Nope, Mozilla gave up on Servo in 2020. It‘s now governed by the Linux Foundation Europe.

I always enjoy recognizing a specific developer's handwriting in a finished product. Luckily, Valve's misyltoad, a proud inhabitant of "Frog Cult", United Kingdom, makes this very easy. From their work on frog-fifo-v1 for Mesa, to frog-color-management-v1 and frog protocols for Wayland, to their talk Rainbow Frogs: HDR + Color Management in Gamescope/SteamOS, they seem to follow a very strong theme. I'd be surprised if they weren’t responsible for this frog as well.

I have already read that article, and while I think that Patrick does a great job in general, this particular post contains overly dramatic and, in parts, misleading arguments. For example:

The text aims to make the temporary “Chat Control 1.0” regulation permanent. This allows providers like Meta or Google to scan all private chats, indiscriminately and without a court order.".

This is a bit strange. Chats without E2E encryption, especially the ones on Google or Meta platforms, were never private. I think it would be better to raise awareness of that fact and encourage E2E messaging instead of complaining about law enforcement having access to those chats.

His argument regarding age verification is also very weak:

[...] This means every citizen will effectively have to upload an ID or undergo a face scan to open an email or messenger account. [...] This creates a de facto ban on anonymous communication [...]

This is misleading at best. The implementation details of the age verification are not specified in this proposal. There are absolutely ways of verifying someone's age anonymously (Privacy Pass comes to mind). It's totally possible that it'll be a far worse system, but that's just not as set in stone as Patrick suggests.

It's definitely necessary to keep an eye on the further development of this legislature. But Patrick's Reality Check unfortunately stretches the meaning of the word Reality a bit too much.

I have to disagree with the statement that there is no voluntary law. For example, GDPR certifications (Art. 42) have been a thing for years, are encouraged by the EU, but have remained completely voluntary for organizations.

I totally agree with you that it's important to stay vigilant and keep an eye on the further development of this specific regulation, especially as it still has a long way to go before actually becoming law. But I think seeing the compromise as some sort of trickery is purely speculative right now and doesn't really do justice to the activists inside and outside EU organizations who have spent the last few years successfully preventing a mandatory chat control. A lot of the comments here seem very doom-and-gloomy, sometimes almost resigned, as if nothing has been accomplished by protesting these initial proposals. And I think, while there are definitely further battles ahead, it's also a good idea to celebrate and remind ourselves of the accomplishments we've made here.

Yes

As this version of the law is completely voluntary, I don‘t think it will change anything. Secure chats won‘t implement it, because it‘s practically impossible, and insecure chats won‘t implement it, because there‘s absolutely no profit in it.

It‘s still completely unnecessary to have a law like this, as it won‘t help with anything. But at least it doesn‘t force any messaging applications to either break their encryption or leave the EU.

Also, as this is proposal is finally put into law, there‘s one less battle to be fought by privacy activists (for now).

So all in all: The worst has been successfully averted, I think we can celebrate that. But the next privacy invading proposal will come soon enough.

In 2023, it was €5.000/month (source).

That‘s about as much as a full stack software developer makes in Germany working a 40h week (source).

Seeing that he was a CEO, definitely worked more than 40 hours per week and was the driving force behind Mastodon, I, as someone who supports them financially, am totally okay with him getting a big payout now.

These figures just haven‘t gone up all that much over the last decade. Sure, you can get 128GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM if you‘re willing to pay for it. But if you don‘t want to spend upwards of $5000 for your PC and you‘re maybe not that experienced, you might just look for a gaming rig from a vendor you‘ve heard of before and get 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM even in 2025 with current-gen hardware.

I‘d like to think that Asus and Lenovo would build „console-beating“ Steam Machines, but they‘ve also tried building more powerful Steam Deck alternatives and those were meh at best and terrible at worst.

Steam Machines are probably easier to design, as they‘re just PCs. But seeing how much thought and care Valve puts into their hardware designs and how little of both Lenovo and Asus have put into theirs in the past, I‘m not going to expect great products from them.

I’d be very happy to be wrong, though.

My gut feeling really isn‘t good on that. The very slow pace of improvement Cities Skylines 2 had, and the multitude of issues it still has, seem like strong indicators for deeper technical issues to me. Fixing those will be a lot harder for a development studio, if it doesn‘t even have the original developers onboard.

It‘s really sad to see, because Skylines 2 could be a lot of fun if it wasn‘t for the glitches, the bugs and the performance issues. I‘m unfortunately not optimistic that changing the developer will improve things.

Note that this is an issue from 2021. Firefox has implemented countermeasures since version 85, Chrome seems to have done the same.

So while this is definitely interesting, it shouldn‘t be an issue anymore.

To be fair, everyone was offered a refund for that game. So technically they probably haven‘t paid for it anymore.

I still totally agree that Sony shouldn‘t go after private Concord servers. This game is very interesting, because it was an unbelievable failure despite having pretty solid gameplay. And preserving that on private servers provides a great way for other developers to learn, and maybe prevent, the tons of other issues leading to the game‘s failure.