It was my first book by JRRT.
Readit Newsblacklion commented on 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015) mashable.com/archive/sovi... · Posted by u/us-merul
blacklion commented on Itch.io seeks payment processors who work with with adult material rockpapershotgun.com/itch... · Posted by u/jfyi
It's convenience. People have gotten used to MC/Visa.
Debit cards are just MC/Visa that comes straight out of your bank account.
A true alternative would need to tie into banks, work with the current payment systems seamlessly, and offer credit options with reasonable terms.
Basically, it would have to be either funded by billionaires as a revenge passion project on MC/Visa or established by a country like the US as a public infrastructure.
I don't speak about MC/Visa in my last sentence but about Stripe, PayPal and all this middle layer between me as entrepreneur and my bank account. Why should I use them and not my bank directly? Why does this business exist?
MC and Visa is inter-bank systems, I don't like what they do with policies, but I understand why they are needed to "link" all banks around the world together and allow any acquiring bank to get payment from card of any other issuing bank without direct link between them. It is understandable.
And I, as card holder, don't need any men-in-the-middle when I pay at brick-and-mortar shop: such shop has account in some other bank and has payment terminal from this bank, not from PayPal. Why does online shop need Stripe, PayPal or other men-in-the-middle?
blacklion commented on Itch.io seeks payment processors who work with with adult material rockpapershotgun.com/itch... · Posted by u/jfyi
How does the type of transaction help determine fraud?
Are you saying it's because these games weren't properly flagged as an 'adult' transaction? When I buy Call of Duty from GameStop, is it flagged as an 'adult' transaction?
Also, didnt MasterCard directly say they're enforcing their existing guidelines against "unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.” ? It doesnt seem like it's just a coding issue....
Type of transaction directly influences commission of the system, as high-risk transactions are linked with higher commission.
If you sell adult products you are subject to higher commissions. If you sell adult products and don't mark these transactions as adult products you evade higher commission.
I don't say I agree with this logic, and I think tat Visa and MC are f*cking bastards, but it is how it works now.
blacklion commented on Itch.io seeks payment processors who work with with adult material rockpapershotgun.com/itch... · Posted by u/jfyi
I've been under the impression that MC/Visa claimed this is 'illegal content'.
Seems like its more than just a coding issue, but an issue of payment processors acting as gatekeepers of what is allowed to be purchased.
Nah, you can purchase anything legal (and adult content is legal in many jurisdictions).
Problem is, different classes of goods and/or services have very different rates. Like, if you sell grocery it is 1%, if you sell computer games it is 2.5% and if your sell adult content it is 5% if you can see physical card (you are magazine stall with adult magazines) and 7% if you don't see card (on-line sell). Numbers are totally made up by me here, BTW, but principle is the same.
You see, Visa and MC are credit card system, so if transaction was done by stolen card (and probability of that event depends on the goods sold and type of point of sale) and it was charged back by proper card owner, it is Visa/MC who pays for troubles.
It is what why proper transaction coding is so enforced.
Many (a lot) of transactions are with effectively debit cards (overdraft limit is set to 0.0 by issuer bank), but technically any Visa (not Electron) and MC (not Maesto) card is credit one.
On the other hand, I didn't hear about successful charge backs for many years. Like, 20 years ago it was trivial with good European bank (one phone call, zero paper work — I seen this several times in person!), and now it is much harder.
And one more question: why do we need payment processors at all?! I don't need it to pay with my card, why do I need to accept payments? Why banks don't want to be payment processors directly for their clients? Why do we need these MitM?
blacklion commented on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” blog.thunderbird.net/2025... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Microsoft Outlook has a very large market share in the business world. There is an old and a new GUI design version, and you can run the app, or use it online.
I don't like the presentation of the individual emails especially, I find the thread-view hard to understand, especially on mobile, but it works. Personally, I would have preferred the older folder presentation designs of 20+ years ago, for me this app is trying to be too clever - in both the old and the new GUI version. However, it is just so very widespread. I have to use it because everybody else in the company uses it.
