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Latest Comments by Pikolo
Firefox v149 is getting a free built-in VPN and other new features
19 Mar 2026 at 12:03 pm UTC Likes: 5

50 GB is plenty for anything that's not video. My mobile data plan is 2GB and non-video calling and streaming applications don't use more than ~500 Mb a month.

But I can't see how they can possibly keep it free

The Godot powered Slay the Spire 2 has already hit over 3 million sales
16 Mar 2026 at 6:59 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: vertigoSteam workshop support could be absolutely massive. I'll still be holding off until the game leaves EA though.
It makes sense not to add Steam Workshop support too early - you could break mods with changes, and you're likely to have the biggest changes early on

Discord rolls out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux
13 Mar 2026 at 10:04 pm UTC

Quoting: Philadelphus
Quoting: Pikolo
Quoting: PhiladelphusI did notice that video backgrounds were a thing recently while video-chatting with my brother. Nice to see that finally happen.

What does doing "\@everyone" actually do? It's unclear from the patch note.
It was working the same as @everyone (mentioning everyone giving them a notification), but without warning you that you're sending a very broad notification
Thanks! I'm just still unclear what an "escaped mention" is, or at least what it's supposed to do. If "\@everyone" does the same as "@everyone" now (if I understand the fix)…what's the point of the backslash? 🤔 Or does it do something different now? What does "\@<user>" do differently from "@user"?
It's not supposed to do anything besides showing the text ;) It's a relatively common issue in programming - you want to be able to do more than just show the literal text, but sometimes you need to show the very sequence of characters that would normally do something special.

One place it comes up is in error messages and instruction manuals - if you want to tell the user how to achieve and effect, you need to show them the "magic words", but not "cast the spell". Backslash is a very common escape character. If you want to actually show a backslash in a language where it's an escape character, you escape the escape character itself - so `\\` would show up as `\` in javascript strings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_character [External Link]

Discord rolls out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux
10 Mar 2026 at 7:02 pm UTC

Quoting: PhiladelphusI did notice that video backgrounds were a thing recently while video-chatting with my brother. Nice to see that finally happen.

What does doing "\@everyone" actually do? It's unclear from the patch note.
It was working the same as @everyone (mentioning everyone giving them a notification), but without warning you that you're sending a very broad notification

Ubuntu and Fedora devs comment on California's new Digital Age Assurance Act
4 Mar 2026 at 7:13 pm UTC Likes: 2

If the law actually allows applications to rely on an OS supplied age instead of forcing application authors to try to steal identity documents or face scans, this could be a privacy improvement.

Think of all the data breaches with Discord being forced by the UK government to ask for user IDs - if they could rely on a device API, that could be avoided

European Commission gathering feedback on the importance of open source
12 Jan 2026 at 5:36 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: LoudTechieMy proposals were.
Publish cryptographic hashes of restricted material, so small player can collaborate to implement filters for illegal information like CSAM and copyright protected material allowing them to more cheaply preform moderation responsibilities.
Perceptual hashing [External Link], used for copyrighted content and CSAM detection is very different from cryptographic hashing. The goal is to catch images and videos that are "sufficiently similar". It's as vague as it sounds, and unless configured with a very low sensitivity is guaranteed to cause false positives. When configured with low sensitivity, it's possible to bypass. When you take into account the quantity of CSAM perceptual hashes out there, false positives happen regularly. So you can either block everything, or block random things. Far from a solved problem

Using perceptual hashing for copyright enforcement is even worse, because the algorithm has no way to account for exceptions to copyright [External Link]. That should always be a human's judgement call, but with copyright trolls in the picture you get a lot of pressure towards false positives.

European Commission gathering feedback on the importance of open source
12 Jan 2026 at 5:26 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: vic-bayTo force tech giants contribute back to open source, the open source projects should force GPLv2 licence. And have actual auditing entity to ensure compliance. EU can enforce that.
EU has created a GPL compatible license - EUPL v1.2 [External Link]. It's actually translated into every single EU language, and by lawyers, not volunteers, so it's more likely to hold up in court.

Around 70,000 users affected in Discord related breach which includes some government ID images
10 Oct 2025 at 3:28 pm UTC Likes: 2

@fabertawe A well designed Digital ID would result in something exactly opposite - instead of every entity accessing your Identity getting full details, there would be an "isOver18" API they could query. Hopefully you'd authenticate yourself to Discord with a one-time token rather than sharing your real name.

Whether we would get a well designed API, I don't know. But without a proper digital ID, we will keep getting passport photos used for age and identify verification