Most of the "funding" that Germany does usually goes to companies that can "play" the bureaucratic process instead of the ones that would actually deliver anything of value - so it probably won't be an effective strategy to accelerate FOSS.
A good starting point would be to require all government software to be OSS in the EU - similar to what Switzerland started a couple months ago.
I think Germany and Europe has invested enough into Europeans. I think it would make more sense to mandate all government software to be developed by black and brown indigenous people of colour. Now is the time for Europe to pick up the DEI commitment that the United States has failed to deliver on.
Hi, German here as well - there are plenty of political news for us to sit through these days...
I personally don't feel compelled to move away from my Apple devices as of yet, but this'll certainly influence my future purchasing decisions.
Why? - With politicians like Trump you'll always have to draw the line between campaign talk and real politics - When actions start or the relationship between the EU and US starts to deteriorate it makes more sense to jump ship.
From a bureaucratic standpoint I hope that the EU takes this as a wake up call to finally deregulate - to allow more innovation and trade with other parts of the world if it comes down to it.
"AI generated code" essentially means using Github Copilot or an alternative - these barely write a function without errors, nor are they even close to implementing a new feature autonomously.
I expect these tools to improve productivity for new-ish developers, however for anyone that is literate in a programming language the effect is marginal at best ("Copilot pause" etc.)
As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly...
Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience, but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's Vanguard.
With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have pushed beyond 15k and briefly above 20k Elo and the amount of cheaters have steadily declined (although less obvious cheats, eg. wallhack, are probably more common at that level) - for Valorant it has pretty much stayed at a constant amount of "cheatiness" across the ranks.
CS actually has a rich history of features, functions, services?... that aren't strictly anti-cheat...
Overwatch gave players the option to "police" others players replays - this wasn't only against cheating, but also griefing.
Prime? Is it still even a thing? It was great when CSGO went F2P... all the cheaters just annoyed the non-prime players (F2P).
The ominous Trust factor which is probably the single most effective piece in making my personal experience great. But there's no real way to tell?
Also, VacNet - which is running? is AI based? banning players? lowering their trust factor?... with Valve there's no real way to tell most of the time, but it's probably existent in some shape, way or form.
Not to say that CS2 has solved cheating, it's far from it - but neither has Valorant.
I have a very hard time believing that the rate of cheaters go down in high elo. IIRC the new CS2 leaderboard still regularly features cheat companies on it (eg. config by [cheat dev] as the leaderboard name.) I myself do not have any data to back up that claim, but yours completely goes against what I have experienced.
I think the point about wallhack being more common in higher elo is more likely. I would add that some forms of trigger botting and recoil control cheats are actually more difficult to tell than wallhacking. Spinbotters don't get very high elo because they get mass reported because of how blatant they are, likely not due to VAC. I would need some real evidence to believe that claim (although as I said I similarly have no evidence myself to convince you to accept my claim).
One thing I can say is that I do frequently meet cheaters in CS these days, and the issue has gotten so bad in my experience that many cheaters even announce at the start of the game that they eg. have wallhack. Or one team member will turn on cheats if a game is getting close towards the end of the game. Also, the main reason FACEIT exists is for its anti-cheat, and on FACEIT there are almost no reports of cheating, and it's a big deal when it happens. If VAC was really working now we would see more people leaving FACEIT. I must ask when you started playing CS? Because the only way your post makes sense to me is if you started playing around the time when CS2 came out, which indeed did have more cheaters then it does now, but that was truly an exceptional level of cheating and I don't think that is a fair point of comparison, especially as a comparison to Vanguard.
I admit to taking claims about Vanguard at face value and I've never played Valorant (in part due to Vanguard, as I don't want to install a rootkit). But what you say about Vanguard also completely goes against what I have heard about it.
I absolutely support your claims about the leaderboards, it's an obvious show of cheating in CS2. There's also a strong incentive for cheating companies to be there so it might not be descriptive of the average experience. However, I can't speak for that level as my peak was barely over 25k (top 1%?) and the leaderboards are simply orders of magnitude away from that.
Regarding cheaters announcing they're cheating - I haven't encountered that in a long time, but I have heard of it often enough from new players... so it might be an issue with trust factor, but who knows?
I have actually been playing CS off and on since around 2017 - at least in my experience the current cheating situation isn't worse than it was back then, but it's also not better. The only time it was meaningfully better was when prime released around 2021.
However, it's also true that I started playing more after the release of CS2... and the aforementioned 10k Elo mark was a real pain point for me and my friends. Every time we were due to pass it we ran into cheaters, smurfs and even a server crash once (incredible luck?). After over 3 months we made it past 10k and climbed above 15k Elo within 2 weeks. - This is my experience and I have heard similar stories from other players. (Although ranks have been massively imbalanced at that time as well, which partly explains this?)
Nevertheless, it's good to have a discussion about cheating - in CS2's case the experience can be so different depending on the region, ELO, trust factor, ... with Valorant the discussion simply gets shutdown way to often because of "Vanguard" and without a replay system you're just left to your own devices.
but yeah I can agree, my friends say CS2 is full of cheaters, I have played 7-12k rating and I got only a few cheaters throughout this whole year of CS2.
and they say they keep playing Valorant because there's way less cheaters than CS2.
