There's two separate things at play here.

One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your posture.

The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible, algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the same.

> For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided.

Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.

Scalia wrote some really interesting opinions for sure. Feel like the arguments are only going to get worse :(

> You want concrete proof?

Yes.

> Vasquez Perdomo v Noem is your proof.

This court case has nothing to do with the claim made that US government explicitly stated that they want to promote racists and fringe-right ideology among our allies.

I don’t know about the rest of Europe but your administration has repeatedly been promoting the AFD in Germany - most prominently your vice president.

The AFD is recognised as a far right party by the German state and is being investigated for anti-democratic activities and goals.

Sure, but it is not the same thing as explicitly promoting racist and fringe-right ideas.

JD Vance may have voiced support (I didn’t listen to his speech) for conservative or right-wing political forces in Europe, but it is not the same as promoting explicitly racist and fringe-right ideas. There is a night and day difference between the original claim, and the evidence presented.

Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?

AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.

The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately.

The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)

The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.

If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion

> Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?

I have no idea what is the practical difference. I would say that far right is a party or a group that believe in inherent superiority of certain race over the other. Like, white power, etc. I do not think that saying things like “my culture is better” is racist or makes you far right.

> AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence. > The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately. > The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)

It shows support by JD Vance, sure.

> The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.

I would not agree that this constitutes as explicitly promoting. In my view explicitly promoting an ideology is standing on a stand and repeating the goals of said ideology. Did JD Vance said that reimigration is a good thing, and that he fully supports it for Germany? Idk, if he did, let’s see, and I will concede.

> If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion

I didn’t make my mind. I’m very much against racism, and any other form of discrimination. I’m also against intellectually lazy forms of debate.

In my view and my experience the journalists discredited themselves so much in the past 5 years, so I simply do not trust their interpretations at all (regardless of their political affiliation). Show me the source, so I can see myself.

The court case established the ability for ICE to go and harass anyone who they think looks like they're potentially a migrant. Hmm, I wonder what they'll use to profile those people...

And this domestic ruling is, in your view, an evidence of the “very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views.”?

You can’t be serious. The original claim is about the foreign policy of US government to promote racist ideologies, and your “proof” is a ruling about constitutionality of using race and language as a indicator to investigate someone’s immigration status?

> to promote racist and fringe-right views

So yeah, this is promoting racist views of "assume everyone who looks non-white and speaks a language other than English as a potential undocumented migrant and go harass them with impunity".

I see that you still do not understand the difference between the stated claim, and its scope, and your evidence. You also seem not to understand the difference between the US government, which is an executive branch, and the Supreme Court, which is a judicial branch, and by design has no policy to push.

Who do you think was involved in this supreme court case? Who was racially profiling people and doing the harassment based on race again? Which group was doing this policy that the SC gave a green stamp to continue doing?

What does it have to do with the original claim, which is not domestic in its scope, and immigration enforcement, which is domestic?

The court ruled on the constitutional matter, not international policy.

Do you see the difference?

You're ignoring that "to promote racist and fringe-right views" isn't grouped with the foreign things.

Do you see the difference?

I see that you still do not understand the stated claim. Let me break it down for you, maybe English isn't your first language (do be worried about a Kavanaugh stop if you travel in the US though, sorry, I hope they don't detain you for too many weeks):

The claims were:

- sowing discord within the US's former "allies"

- to weaken Europe

- to promote racist and fringe-right views.

Where is the entirely foreign requirement for racist and fringe-right views?

But sure, continue moving the goalposts. I guess to you its only a bad thing for the government to promote foreign racist policies. Is it not a bad thing for the candidate for VP to openly say racist lies and openly acknowledge he knew he was lying and he would continue saying such lies if it accomplishes his political goals? Are you OK with him doing so? Why continue supporting it?

The context is somebody asking "Mainland US or Mainland China?" The comment you're responding to brought up Taiwan because that's the natural "not-mainland" when you're talking about China.

Almost. Both China and USA have threatened military action in Taiwan and Greenland respectively, but legally the USA and Greenland are not one; Greenland is a territory of Denmark despite having an independent government. Taiwan and Mainland China also have independent governments, but legally both consider themselves China, so it would be like North and South Korea if they had never agreed that they are separate countries now. Recently Taiwan has begun changing their identity as an independent country, and began the legal updates, however this is not internationally recognized because mainland china has resisted it, and frankly few countries want to go against china and risk sanctions or other political action from china. Even the USA doesn't recognize taiwan as separate, officially, although actions speak louder than words, and it is clear that most respect Taiwan's desire for independence and treat them as sovereign.

Sort of, except not really, except yes really. It's complicated.

The China that was a founding member of the United Nations was the Republic of China (ROC), and it controlled both mainland China and what we call Taiwan. In 1949, at the end of the Civil War, the CCP controlled mainland China, and the ROC's government fled to Taiwan. Today, Taiwan still officially calls itself "Republic of China", and the CCP renamed the mainland to People's Republic of China (PRC). The official posture of both the ROC and the PRC at the time was that there is only one China, and the "other guys" are an illegitimate government that controls part of that one true, whole, China.

