I see a lot of mention of ProtonDB in this thread, so I thought I'd take a look at which of my favourite games are supported.
Unfortunately, when I try to open it, it gives me a NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST when it tries to download the page's .js and CSS from a head.protondb.pages.dev domain.
I tried to add that to my /etc/hosts file, but then I got an error about a certificate.
Most strange, and the only clue I found online was this YouTube video[1] that suggests accessing it through Tor...
To sell food to others, you need to get a "restaurant license". I dont think anyone would argue that people should be able to buy food from whoever. And I dont think that's what "treating people like adults mean".
I use food as an example to illustrate the point. I'm aware that food != app, but the point is when you offer goods/services in a modern society at scale, it is reasonable to verify yourself.
I think people should be able to buy food from whomever. I don't see why not. You can't go over to your friend's house and toss them some cash for a steak or wings or whatever? What, they aren't a professional chef with a license granted to them by a bureaucrat, you could get sick and die!
It's easy for me to judge what software is safe to use and mitigate what risk might exist. It's impossible for me to judge what food is safe to eat and being wrong could kill me.
Come on. There's a reason government regulates food and not apps. Government is at least accountable to us, and at the time food safety regulation norms were established, was trustworthy to act in our interest. Google and Apple never were.
Don't be obtuse. I can tell the difference between yt-dlp with 130,000 stars on github and some AI/crypto shovelware or a Spotify unlocker downloaded from a .ru site.
And the point isn't that it's impossible for me to get it wrong, it's that it should be my choice and my business and I'll accept the responsibility if it's less easy than I thought. The Apple types can have an easy mode where Apple decides what's safe. We can have it both ways.
Another issue with AI not crediting such a post is that the license is CC-BY-NC (at the bottom of the page), so in theory AI would be able to launder the license.
I wonder how many times this has happened already?
Oh, man, many years ago I used Tiddlywiki (and later Wiki-On-A-Stick) as a browser-based note taking app, but stopped using it because the API they used to save the file to disk got deprecated and removed.
History not repeating but rhyming, I suppose...
Anyway, thanks for this. I've just added it to my bookmarks.
I had to do this a while back and it's nearly made me punch my monitor. The lowest circle of hell for the person/people who decided putting this basic functionality behind a fucking arcane flag. Few things make me more mad than having my finite life wasted hunting down solutions to problems that have no reason to exist.
In Firefox, there is a way that doesn't require a flag: create a bookmark with the url, and set its "keyword" field to the trigger word you want for the engine.
That works in chrome/edge too. (Even better, Edge matches urls with %s very good, and the URL bar offers past searches as suggestions better than Firefox does.)
They removed most bookmarks and search engine settings, but bookmarks with keywords work fine at the moment, for both mayor desktop browsers.
Also you can store them in a file(!) and import them for a nice cross browser experience, keeping track of them, and not losing them.
Agreed, but now the doctor has to do her job and the AI's job.
Cory Doctorow wrote about it a while back. I think it was this article "Humans are not perfectly vigilant" [0]. It explains how technology is supposed to help humans be better at their jobs, but instead we're heading in a direction where AIs are doing the work but humans have to stand beside them to double check them.
For what it's worth, the tech will only improve over time and looking at the birth rates, humans will only become more and more overworked and less reliable as the years go by. There should be a point where it just makes sense to switch even if it still makes mistakes.
I worked my way through some of its source code many years ago during my post-graduate studies and it was very _strange_. I see it is now on GitHub [0].
They used C macros to implement object oriented programming, with symbols like `me` and `my` and `thee` scattered throughout the source code. It seems the code has been converted to C++ (IIRC it used to be in C), but I still see the `my` keyword in there.
They have their own BASIC-like scripting language. The weirdest property for me was that it allowed for whitespace in the identifiers. Just look at the example in [1]: The `Create simple Matrix` is actually a function in the scripting language that constructs a matrix object. The function name corresponds to a menu item and IIRC they used some more preprocessor magic to reuse the same code for the menus on the GUI and the functions in the scripting language.
I don't think you're supposed to write the scripts by hand. Rather it recorded your actions as you worked your way through the GUI and then you could export and modify those recordings as scripts.
They also implemented their own cross platform GUI toolkit rather than using one of the existing cross-platform GUI toolkits, so it works on Windows, Linux (or any X Windows I believe) and MacOS.
Unfortunately, when I try to open it, it gives me a NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST when it tries to download the page's .js and CSS from a head.protondb.pages.dev domain.
I tried to add that to my /etc/hosts file, but then I got an error about a certificate.
Most strange, and the only clue I found online was this YouTube video[1] that suggests accessing it through Tor...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc