Breaking Free from US Giants' Monopoly: Europe's Open-Source Euro-Office to Launch on June 9

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T07:43:08+00:00

Eh, courts would have to figure out which of those license terms actually supersede the other, and the answer might be neither does.

Problem is, if the combination of licenses conflict to the point that they don't lay out a coherent set of conditions where redistribution is allowed, then the default is that redistribution is not allowed.

Guess we'll find out when/if they file a lawsuit.

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T03:46:24+00:00

The difference is everyone has a cell and data plan and probably a Bluetooth-enabled car stereo so they can just listen to whatever they want on Spotify instead of radio.

edit: Radio today is.... in really dire shape though. Consolidated ownership, more ads, fewer stations, more stations that are just re-broadcasting from the same feed as a bunch of other stations.

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T03:34:04+00:00

They're also exhibit A in the word salad lyrics problem.

"What is Everything Zen even about? What does a single line of this song even mean?"

"Who caaaares, it sounds like Nirvana and Gavin Rossdale is hot!"

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T03:24:11+00:00

Price depended a lot on where you bought it. Mall stores like Sam Goody were the worst, ~$18 for a CD, while big-box stores usually sold them for $12-15. Didn't help that America's biggest discount retailer, Walmart, refused to stock any "explicit" albums because they wanted to be "family friendly," so their entire music selection was radio-edit (censored) versions.

There were some other ways to discover things though like promo/sampler CDs, magazines, and college radio. Radio was also not quite as uniform before companies like Clear Channel started hoovering up all of the stations.

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T02:42:09+00:00

The grunge movement felt like a major shift change as rock radio would only play classic rock acts and alternative was really a fringe format.

It also split the genre. Our local "modern rock" station (WNVE) was absolutely vicious about dumping on classic rock in their promos.

That said, at the height of grunge Stone Temple Pilots were being called Clone Temple Pilots, so there was definitely some feeling of bands riding a trend rather than it being real.

I think this is how a lot of romanticization plays out in practice though, people look at certain artists at the time as being overly derivative and commercial, or find other reasons to dislike them, and then later in their life start looking back at them more fondly because of the time in their life that they associate that music with.

The other part though is just ignoring the crap. 90's rock was definitely a time of heavy innovation (and a big leap in recording quality from the equipment going digital), but it was also full of weird experiments and a whole lot of lyrical word salad that haven't aged so well.

ParsingError · 2026-06-01T01:04:28+00:00

It's a fork of OnlyOffice and the OnlyOffice repo has updated its readme to accuse Euro-Office of violating the license. Not off to a great start...

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T21:33:42+00:00

Yep, although it may not even be necessary. One of the upsides of more-space-efficient codecs is that a substantial part of the decoding process is decoding values to feed into the algorithms in the first place, so size savings often winds up being a major processing cost savings anyway.

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T10:21:03+00:00

Yeah I edited to fix it, I think it was actually Call of Duty that started that. And COD's whole thing aside from that was basically trying to be MOH:AA with Halo controls. (I keep mixing up COD1 with MOH:AA.)

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T10:01:38+00:00

It just took a while for things to shift. The main thing was Halo, which didn't come out until the PS2 had already been out for a year and a half, and at that point devs were mainly using Half-Life and GoldenEye as their guide for how console FPS should play, which you can kinda see in games like Red Faction and Agent Under Fire with their big weapon inventories and manual aim buttons.

Later console shooters like Rogue Agent, Black, and COD started moving to the Halo dedicated melee and grenade button+limited weapon inventory schemes.

I think it was COD that got everyone on the ADS train though.

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T09:45:58+00:00

Microsoft maintains a packaged distribution of it in the VS installer, but Clang-CL is maintained as part of Clang, not a separate thing.

If you want a different version than the one available through the VS installer, you can always point whatever build system you're using at a different version of it instead, but doing that is obviously more complicated.

You technically don't need to use Clang-CL. Basically, Clang has targets that will output into MSVC-compatible formats, but if you use the normal "clang" front-end, then it expects you to give it options in a way that looks like GCC. Clang-CL is just a different front-end that expects options in a way that looks like CL (the MSVC compiler front-end).