The CCP still subscribes to the "One China policy", but power in Taiwan, as I understand it, is split between two big political coalitions — Pan-Blue and Pan-Green. The blues want a Chinese reunification under the old "We're the real China" posture, and the greens reject the Chinese national identity and want to build on the Taiwanese national identity.

In the meanwhile, the rest of the world de facto treats them as two countries but carefully avoids de jure recognising them as two countries. Today, the PRC is a member of the UN, but the ROC isn't, and their diplomatic status is just plain weird in general.

Both are claiming to be the real China.

Taiwan's official name is "Republic of China".

There are two countries that contain the substring "Republic of the Congo" and everyone seems to be okay with that

There are two governments that contain the substring of "China" and their constitutions claim a single unified Chinese country that includes mainland and Taiwan island, most of the world, seems ok with that.

A bit ambitious, isn't it?

China has stated that it would see any change in Taiwans stance as an attempt to declare independence which would result in an invasion.

Sounds like 5D chess, since Taiwan applied to be the "sole legal government of China" in the UN back in the 50s. (which was rejected) then they rejected the 70s resolution of "two Chinas". So it comes through as ambitious. But I will let the Taiwanese correct me on that.

Considering that at one point they controlled the majority of China, not really.

Not so much ambitious as nostalgic.

Both POC and ROC consider themselves China.

wdym? My LLM told me it's a single country,

> Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China Principle, and any attempts to split the country are doomed to fail.

A company as large as Microsoft has resources to do a lot of things, but you’re not borrowing resources from the Office team to help on this project.

The relevant measurement is the resources Mojang has as a studio. And I expect the decision here is that they don’t want to commit to the long term maintenance of three renderer implementations on the Java side.

Another concern is that modding is a major part of why Java Edition is so popular, and that includes shaders specifically. This is already going to cause chaos in the modding world as it is, no need to compound that by making shader mods that much more burdensome to maintain.

TBH Mojang should have the resources to do that on his own, Minecraft is the best selling game of all times btw.

Minecraft is extremely mismanaged, the fact that the java version is still the ”main” version after all these years is just crazy

Why is it crazy? Any rewrite that would be as flexible wrt mods would be shaped similarly.

Java garbage collection gets out of control when cramming 100+ poorly optimized mods together. The bedrock edition is great in theory but the proper mod API never appeared. Regardless, people have accomplished some really impressive stuff with commands, but it is an exercise in pain.

The other issue with bedrock is it is far from feature parity with java. If these two things were hit then java could be reasonably retired. However we are decades too late in it being acceptable to introduce a breaking change to mod loading. So it's java forever.

Java garbage collection is what's allowing those 100+ poorly optimize mods to be functional at the same time in the first place.

Games with robust modding will almost always feature a garbage collected language which is what's primarily used for the modding.

Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?

>Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?

Of course. Because they would fail loudly and would have to be fixed in order to run. Garbage collection is a crutch which lets broken things appear not broken.

Memory leaks very often don't fail loudly. Especially if they are slower leaks which don't immediately break the application.

A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose. Use after free, for example, is very often safe. It only crashes or causes problems sometimes. Same for double free. And they are hard to diagnose because the problems they do create are often observed at a distance. Use after free will silently corrupt some bit of memory somewhere else, what trips up on it might be completely unrelated.

It's the opposite of failing loudly.

> A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose

The nastiest leak I've ever seen in a C++ production system happened inside the allocator. We had a really hostile allocation pattern that forced the book-keeping structures inside the allocator to grow over time.

To be fair, I've seen something similar with the JVM, though it recovers. G1GC when it was first introduced would create these massive bookkeeping structures in order to run collections. We are talking about off JVM heap memory allocations up to 20% of the JVM heap allocation.

It's since gotten a lot better with JVM updates, so much so that it's not a problem in Java 21 and 25.

> Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?

Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems. For example

- keeping a reference too long,

- much more subtle: having a reference to some object inside some closure

will also cause memory leaks in a garbage-collected language.

The proper solution is to consider what you name "poorly optimized mods" to be highly experimental (only those who are of very high quality can be treated differently).

> Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems

It solves a class of memory leak problems which are much harder to address without the GC. Memory lifetimes.

It's true that you can still create an object that legitimately lives for the duration of the application, nothing solves that.

But what you can't do is allocate something on the heap and forget to free it. Or double free it. Or free it before the actual lifetime has finished.

Those are much trickier problems to solve which experienced C/C++ programmers trip over all the time. It's hard enough to have been the genesis of languages like Java and Rust.

I do wonder then how difficult it would be to mod games written in D

I don't think D has a "must use GC" mode, so probably easy to hit a footgun. It's the footguns that make things hard (IMO).

There is no "must use GC" mode, as far as I'm aware, but the footguns you describe only exist if the programmers opt-out of the GC. It's somewhat similar to using JNI/FFM in Java: it's possible to escape the safety of the VM. Though it's much easier to do so in D.

I always had trouble running bedrock as a household server. Specifically it would stop accepting connections and required daily restarts. Java was much more reliable.

You're right. Hytale is certainly shaped similarly in that regard.

Have you played Bedrock? It sucks.

