kbity

Kbin. Kbity. Like kitty but kbin. Kbity!

Well, five times zero women checks out.

Before adding “@@*$redirect-rule” to uBlock Origin filters:

• With uMatrix enabled: 99%, everything except ads-api.twitter.com and ads.youtube.com was blocked.
• With uMatrix disabled: 83%, 125/150 blocked.

After adding “@@*$redirect-rule” to uBlock Origin filters:

• With uMatrix enabled: 100%, 150/150 blocked.
• With uMatrix disabled: 85%, 127/150 blocked.

Using Firefox with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and some others.

Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.

The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.

Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I’m aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you’re absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.

Luckily, I think most games either didn’t do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.

The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft’s whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.

The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft’s core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn’t necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).

Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin’s “Übershaders” - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One’s CPU design, similarly to how Apple’s M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.

Microsoft’s APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.

Peter Thiel is interested.

Works pretty well. Reader Mode is great at unfucking user-hostile site designs like this.

Yeah, Windows’ bullshit is what drove me to Linux in the first place. I only have it on my gaming system, and only because Discord’s stupid screensharing doesn’t transmit audio on Linux, NVIDIA’s drivers for Linux suck balls (going AMD next time now that their cards are good again) and there are a couple of games my friends play that have issues on Linux. I’ve never run into a game on my everyday laptop that Linux couldn’t run, and the Steam Deck will take basically whatever you throw at it.

Windows is a barely-functional rat’s nest of code spaghetti that falls apart at complete random. Sometimes your audio drivers will just stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes your computer will just refuse to connect to the internet until you do a clean install. Windows Update apparently runs Prime95 in its spare time and so does the Antimalware Service Executable. I hate using it so much. I wish Windows would just curl up and die.

A Libertarian candidate for the US Senate back in 2018 proposed giving shotguns to homeless people for self-defence.

They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.

This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying “I tried to build the Torment Nexus”, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting “shame”.

OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It’s not always up to date or fully-detailed but it’s far from useless and I appreciate that. It’s my primary map program on my phone.

And yet they keep buying and killing their competition to try and funnel you into their godawful hellsite.

Thank God there’s a less awful alternative frontend for Fandom. Absolute garbage website, unusable without an adblocker.

Well, there’s the thing, you need a browser. You’d be surprised how many newer Reddit users access the site primarily or even exclusively on their phones, and who tend to use apps rather than their mobile browser.

It got mentioned a lot on /r/RedditAlternatiives and since its API is already up and running, there are a whole bunch of apps for it. With mobile apps being the thing that started the whole Reddit disaster, it makes sense that Lemmy would grow quicker than kbin which doesn’t have mobile apps yet.

Nice, here’s hoping for a Kbin version once Kbin’s API is ready!