Implementing any kind of DRM is the game developer’s prerogative.

Yes, sure, but Steam encourages the use of the DRM included in the Steamworks API.

If Minecraft could only be downloaded through Steam, that would also be a step back insofar that right now, Mojang will let you download the game without any authentication at all. Changing this would be quite inconvenient for mod developers.

Allowing other versions is possible, again, at the developer’s convenience.

How? With branches / betas? There are a limit to those, and I’m pretty sure Minecraft exceeds them already. And as you already mentioned, you couldn’t use multiple versions at the same time. The only alternative (that I know of), the download_depot method, is far from user-friendly.

No other launcher needed besides Steam (and Steam is very far from being only a launcher)

That would reduce the number of launchers required from 1 to… 1. 🙃

Steam Workshop

The workshop is integrated into Steam and can only be used there (can’t download the files manually, as far as I know). It’s also way too simple for the modding needs Minecraft has (with its multiple versions, dependencies or breakage between mods, modpacks…).

It would also require Mojang to write their own mod loader, which would likely be too limiting for most mod developers. (And Forge is not the only mod loader out there. There are far better ones, like Fabric.)

There’s just no point to doing this. You’d replace a system that works very well with one that doesn’t. Steam generally works pretty well for managing games, but I don’t believe there would be any improvement if Mojang were to switch to it for Minecraft.

Minecraft in Steam would be a downgrade in every way (Minecraft already has no DRM, lets you freely download and play old versions, doesn’t require the official launcher to start, is easily modded, and so on).

On residential connections, that’s probably the case, yes. I’m hosting it on a VPS though and have had no problems with blocked ports so far. I imagine it depends on the provider?

I’m not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders. As long as the email still lands.

In that case, it really isn’t that much of a hassle. A basic mail system isn’t that complicated to set up (just make sure you have proper authentication and such, don’t host an open relay!). I actually did this not too long ago, using maddy, which unlike the traditional postfix+dovecot setup (which I had also been looking into) means you don’t even have to host separate services for SMTP and IMAP, and it also automates most additional things that are necessary nowadays for you, like TLS, DKIM, DMARC, and so on. Not quite everything though, there’s still stuff needed to do manually, mostly to set the SPF and DMARC records in the DNS, but it’s been working really well so far.

And really, the only mail provider you have to worry about for putting your mails into spam is gmail. They’re the worst. (maybe microsoft-hosted outlook too, but I haven’t encountered anyone using that)

I don’t get why this is being so heavily downvoted, the button has been a really fun event the last few seasons.

If it’s because of the referral link, here’s mine: https://thebutton.social/?ref=9HCTGA :)

No? If you want to resolve this URI, you have to follow the redirect, there’s no way around it. Requesting it from google and looking at the Location header is following the redirect.

I mean, I agree that one should drop google and that this is probably just another thing they do to track people, but that’s not what I meant with that comment.

The real URL is in the Location header on /goto. Request that URL. Do not follow the redirect.

…but that’s how you follow a redirect?

yup:

(-27)^2/3 = ((-27) ^ 2) / 3

-27^2/3 = (-(27 ^ 2)) / 3

The reason is that you almost always want the negation to happen after the exponentiation, because it otherwise wouldn’t have any effect (at least when the exponent is even).

-27^2/3 would come out to a different number, because the exponentiation has a higher precedence than the negation

Yes, there’s an “enable JXL (JPEG XL) support” toggle in the settings (tabs and browsing → media on librewolf (which is what I use too), or in ‘firefox labs’ on normal firefox).

It does seem to be animated when I view the file in firefox. That doesn’t have to mean it works when embedded on webpages though, but I guess there’s an easy way to test that :)

Interesting, that’s much more sophisticated than my setup (though to be fair, I host my services on a rented VPS instead of home)!

The issue only occurs with my externally-facing DNS, which is needed to, for example, to reach my Lemmy backend instance (lemmy.pootis.network) and the pictrs deployment. But yeah, internal DNS works perfectly for me and it easily survives a node failure.

Could still set up a recursive resolver for external DNS, but I guess that wouldn’t help other people who use a bad resolver. Tricky situation.

But even if I query 1.1.1.1 directly for my-website’s record, it just doesn’t work most of the time because the resolver pins itself to ns1 which is currently failing, or it selects ns1 and does not even care to try ns2.

That sounds bad. They really shouldn’t do that.

moving my DNS infra somewhere else (Cloudflare, for example)

And it would also mean this isn’t a solution either. If the problem is on the resolvers’ side, moving to a different DNS hoster would not change anything. Hm. And the other two potential solutions you’ve listed would be extremely overkill for this use case…

Personally, I only host one authoritative nameserver and do redundancy by using some free secondary DNS services (although a friend has also recently set up an authoritative nameserver, so maybe we’ll host secondary DNS for each other in the future). I haven’t encountered this issue before, but my server also hasn’t been down a lot.

There’s a lot of custom machinery that keeps my workloads running and accessible after a node failure, but all of this becomes completely moot when authoritative DNS is the bottleneck.

If it’s only necessary for your own stuff, maybe you should set up a local DNS resolver that works correctly which your services can use?

To be fair, I’ve heard it from somewhere else too. I’ll see if I can find a source.

It’s best not to use multiple ad blockers at the same time. They’ll conflict with each other and you’ll be worse off. uBO alone is probably enough.

Ah, didn’t expect you to already know qobuz 🙃

But yeah, that’s definitely a problem. I remember them sending the email where they announced this could happen now (although weirdly enough, they never sent an email for when purchased items were taken down any time after that again), and had it happen a few times as well. Luckily, I’ve also saved everything locally, so I haven’t lost anything. Still annoying. Also sometimes, an album that’s suddenly gone just seems to reappear a few months later, as if they were just reorganizing their library, but really, I have no idea what’s going on.

Didn’t know about them before, thanks for sharing!

The same album might be sold lossless in one region and only lossy in another region.

That’s weird, since as far as I can tell, qobuz doesn’t offer lossy downloads at all (I’ve heard they used to, but stopped. Maybe there are some regions where they’re still offering it?)

Copyrights are rights. A license grants others (parts of) that right. A copyright isn’t a license.

I don’t really see what that has to do with what I said? Unless you are saying that licenses exist for other things than copyright (in response to “licenses are a copyright concept”). That’s definitely true, I oversimplified to make my point, but I’m also pretty sure that copyright licenses are the only kind of license that are relevant here in the first place.

MP3 is a horrible non-free (well, not anymore, because the patents expired; but still), outdated format. bandcamp also lets you download as FLAC, which is none of that and lossless.

edit: it feels this comment came off a bit aggressively, so I just wanted to say that wasn’t my intention 😅