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Comment Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score 1) 82

It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.

That they probably use a small subset of, And can have a bot scan their game's text assets for all characters presented in a certain font
and build a font with only the ones used in their existing program.

Comment Re:Does anyone know what "preview" means? (Score 2) 73

It's actually pretty understandable.

Despite the meme power of a broken login, the bug affects a fallback feature you might well go years without using.

It requires you have PIN/Touch sign in enabled; which if you've enabled that, that means that is how you normally login.
And that works just fine. Nothing is broken there.

What is missing is a "password" icon in the 'fallback' options to "sign in a different way" (using a password, e.g., instead of a PIN or fingerprint.)

So despite being on the login screen, its not actually something you are going to regularly interact with normally, unless you forgot your pin or something. And its hardly something human beta testers are going to think to explicitly test for, every single build. And since the bug is a missing element as opposed to a visibly broken element, well, its easy to fail to notice something you almost never use isn't there.

Meanwhile, clicking where its supposed to be still actually works, so its entirely plausible that you could have automated test scripts that continue to pass if they've been scripted to click at coordinate (X,Y), or to select the password button programmatically by an identifier or something, and then 'expect' something to happen in response, because the button is there and it works just fine, its just missing its texture or something. This would slip past a lot of test frameworks, the button is "in the model", "its active/enabled", "its selectable", "its clickable", and "it fires a click event if you click", "and whatever it is supposed to do happens", and its probably even "visible" (though you can't see it); most likely the icon or texture is missing or unassigned or referencing a transparency by mistake, and its just a "transparent button". So unless you specifically add checks to screen capture and compare a pixel block range to a reference image bitmap or something, you aren't even going to catch it with an automated test.

Tests like THAT do exist and can be written, but its not usually very useful, and the cost to write and maintain such tests with reference images is huge. change an icon or font or background color and a zillion tests need to be updated. Its a difficult balancing act to decide what to test, even for a highly competent QA team.

It's possible it just outright incompetence too... but in this case, for this bug... its pretty understandable.

Comment I'll tell you what will happen (Score 2) 236

What always happens when you try to block kids from doing anything: they find a way to do it anyway.

We older folks too were "blocked" from doing stuff as kids, pre- and post-internet, and we too did it anyway. And it actually made us smarter, as we had to devise ways around the obstacle.

Kids are smart. This will just make them smarter.

Comment Re:Since we know nothing about it (Score 4, Interesting) 72

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

Comment Bummer (Score 2) 37

That's too bad. I donated to this project, thought it might do some good, and was excited by the prospect of a clean slate design opportunity. The lessons here are:

1. You don't create new opportunities with information tech, you expand existing ones.
2. Computer skills are essentially manual skills. Doesn't make you smarter, just more efficient.
3. Information tech is overhyped. AI won't make us smarter, either.

Comment Re:But it's already loaded! (Score 1) 69

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

Comment Jesus Christ (Score 0) 69

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 222

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

Comment Perfect storm of mediocre (Score 0) 18

Microsoft hasn't been able to do proper security - or proper development for that matter - in half a century, and AI is notorious for pissing out poor quality code.

Glad I only use the git part of Github.

If only Microsoft saw some sense and quit pushing this disaster of a technology - or at least gave people the option to leave it out of their activities. Fuck this AI shit, seriously. It's getting really tiring now...

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