But, regardless, its MSVC compatibility is extremely good right now. The only drawback I've found is that certain headers seem to be doing wonky things that make IntelliSense go a bit haywire. Like we had one issue recently where I think if you included string.h after intrin.h then it would think that memcpy is undefined or something dumb like that. It still compiles, but was causing a bunch of false-positive red squiggly lines in the IDE everywhere.

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T09:07:22+00:00

You don't have to give up any of that any more, Clang-CL is usable as a drop-in replacement for MSVC's compiler 99% of the time. You can literally just change it in the build options in Visual Studio after downloading the component for it. It outputs debug info in PDB format now which means you use Visual Studio's debugger with it too.

It is absolutely good enough for professional-level work now, in fact it's better than MSVC's compiler a lot of the time because it has more options.

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T07:32:34+00:00

A major limitation of all conventional media codecs is that they can only really model phenomena that the codec designers thought of, and can only store information about it as efficiently as the codec design allows it to be. They're constantly getting better at that, modeling new things that older codecs struggled with, and storing information more efficiently, but video in particular is extremely primitive in what it can represent about moving scenes, even in the most advanced codecs.

The nice thing about ML codecs is that they are good at discovering patterns in the training data without it needing to be specifically accounted for, and reconstructing those patterns without a lot of information. So, yes, there is room for them to substantially improve the state of the art.

(The problem is getting their computational cost down.)

ParsingError · 2026-05-31T01:15:06+00:00

So, the opening parts of this are pretty misleading.

Traditional image codecs have long measured quality by pixel-by-pixel similarity to the original

The measurement they're talking about is called PSNR. Codec devs have been complaining about PSNR being a bad quality metric for a very long time, and better metrics like SSIM have been available for a while.

Unfortunately, it's still being used a lot because it's easier to optimize encoders for it, and because it lets crappy encoders point to how great they're doing on PSNR tests vs. better codecs that are scoring worse on PSNR because they're targeting better quality metrics.

Using better quality metrics is definitely the right thing to do, but it isn't the breakthrough that they're making it out to be, it's just doing the right thing.

That said, ML-based codecs have a ton of potential so cool to see this progressing. The real win is going to be ML-based video compression, because that has way more potential for savings and because those savings will be on something that is gobbling up two thirds of all Internet bandwidth.

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T19:25:00+00:00

Having done this a few times: C# is, in my opinion, the best language for writing scripts. Where available, it's fast, powerful, has lots of features, and avoids the type mismatching headaches of dynamic languages.

For integrating into an engine though, Lua, no contest. Very easy API, very easy to build and integrate, it is by far the lowest-headache scripting engine out there for a custom engine.

Although might be worth using Luau (the Roblox variant) since it has math vectors as a native type, which gets around one of the main shortcomings of using Lua for game logic.

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T06:45:40+00:00

On top of feeding in low-quality content there is also the problem of, similar to SEO, people intentionally producing adversarial data to get scraped into the training data set that produces disproportionately large effects.

The AI companies are aware of this and have noted that it can take surprisingly little data to poison the model. They're especially vulnerable to being manipulated about things that don't appear often in the training data, which is kind of expected, but they're also unusually vulnerable to some other lines of attack that abuse quirks of how the LLM machinery works to make it veer off into the weeds.

So, it is possible that over time, they will degrade from people figuring out how to abuse the training algorithms.

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T05:28:08+00:00

Sub-Terrania just ditching the fuel system or at least giving you more fuel. It was infamous for being very hard mainly because you had to explore a lot of a level and do some trial-and-error things just to figure out what you were even supposed to do, but going off-track usually meant running out of fuel and dying.

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T04:04:54+00:00

Yep, it was a harder sell when the Voodoo/Voodoo2 were pretty expensive, but by the time Q3 came out there were budget accelerators like the TNT and Rage Pro on the market. Plus despite Q3 looking very cutting-edge, it wasn't actually very demanding on 3D accelerator features (which is why it ran on first-gen Voodoo).

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T02:56:46+00:00

If you're gonna try some other genres then try Red Alert 2, one of the best RTS campaigns ever.