They support a huge amount of scenarios and edge cases that many businesses now depend on, combined with all the Microsoft server side and infrastructure stuff they have of which the emails are just a very small part now.
Outlook is more groupware client, than e-mail. Also, to-quoting only (AFAIK, it is THE place where top-quoting was invented).
Also, when I was forced to use it (to be honest, about 10 years ago) it works terrible with IMAP (as opposite to Exchange) servers.
blacklion commented on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” blog.thunderbird.net/2025... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.
Gmail:
- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive
I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.
I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.
> How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.
I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people where different people answer to different messages, gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads, only messenger-like conversations.
Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for threads is wrong.
You can put answers to same folder that message your answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not exclusion.
Update:
> smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting quirks more than once. It is solution in search of problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.
blacklion commented on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” blog.thunderbird.net/2025... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.
It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address).
It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB).
Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded the emails locally to that desktop computer).
And more.
So it wasn’t so much that Gmail is “good enough”. It was more like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn’t think they could compete - also given that Google provided the hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration - something a desktop app alone could ever do.
Note: I'm not saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the sails of desktop mail app creators.
> You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.
It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filtering is still much more cumbersome than even Thunderbird one, not to say Sieve, and can be done only from web, but not from Android client. It doesn't support any crypto natively, both PGP or S/MIME.
Their are all features which I'm using daily (maybe, crypto is not daily, but still use sometimes).
Only good thing is labels, which is more flexible than tree folder structure. And, yes, full text search, obviously, as it is Google product.
As far as I remember, Thunderbird was not much worse than it is now, and it is supports most of this (though, quoting was and still is very weak, problem solved in FIDONet in 1990s!).
To be honest, I don't remember what was situation with address book and address autocompletion from it in Thundrbird before GMail, maybe there was none (but I will surprised, as, again, it worked in old TUI-based FIDONet client for DOS and OS/2), but this feature is trivial to implement in desktop app, and it could use LDAP or another centralized directory, not only addresses collected from your mail.
It was better than any web-mail, for sure, but better than desktop client? It is debatable.
1GB of storage is question of hosting, not client.
Update: Add to it modern gmail hate to self-hosting mail domains, and I could say that Google kills email as federated, free, non-vendor-dependent system. It is not surprise to me, of course, but still.
blacklion commented on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” blog.thunderbird.net/2025... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
«Manual Folder Sorting» — first, they broke 3rd party plugin for that. Next, author (not member of official Thunderbird team or employee of Mozilla) of this plugin spent more than 1 year pushing this functionality into base.
Now they highlight it as big deal in new release without mention volunteer author of this BASIC feature which should be in mail client FROM VERSION 0.0.1!
It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Thunderbird is best what we have (Cross-platform), but still very bad, and after killing off XUL plugins cannot be easily modified.
They exists for 21 year and now announce manual folder sorting! There is no support for Sieve (3rd party plugin? Dead after removing XUL)! There is no way to store folder settings as IMAP properties, and if I have two installations (on laptop and desktop, for example) I need repeat same setting or folders again and again — including selection of identity per-folder (again, not native functionality but 3rd party plugin, thanks, it is alive now!). No true message templates (per-folder, per-action, per-identity), only lousy "signature", broken in-line quoting in plain text messages, etc, etc, etc.
And it is best what I can use cross-platform :-(
21 years of progress and now we are here.
blacklion commented on Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads chipsandcheese.com/p/inte... · Posted by u/zdw
To see what that means in practice, in my multi generational meta benchmark the 285K lands currently only on rank 12, behind the top Intel processors from the last two generations (i7-13700K and 14700K plus the respective i9) and several AMD processors. https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu. The 3D cache just helps a lot in games, but the loss against the own predecessor must hurt even more.
Is your benchmark trustworthy?
I see strange discrepancy: my "old" i7-12700K vs i7-13700K:
Games: 170 vs 270 Software: 271 vs 1875 (!!!)
I can believe into 170 vs 270 (though, these two CPUs are not so different!) but 7x difference in software!? Is it believable?
If Rust continues to take over we will end up with (truly)static everything, which doesn't look too bad.