tal

You don't, but it's considerably quieter to use a liquid cooler on current high-end CPUs because of the amount of heat they dissipate. My current CPU has a considerably higher TDP than my last desktop's. I finally broke down and put an AIO cooler on the new one, and all the fans on the radiator can run at a much lower speed than my last CPU because the radiator is a lot larger than one hanging directly off the CPU, can dump heat to the air a lot more readily.

The GPU on that system, which doesn't use liquid cooling, has to have multiple slots and a supporting rail to support the weight because it has a huge heatsink hanging on a PCI slot that was never intended to support that kind of load, and the fans are far more spun up when it heats up.

The amount of power involved these days is getting pretty high. My early PCs could manage with entirely passive cooling, just a heatsink. Today, the above CPU dumps 250W and the above GPU 400W. I have a small space heater in the same room that, on low, runs at 400W.

Frankly, if I had a convenient mounting point in the case for the radiator, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd seriously have considered sticking an AIO liquid-cooled GPU in there

there are a few manufacturers that do those. The GPU is a lot louder than the CPU when both are spun up.

I will kind of agree on the RGB LEDs, though. It's getting obnoxiously difficult to find desktop hardware that doesn't have those. My last build, I was having difficulty finding DIMMs that didn't have RGB LEDs; not normally a component that I think of anyone wanting to make visible.

I'm kind of wondering whether we'll get to the point where one just has a standard attachment point for liquid and just hooks the hardware's attachment into a larger system that circulates fluid. Datacenters would become quiet places.

The remarks demonstrate strong and united opposition from the EU's two most important members to the Commission's push to loosen export controls within the EU in order to fast-track arms production. The EU executive has proposed allowing countries to skip obtaining approval before reselling key sensitive components used in weapons manufacturing.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/eu-envoys-reach-deal-150-billion-euro-arms-fund-2025-05-21/

EU envoys reach deal on 150 billion euro arms fund

SAFE fund aims to boost EU defence industry

Defense policy, including arms export policy, may not be an EU competency (or in US parlance, defense in the EU is a state power rather than a confederal power). So, as of 2025, Brussels may not be able to say something like "EU members need to be willing to permit transfers of weapons to other EU members" or anything like that.

But if the EU is going to be funding substantial defense purchases moving forward, it's not just acting as a defense producer, but as a defense customer. And in that role as a large customer who can potentially place conditions on its purchases, it may well have influence over arms producers.

Yeah, I'd say that the title here is clickbait. The author is working awfully hard to try to frame the issue in the article in such a way that they can write that title.

Also, relevant:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

also Gilmore

Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.

This is actually an example of the opposite. Here, it's a Christian activist group in a non-US country impacting customers in

among other places

the US.

All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.

My guess

and I haven't seen anything where payment processors have released any details of what Collective Shout did -- is that Collective Shout didn't just call Visa and say "we don't like this". They probably found some sort of law, maybe in Australia, that processing payments for these violates, and had their lawyer send a nastygram to payment processors about it. The payment processors sent their own warning letters to the merchants.

Like, the reason payment processors are useful as leverage for countries is because countries can put pressure on them, because payment processors do business all over and are gonna be skittish about violating laws in a bunch of countries, can get cut off from doing business there. And any one retailer just isn't big enough for them to be worried about cutting off compared to getting cut off from a country.

If you want to put pressure on payment processors, I'd guess that you're probably going to have to have some kind of law to threaten payment processor with on the grounds that processing payments to Steam and itch.io and other retailers and so forth when they are deindexing games results in some kind of legal violation. I'm not saying that that's impossible, but it's probably harder to do than it is for Collective Shout is to pull their shennanigans.

I'd also note that it is not at all clear that the present situation is the final state of affairs. That is, what my guess is that Valve and itch.io and so forth did is that they got their nastygram from the payment processors, then went to talk to their own lawyers. It's entirely possible that after those lawyers have a look at it, they're going to say "you can't sell Game X in Country Z", and Valve will just restrict the regions where they sell those games. That is, I would not be surprised if the scope on this restriction narrows, and Valve and itch.io are just playing it safe until they're confident as of their legal position.

There are also quite likely legal workarounds of varying efficacy that publishers can do in various jurisdictions, and they're probably going to be looking for some kind of consensus on what can be done where. Some jurisdictions have restrictions on incest pornography, for example. There are games

Sexbot on Steam comes to mind

that were clearly written with the intent of being incest pornography, have invisible-to-the-user variables that reference interfamily relationships. However, what the user sees is that they simply permit the user to specify the relationship between game characters. If the user specifies an incestual one, then that'll be how the game plays

but it's the user providing that input; there's no user-visible incest content provided by the publisher.

Other games on Steam require patches to add content that are provided by the publisher via a non-Steam route but not provided by Steam or similar

just useless unless someone has a copy of the game from Steam or similar

to add content that may be legally questionable; that cuts Steam out of the loop, so Steam won't care. My guess is that the situation is going to be somewhat in flux as various countries hammer out the fine points of what they restrict and publishers figure out how to adapt to the situation.

And then there are games, like Skyrim, which have third-party mods providing pornographic content to add to games that I am very sure is not legal in many jurisdictions, which are provided by non-Steam sites that don't do business in the jurisdiction in question and thus don't care about legal nastygrams from that jurisdiction. The US legal system will not enforce foreign rulings against an American website that doesn't meet a number of criteria for being considered to be doing business abroad, for example, because it doesn't consider that website to be doing business in that country and thus the foreign country to have jurisdiction. The foreign country can block its users from having access to that website in the hosting country if it wants, but thus far, Australia is not doing that...and if we go down the "blocking internationally" route, then the next step for people who want to distribute content is probably going to be things like VPNs, Tor, and Hyphanet.

It's clearly the anticipation that gives it the flavor!

Capybara for Lent!

https://www.pastafariancalendar.com/

Friday, July 25, 2025 🍨 Hot Fudge Sundae Day 🍨

These seasonal food regulations should definitely reflect the clearly-correct religious position and not some false religion's take on things.

I kind of don't want to send my location to "location sharing" companies to sell to data brokers.

!floridaman@lemmy.world

So you're specifically also wanting community servers, based on the first paragraph?