Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.

Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.

Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!

The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.

I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.

Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.

That’s a rather annoying shortcoming of XML, I agree. Then again, the choice is pretty inconsequential and the XSD for your data exchange format will lift any ambiguity anyway.

The choice between XML and JSON are a matter of preference, nothing more. XML is much more powerful than JSON and it’s usually a better choice in my opinion, but if you’re writing your applications well, you may as well be sending your data as pixels in a PNG because your serialiser/deserialiser should be dealing with the file format anyway.

The way you describe this, it sounds like it would need to work on trust a lot more than it already does. What if there’s a malicious instance actively circumventing bans, ignoring any pulbished banlist?

They already exist with the current Lemmy model, unfortunately. Bypassing ban lists isn’t exactly difficult unless the server you’re following does whitelisted federation.

I was talking about the scenario where you are instance A and you don’t know the followers of a user of instance B. That is not easy to keep track of, since you obviously don’t get any of the follow requests for a user on another instance.

If you don’t know who’s following who, ActivityPub still has inboxes and other collections that can contain existing posts for new servers. Server A can add their likes to the appropriate collection and any new servers can fetch that collection at the first follow of that account.

Agreed. I think that’s a shortcoming of ActivityPub.

That’s not a comment, that’s a field. There’s a reason var comment = "Increments i by 1" isn’t how you comment in any programs.

I don’t see comments in the spec?

XSD and XSLT files alone can replace half the JSON applications I’ve seen. I can see why it’s easier to take the barebones JSON notation and reinvent the wheel, but those tiny programs are the “Excel+VBA” of web applications.

Most web frameworks contain code to exchange JSON over XMLHttpRequest for a reason. XML is and always has been a data transfer format as well as a file format. JSON is, too. The amount of config.jsons I’ve had to mess with…

but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either

I don’t see why not? The entrypoint of web frontends is sent as HTML already. I guess that’s based on SGML, XML’s weird and broken cousin. Outputting XML is just a matter of configuring whatever model serialiser from JSON to XML.

There are a few good arguments against XML, but those also work against JSON.

ActivityPub has been designed as a push-only protocol as push/pull would involve too many web requests. It was designed for designs like Facebook and Twitter. This flexibility made Lemmy possible.

As for sending the post, it’s not that hard to keep track of all servers that follow a group or person or hashtag. Following people is not passive, you send a follow request which usually gets approved automatically.

Bans are already questionable. Servers choose not to forward every message (personal, group, public) to every account. There is no “themselves” in a shared server. Either the entire server gets banned, or the server is trusted to enforce bans. Lemmy federates those bans (though Lemmy and Kbin don’t always communicate right).

What if the community defederates an instance but my instance doesn’t defederate that one - will my instance send the post to the instance that is defederated by the community?

I would say “the server publishes a banlist containing *@bad-server.tld”. The defederation list on Lemmy is public anyway, but you could also argue for making such behaviour a setting, and there are probably other/better alternatives.

I think RCS comes with some autodiscovery capability (by sending a request to a magic HTTP URL over the right APN, haven’t read the spec in a while) but it does make sense that carriers push it in profiles as well.

Lemmy doesn’t do it currently. It blindly trusts communities to not lie to people. I just found out about this myself.

In theory the JSON body could include all the necessary information to validate a signature and the signature itself. Then, a simple HEAD request could validate the contents without having to re-download everything, and users’ public keys could be cached to minimise HTTP requests necessary.

ActivityPub was designed for social networks, not for forums. I’m not surprised it doesn’t work well for Lemmy.

The alternative, in my opinion, would be shared inboxes combined with adding the “public” audience to outbound messages.

Linux has support for updating various Lenovo models through a piece of software called fwupdmgr. If your laptop is support, it should show up automatically in Gnome Software or similar package managers.

For your laptop, Lenovo has a “Bootable CD” download option for non-Windows users. It’s intended to be written to a CD (but a flash drive will probably also work), for example by using one of those USB DVD drives.

If you don’t have a flash drive for some reason (and I doubt you’ll have a DVD drive in that case), you can try to make the Ubuntu bootloader boot the ISO, though that’s not something for beginners. Here are the official instructions in case you still want to try, but I don’t think I’d bother.

The easiest method may be to contact Lenovo and ask them how to do it. I think they’ll refer you to the bootable ISO. If they don’t make their updates available for anything but Linux, you’re going to have an annoying time.

Spending the five dollars on a flash drive to write the bootable CD to would be worth it in my opinion.

To answer your question: if the software manager doesn’t offer you the firmware update already, the easiest (not necessarily easy) way would be manually adding a bootloader entry to your Grub configuration to boot the update ISO you can download from Lenovos’s website.

The second easiest way would probably be to extract the firmware updater from either the Windows download or the ISO file, extracting the .efi files and the .rom files, placing them on your EFI partition, and using the boot menu to manually boot the firmware updater.

Or, to answer more succinctly: if you don’t get those updates already, there’s no easy way without a bootable medium. Sorry. Tell Lenovo to publish the firmware updates through the standard Linux channels like they do for other laptops.

I’m not sure if that’s true. From the spec:

Additionally, if an object is addressed to the Public special collection, a server MAY deliver that object to all known sharedInbox endpoints on the network.

This requires implementing sharedInbox support, but I believe this should permit federating any content of choice to any server.

But surely the receiving server could validate that signature by verifying the existence of the received activity (by asking the origin server for the object referenced and validating the signature).

If like objects are distributed in URL form, this is already how it works. The extra load wouldn’t be fun, for sure, but the lack of an embedded signature makes it very easy to falsify anything on the Fediverse.

But that’s how ActivityPub was designed? Are groups going to be implemented in Mastodon by replicating the crazy “pretend there’s an account boosting everything that’s happening on the server” behaviour?

Don’t drink the JSON coolaid. XML is fine. Better, in many cases, because XML files actually support comments.

In the modern programming world, XML is just JSON before JSON was cool. There was a whole hype about XML for a few years, which is why old programming tools are full of XML.

It’s funny but sad to see the JSON ecosystem scramble to invent all of the features that XML already had. Even ActivityPub runs on “external entities but stored as general purpose strings”, and don’t get me started on the incompatible, incomplete standards for describing a JSON schema.

It’s not just XML either, now there’s cap’n proto and protobuf and bson which are all just ASN.1 but “cool”.

The EU actually ruled that iMessage isn’t a gatekeeper because it’s not used enough to be considered important for now. I do believe China is forcing phones to be RCS compliant though, so it’s still mostly about government pressure.

They have to if they want to support payments over RCS (it’s in the spec). Gotta love telecom specifications!

Luckily that stuff isn’t too hard to get around