> it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government

Not everywhere though; it's up to the canton or municipality to implement this. It's literally the only reason I still buy stamps. Should be made a thing at the federal level imho.

There is a significant difference between jury duty and military service when it comes to risks and bodily harm. Equating the two as both being "reductions" is absurdly missing the point.

I'm not equating them. Military service is a much bigger reduction. But it doesn't seem fair to call it a complete elimination of bodily autonomy -- that's my main claim.

Is there a link to the specification and the resulting generated code ? I skimmed through the article and the author's github profile, but couldn't find anything related.

Seems like a serious oversight if this is your selling point.

Their docs say:

> Allium has no compiler and no runtime. It is purely descriptive, defined entirely by its documentation

From what I understand that means there is no spec, no parser, it's just vibe evaluated by LLMs.

Sorry, I meant the spec and code of the toy project described in the post.

I don't necessarily expect their secret sauce to be openly available. But given the grandiose claims made there, I do expect something to back it up other than a corpospeak "trust me bro".

I would say Iran is a much better illustration of what happens when your citizenry is disarmed. The crowd isn't very scary. They don't pose a real threat. There's little risk in crushing them. They can't fight back meaningfully.

Color me unconvinced. Google can't even figure what language I speak even though I voluntarily provide them the information in several different ways. I can't understand half the ads they serve me.

Google doesn't choose what ad to show you. Google serves up a platter of details and auctions the ad placement off to the highest bidder.

That platter of details is not shown to you, the consumer.

What you are experiencing is that your ad profile isn't valuable to most bidders, ie you don't buy stuff as much as other people do, or your ad profile is somehow super attractive to stupid companies that suck at running ads who are overpaying for bad matches.

It is not evidence that google knows nothing about you.

Google is pleased that you think they don't know you. It helps keep the pressure down when people mistake this system for "Perfectly target ads". The system is designed to make google money regardless of how good or bad their profile of you is.

It's not just the ads though. Am I to think that Youtube helpfully replacing a video title (whose original text I understand) by a half-assed translation into a language that I don't speak is actually Alphabet playing 5D chess ? If so, hats off to you, Google. I totally fell for it.

Unless the goal is to distract from some unfavorable, heavily redacted files. In which case, this seems to be a resounding success.

Using war to divert unwanted attention away from domestic issues is a proven approach.

Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too.

That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.

It doesn't seem to be just Steam. From what I see (from Switzerland), other online stores relying on PayPal seem to be impacted too. Though if the store let me try to use PayPal anyway, I can just switch the currency of the purchase to USD instead of using the currency of the credit card (CHF in my case), thus having my issuing bank do the currency conversion. It seems to work fine so far.

The timing of this problem is weird. Hard not to see a link with the recent troubles with Visa and Mastercard, even if Valve claims that it's not the case.

I wonder if this is actually more related to some EU lawmakers probing a few big online platforms for the abusive conversion rates they impose. Amazon is guilty of this, all the budget airlines are guilty of this, and so is PayPal.

They “offer” to charge your card in its native currency to avoid exchange rate fees, but they do so with an abusive exchange rate. They also always go out of their way to show the inverse exchange rate that nobody uses, and is hard to evaluate.

I just checked on Amazon, and they now display the “usual” exchange rate (still with an insane rate). So it definitely looks like something is getting tightened in the industry.

Indeed. As far as I'm concerned, the touchpads have been the killer feature of the Steam Deck. Emulating a mouse using a stick or the gyros doesn't click for me. The touchpads are just so much better when you need both speed and precision, be it for games (specially shooters and strategy games), or desktop mode (for navigation and web browsing). Plus, it works pretty well for typing text with the virtual keyboard.

I don't understand why none of the other manufacturers implemented those. I wish the Steam Deck had just a little bit of extra power, but I'm not willing to part with those pads. I'm eagerly waiting for the Steam Deck 2.