.
But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.
By far the most important thing about the PS5 SSD was the fact that it wasn't optional, and developers would no longer have to care about being able to run off mechanical drives. That has repercussions throughout the broader gaming industry because the game consoles are the lowest common denominator for game developers to target, and getting both Xbox and PlayStation to use SSDs was critical. From the perspective of PlayStation customers and developers, the introduction of the PS5 was the right time to talk about the benefits of SSDs generally.
Everything else about the PS5 SSD and storage subsystem was mere icing on the cake and/or snake oil.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. Sony was extremely deceptive in how they marketed the PS5 to devs, and the Helldivers dev don't want to admit how completely they fell for it.
It's incompetence if they "fell for" such basic examples being presented in the wrong context. 5% of the blame can go to Sony, I guess, if that's what happened.
And on top of any potential confusion between normal SSD and fancy SSD, a mailbox is a super tiny asset and the issue in the spiderman game is very rapidly cycling city blocks in and out of memory. That's so different from helldivers level loading.
I don't really understand your point. You're making a very definitive statement about how the PS5's SSD architecture is responsible for this issue - when the isssue is on a totally different platform, where they have _already_ attempted (poorly, granted) to handle the different architectures.
how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?
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