As long as you're just traveling with one company it's usually fine - especially DB, you can usually just hop on the next train.
However with a journey spanning multiple companies you're out of luck... and with seat reservations on TGVs you commonly have to wait until the next day.
It's something that shouldn't be too hard to fix: Give passengers an easy and forgiving way to continue their journey (and make the causing company pay) - ideally this should automatically show up on the App and give the passenger options of new connections etc.
None of this fixes seat reservations on TGVs though, which are also annoying for offers like Interrail/Eurail... EU should probably start regulating seat reservations /s
Delays are only a problem when you put tight connection times. If you increase the buffer between railway companies/countries this is hardly a problem.
And train travel is not like plane, if you have to wait, say 4-5hours in a big city you can easily put your luggage in a locker and spend an enjoyable time in that city as the station is usually located in or near the city center and you aren't locked in a terminal nor do you have to account for extra time to pass security.
I have an upcoming transatlantic flight next week. Train is obviously not an option for this one but I will have to spend 4-5 hours at Paris CDG airport for a connection. I have to stay in the airport, pay an awful lot of money for any drink or food I and my family will need instead of visiting a monument/museum and have a nice lunch in the city...things you can do easily by just stepping out of a railway station.
A "pocketable" gaming console in the modern world is essentially a smartphone with analog sticks.
There are "controller grips" or "controller mounts" for phones readily available and you can even pair it with Steam in-house streaming or Moonlight to play games at a quality that is impossible at this form factor for cheap.
Even at larger sizes it's difficult - The Nintendo Switch only worked because of great franchises and IP. The Steam Deck also required great technological investment into Linux and platform familiarity.
It's not hard to see why barely anyone's trying...
> A "pocketable" gaming console in the modern world is essentially a smartphone with analog sticks.
Yes in a technical sense. But no in a business and ecosystem sense.
PSP and Vita had very impressive game offerings that we don’t get on mobile to this day. The games felt like proper PlayStation games, only about 0.5 console generations behind. Back then it meant PS2.5 games. Today it would mean PS4.5 games on your handheld.
Switch is probably the closest today due to its first party games and very fluent support for many popular titles, unlike Steam Deck which is still a bit hacky and not everything it offers runs well. But Switch technically is several generations behind. PSP and Vita really felt like 2/3rds of your PlayStation 3.
No smartphone with a controller add on offers an experience of PlayStation 4.5 with first party titles and support. The business side was executed very well on PSP/Vita. The developers cared for that console.
Yeah, from a logistics point of view I understand it. No one is going to design a smartphone game to be gamepad first , and with the huge cloud push there's less pressure to make console games work on mobile anyway. So the last bastion (unless you have an amazing networking solution in your household) is basically "wait for Windows PCs to become almost smartphone sized".
I do in fact have a smartphone with a controller mount. Mostly for emulators at this point. But most of the time it can feel like no one is really taking advantadge of the hardware capabilities of modern phone hardware.
The future in this space will probably stick to what IDEs have done from the beginning: Leaving the "core platform" unchanged while providing additional AI powered features around it.
Microsoft Office, VS Code, Adobe Photoshop and most other large software platforms have all embraced this.
I have genuinely not seen an AI product that works standalone (without a preexisting platform) besides chat-based LLMs.
Great demo! The drone-space is really interesting at the moment. There's great hardware and open source software available to hobbyists.
Potential use cases are almost endless: agriculture, first responders, defense, maintenance, planning, transportation...
A lot of the value proposition will probably come from getting these drones to be as effective and autonomous as possible - this is easier to do if you have a domain-specific product.
As for myself, I am currently writing my own flight controller for Quadcopters in Rust targeting Linux and STM32s - quite the journey as I had no embedded programming experience before starting that project.
The ethos I have seen around these is usually "It doesn't have to be proper if it isn't making money"
I think it's a fair attitude if your only goal is to make money, but it completely misses "why" you should build something... if you truly care about a problem you wouldn't haphazard it anyway.
Maybe I don't truely care about my problem? But I just care a little bit, and I've done the risk analysis.
I used a whole lot of "ChatGPT just wrote it all for me" for a rust program that watches for and renames video game clips for me. Maybe it's insecure or has subtle bugs, I don't really care all that much because it does the job for me.
You pretend to not care until you do. When it accidentally deletes your files or even your whole hard drive you'll suddenly find someone / something to blame.
> I think it's a fair attitude if your only goal is to make money
Short term, yes. But it's a bit short sighted as most of the AI code I have seen has security and scalability issues that long term have potential to blow up in your face costing even more money.
Granted that can usually be fixed by better prompts. But to right those prompts requires the person doing the "prompt engineering" (rolls eyes) to actually have a working knowledge of a lot of areas such as architecture, security, software engineering best practices, etc. And a lot of the influencers out there pushing AI openly admit to "not knowing how to code" let alone knowing the right way to build a technology product so that it scales and is safe.
reply