You can open up sandbox maps if you want. Not all missions are timed either, some just let you smash shit.
No, Ubisoft tried to offer a partial game for free, distributed via Steam, but sold paid full access for cheap on Uplay. Basically, a "purchase full access to this Steam game on our storefront so we don't have to pay the fee we'd normally pay to get Steam to distribute the game for us".
The issue with the Ubisoft case was that Ubisoft offered R6S in a free, restricted mode and a full mode. However, Ubisoft allowed you to obtain the free version from Steam (distributed by Steam servers) but offered a cheaper way to access the full game on Uplay only.
So you could get the full game, distributed by Steam without spending a penny on Steam, as long as you purchase it on Uplay. That's just Ubisoft trying to dodge Steam's policy prohibiting cheaper access to Steam distributed games on other storefronts.
It's kinda like you providing a free game on Steam, but upon opening it you have to enter your credit card details first in order to access the rest of the game. You're just using Steam's services for free at that point, and that is obviously dodging the policy.
Is water wet?
The USSR recriminalised homosexuality under Stalin, a law that was only repealed after the dissolution of the USSR. It was only legal just after the October Revolution in 1917, but it unfortunately did not last long (in 1933 it was recriminalised). In 1927, the USSR labelled homosexuality a disease and a mental disorder. Under Stalin homosexuality was associated with facism, including warnings about a "counterrevolutionary fascist homosexual conspiracy" used to justify arrests.
Homosexuals were described by the Soviet government as fascist, pedophilic and it was associated with prison rape. Soviet legal scholars deemed it inconsistent with "Communist Morality".
There have been Marxists who put forth compelling arguments why LGBTQ rights should be respected under communist theory, but those largely fell on deaf ears. A modern theorist is likely to be in support.
I hate to say it, but in recent years LGBTQ rights have been best protected in western and northern Europe, Canada and Australia, with the situation improving in Brazil and Argentina for example. These are by and large capitalist countries.
I personally don't think the ideology matters all that much here though. It's mostly religious conservatism holding back LGBTQ rights (see Africa, the ME, Indonesia, Russia and the US/Latin America).
Also happy pride month! 🌈. Let's keep fighting for each other's rights 💪
Oh and to be clear: fuck megacompanies using pride month as an advertising opportunity, that's fairly dystopian. Don't put a rainbow flag on your X account, actually do something.
Steam maintains:
- Server costs for the storefront, fast game file distribution and the variety of other services they offer to developers (eg the friends system, game invites, the Workshop, the marketplace, cloud saves, etc...).
- Steam handles payments for you, worldwide. This alone is already a pretty huge undertaking that many underestimate.
- Steam does a ton of analytics for devs.
- DRM.
- Support staff for handling customer complaints, refund requests, etc...
- Sets up seasonal sales and handles promotion for devs willing to participate.
- Steam allows you to resell Steam keys on other platforms, which forgoes the 30% cut entirely (creating new keys is free), as long as you won't resell the keys cheaper than the game's price on the Steam storefront itself.
- At high enough sales, Steam cuts back on the part they take.
All of this stuff is free and bonus for devs. You pay a one-time fee to set up, which you get back if your game sells enough copies (it's a really low bar, unless the game is total gunk you're going to reach that threshold). Not to mention the costs involved in bringing your game to other devices it wasn't originally built for, allowing you to gain access to a larger share of the market (again, for free. It's even available to users using a competitor).
Ukraine receives security assurances under the Budapest memorandum (which Russia violated).
Keeping cats indoors is not a US specific thing. I'm Dutch and keep mine indoors too. They're not used to the street so letting them go out would be far too dangerous for them. We were also specifically instructed not to let them go outside when we adopted them.
They're perfectly happy to stay inside, it's absolutely not animal abuse. That's just hyperbole on your part.
My sister rescued a cat who she initially let outside (because he's used to it) but after seeing him have quite a few close calls with cars on a busier road she decided to keep him inside. He needed a day or two to adjust but appears perfectly content staying inside.
Letting cats go outside has an environmental impact, sure. It's also not a death sentence to let them go out. Neither is keeping them in animal abuse, nor is leash training them.
Let's turn down the heat a bit, shall we?
[30.05.2026 10:05] andrewtridgell
I reviewed it. The rsync project has been essentially a single developer project for about 20 years now
[30.05.2026 10:06] andrewtridgell
Wayne did it all himself for a long time, now I'm back doing it
[30.05.2026 10:06] realketas
why is it one man job, it seems like too complex for that
[30.05.2026 10:06] realketas
i can't even imagine
[30.05.2026 10:06] andrewtridgell
nobody else volunteers. Its the same story with thousands of open source tools
[30.05.2026 10:07] realketas
it runs entire planet, just one man does it eh
[30.05.2026 10:07] realketas
sad too
[30.05.2026 10:07] andrewtridgell
the linux kernel has thousands of paid full time devs. rsync has zero.
[30.05.2026 10:15] andrewtridgell
the most insane part is that security releases can't be community tested. Those security releases are going to be a huge part of lots and lots of open source projects for a while to come yet, just look at the rate of CVEs over the last couple of months, its gone nuts. You can't do a beta release of a security fix as its embargoed. So for the most critical fixes you *can't* have anyone else look at it. The people reporting the flaws mostly don't have the skills as they used AI to find the bugs. So the maintainer is the sole person to review the most critical security changes, and that is how the madhouse called the internet and IT security is designed. The only defence I have is to build the most comprehensive and accurate test suite I can, so when I need to deal with yet another security report I can at least quickly identify what else the fix breaks. Luckily I can do that work (the dev of the test suite) in public.
[30.05.2026 10:22] andrewtridgell
bottom line is if you want to be useful then pick holes in the test suite, find things it doesn't cover, find interactions between options it doesn't pin down, report those and offer fixes for that.
Basically, it's a solo dev being swamped by LLM security reports, and since those are embargoed only maintainers can review them... and since nobody else has volunteered, he has to do it himself.
He primarily used several AIs to rewrite the test suite from shell (slow, lacking coverage) to python (parallelised, improved coverage). He says he's extensively reviewed everything, but I guess the suite doesn't cover everything. And the test suite changes can be community reviewed.
The dev has been actively inviting people to join as a maintainer and poke holes in the test suite, but it seems nobody has stepped up. I can't really blame the dev here, he just seems unable to keep up without others helping him out. He's tried to use AIs as sensibly as he could, and I'm not entirely sure if it's slop fixes that cause the issues (or if an "unassisted" fix would have caught it).
They'd slice the tendons in his hand otherwise, no?
Fuck ads, obviously, but I can understand there's confusion here.
If GPC says "do not sell my data", but the user subsequently opts in via the cookie banner (or vice-versa), you have two conflicting signals. There's no clear case law or anything that says what to do. Or what should happen if the same user sends different GPC signals depending on their device or browser.
Although I guess the easiest solution is just "do not sell data if any signal suggests it's not allowed", but that doesn't line advertisers' pockets I guess.