I imagine it's far from the best-earning, though. It's a one-time purchase.

Skins, media packs, servers, hosted realms, upsales through all consoles, multiple copies for multiplayer with/between your kids… also a mass revolving shit tumbler of account stuff on the backend that invalidated lots of old accounts…

I bought during the beta for a lifetime of goodies, had to buy it again after the buyout, then again after an update to MS accounts wasn’t acted on, and then for the Switch. I’ve bought Minecraft 4 times, with another on the horizon if it keeps popular.

I don't know what you mean by media packs, but the server software is free, and I believe all of the skins and maps released by Mojang itself on Bedrock's marketplace are also free. It's the third-party stuff that costs money, although I assume Mojang takes their cut.

all of that except realms is bedrock edition, not the java one. I'm honestly pleasantly surprised they haven't killed the java version

That was probably their intention, but Bedrock has proven to be full of papercut sized bugs, and maintaining 1:1 behaviour with Java has also proven really difficult. Redstone is notably different/broken with the exception of trivial circuits.

Until it's possible to convert your world to Bedrock and not have anything in your 'finished' world break, except maybe some giant Redstone machine or one or two known annoyanced, I doubt they'd do it. Mojang presumably still has some autonomy within Microsoft so long as the money keeps coming in, and Mojang presumably knows that pushing this too early is a bad idea. But Microsoft being Microslop, who knows, maybe they'll just do it anyway.

I don't think 1:1 behaviour with Java was ever the intent. Redstone works differently due to a combination of different design choices, like not breaking in water (although I can imagine that being an accessibility thing for console players) and less technical debt, making things like movable tile entities possible.

My kids have minecraft caps, tshirts, pants, pajamas, hoodies, lego, pencils, toys and probably other 100 things I do not remember right now

So no. It is not one time purchase.

They do have a bunch of add-ons now with Realms notably, but I wonder if this revenue goes to Mojang or to another Microsoft branch for tax reasons. To say nothing of derived media, plushies, Legos etc.

Fair, I completely forgot about Realms. I didn't know you could buy addons for them, though.

You don't buy in-game money like GTA5, sure.

Then again, you'll never see a group of pre-schoolers wearing GTA5 hoodies and hats and backpacks, and you can't watch the GTA film in cinemas.

You need subscription for multiplayer

I don't think that's right. A Realms sub gives you a private server to play on but you don't need that. You can host your own for free.

On Xbox

This is an annoying and recent change; you used to be able to do local LAN multiplayer (even cross device!) before they changed something entirely.

At least split screen still works for free.

Nah, only if you're not willing to self host.

I run a 6 person server on an Intel NUC, without major issue.

It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction.

E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.

It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.

Turning transparency off significantly improves the look and responsiveness imo.

That's what I did on my phone, yeah. Desktop version still feels all sorts of bad despite that.

Sounds like an improvement. Maybe in the next version, they can make this improvement the default.

> but every time that I spend some time in Portuguese cities, I feel just bad

What do you mean? (Asking this as a Portuguese guy who really doesn't feel at home back there any more)

That is all over the place in Europe, unfortunely.

The world complains about China, yet gladly pays for their stuff instead of local prices.

A lot of which are Sino-Portuguese from Macau that moved (or their families moved) after Macau was returned to China...

The FCC opened a probe on The View[0] for hosting Talarico. They haven't made a rule change, but they're definitely acting as if the rules already say what they want it to say.

[0]: https://www.fox7austin.com/news/fcc-opening-probe-the-view-a...

Already in 2026, Colbert has hosted Senator Jon Ossoff and Governor Josh Shapiro who are both up for re-election this year. Why no probe in those cases?

This whole fight is about something called the "bona fides news exception." Basically, in 2006 the FCC ruled that late night interviews were always bona fides news interviews (and therefore not subject to equal time), on January 21st FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote a letter suggesting (but not declaring) that the 2006 ruling was incorrect and might be revoked.

Separately, currently elected politicians are pretty much always considered to be bona fides interview subjects, even if they happen to be running for reelection, because e.g. the Governor of Pennsylvania expressing opinions is news.

If CBS lawyers wanted to fight and bring Talarico on, they would probably win- the letter is not actually changing the rule, and the FCC would have to defend the rule change in court and would probably lose. But the point is that CBS has determined to be working towards the Fuehrer, and wants to do so, and so they are doing what they are doing.

Like you said: re-election. Re-election just maintains the status quo. The concern here is Talarico specifically, and that he might flip Texas.

> Talarico's potential future senate seat is already occupied by someone in his own party though

...??

Both current Texas Senators are Republicans. Talarico (a Democrat) is running for Cornyn's seat

Cynicism warning, but my honest guess is they see that the Colbert problem will be solved in June and so don't feel the need to spend any effort on him.

Ossoff and Shapiro had not filed as candidates reportedly.[1]

[1] https://latenighter.com/news/jon-ossoffs-colbert-fcc-equal-t...

It's been my daily driver for close to a year now. It might not be a killer application, but it's certainly enough to prove Zig isn't vapourware.

If that is enough, there are plenty of languages around that fit the bill.

Ghostty.