I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

If the publisher of a single-player or small-group multiplayer game can't make a useful subset of the server software available to licensees, they should go out of business.

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

If the publisher of a movie or video game refuses to make it available in physical copies, am I justified in pretending that the work was never released?

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

2001: Windows XP ran on as little as 64mb with 128mb being the recommended.

2021: Windows 11 minum is 4gb is listed as the minimum. I've never even touched Windows 11, so I don't know if that is realistic.

The minimum specs for each system is a 64x multiple, as you said. That's a good observation. I'm pretty sure in the late 90s I was running Windows95 with 96mb and my motherboard was capped at 128mb. Negligible ram on the graphics card. It also could have only been 64mb. I don't have a clear memory of what I was running when I first got XP.

Today my PC is a partially upgraded (old) i7-4790k with 32gb ram and 10gb of ram on the video card, so approximately 448x increase in memory in ~25 years.

My Mac is 256gb unified, so ~2,730x multiple.

Still not to the Moore's Law rate!

This is probably the best sentence (and post) that I have read on Slashdot in some time. Amen.

Until streaming providers start doubling the price of the monthly plan to offer a 50% discount on an annual plan.

Another thing that I have found Claude is really good at doing is taking an error from a log and doing a deep dive analysis of what happened. I give it read-only database access, access to www logs, access to application logs, access to a checked out source tree, etc. I paste in the error message (or in some cases paste in a tech support email from a user) and have it write up an analysis, a proposed response to the customer, and any recommendations (if there is a bug or actual problem).

These homeless shoppers are likely to get poached sooner rather than later. With the deep knowledge they build up of any given Walmart store's layout, they'd make good candidates to get hired into the store's online grocery pickup (OGP) department.

I don't know if HEB includes a tip, but I know that Walmart doesn't do tips. When I worked in the front end of a Walmart Supercenter six years ago, associates were trained to refuse tips, and if someone insists, to ring it up as a donation to whatever charity Walmart is collecting for at the time. Often that ends up being the nearest Children's Miracle Network hospital.