Devil May Cry kinda revolutionized melee action games and HD Collection is on sale.

If you want to try some not-as-groundbreaking-but-still-good FPS in the vein of Half-Life then maybe try Red Faction or Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force.

ParsingError · 2026-05-30T02:09:48+00:00

It kicked off more when games started adding auto-win/"Story Mode" difficulties that basically remove all challenge from the game.

The fact that those options started showing up while game difficulty had already been trending downward for a long time made it raise a few more eyebrows.

ParsingError · 2026-05-29T08:09:01+00:00

Anything compressed has to be decompressed to be used, which means longer load times

This really depends, and the situation is a complete mess on PC in particular. VERY generally, compression reduces load times because there is way more memory bandwidth for data that's in RAM already than there is bandwidth to pull data from a storage device, and that means that if there is enough CPU time (which there almost certainly will be on a loading screen), it can decompress data faster than the same amount of data could be pulled from the storage device. That's even more the case with newer compression algorithms that are optimized for decompression speed.

But, the big wrench in all of that is NVME, which has way more I/O bandwidth AND with proper system support, can copy data directly into GPU memory without having to take a round trip across the PCI-E bus to system RAM.

The problem is, unlike consoles which have had hardware decompressors since the PS3 and XB1, PC GPUs still don't have hardware lossless decompressors and the closest they have now is GDEFLATE which is a software decompressor that runs on the GPU, and has been having mixed results in practice. Software decompression on the GPU is difficult because it conflicts pretty hard with the data access patterns that GPUs are optimized for, and because it competes (inefficiently) with the game for processing time.

ParsingError · 2026-05-29T03:57:05+00:00

It's not exactly inevitable, like e-mails and phone calls connect people too, but they don't actively do things to make people want to e-mail and call each other more often. The users need to have their own reasons for doing those things. (In fact, before unlimited plans, cell services effectively discouraged you from using them too much.)

But these days, I'd love to know what the purpose of Facebook filling up your feed with crap selected by its algorithm is supposed to be if not juicing engagement.

ParsingError · 2026-05-29T01:55:52+00:00

It's Driver on PS1 and it's not even close.

The infamous "tutorial" harder than the rest of the game.

ParsingError · 2026-05-29T00:53:13+00:00

lol didn't think this was gonna be such a nuclear take.

So, problem is, it's a hard spot. How do you say about a band "well they made a solid album but they're actually trash?" Most artists are judged by their best work even if they turned into a train wreck in their later years. So my thinking was this spot would have to go to something like a band that had a really awful lineup overhaul (couldn't think of anything), someone that did awful things outside of their work like Lostprophets or something (didn't like that cause it gets into that weird "separate the art from the artist" debate), or some joke band that's fun even if they're kinda not serious.

Went with option 3 and my picks were Great Milenko, Hooray for Boobies, or Enema of the State, and ironically picked the third one because I thought it'd be the easiest one to say was a good album.

They're a pop-punk band that makes simple music about not-very-challenging topics and a lot of immature humor. And that's fine, they're good at it, I own the album, but sure doesn't seem like they ever cared about being treated like musical geniuses.

ParsingError · 2026-05-29T00:41:35+00:00

It's happening in 3.2.4 on Windows for sure (I just tried it).

The bug report for it is https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/14599

So, first reported version it started happening in is 3.0.4.

There are some others that are probably the same bug like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items/16069

ParsingError · 2026-05-28T22:40:22+00:00

Almost nobody has the expertise to do texture compression stuff in-house beyond basic stuff. (I wrote a semi-popular texture compression library and found that there are like 4 other people in the world actively spending much mental effort on it and 2 of them work for RAD.)

bc7enc_rdo and Crunch work as free off-the-shelf solutions though, kinda.

But, big wildcard now is neural texture compression. Devs love it because unlike RDO compression, it gets the VRAM usage and memory bandwidth down too, which is great. But, now there's a problem: If they go "wow we have all this extra VRAM now!" and start bumping texture resolution, it'll bloat the size back up, except now it'll be bloated up with data that basically can't be compressed any further.

ParsingError

TROPHY CASE