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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • They might have set up the user agreement for it. Stackexchange did and their whole business model was about catching businesses where some worker copy/pasted code from a stackexchange answer and getting a settlement out of it.

    I agree with you in principle (hell, I’d even take it further and think only trademarks should be protected, other than maybe a short period for copyright and patent protection, like a few years), but the legal system might disagree.

    Edit: I’d also make trademarks non-transferrable and apply to individuals rather than corporations, so they can go back to representing quality rather than business decisions. Especially when some new entity that never had any relation to the original trademark user just throws some money at them or their estate to buy the trust associated with the trademark.




  • They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

    Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

    That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

    Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.



  • Running another uarch is a whole new level of complexity vs just running on a different OS but with the same uarch, especially if concurrency is involved because translating from one instruction set to another can break atomicity assumptions that concurrency depends on to maintain coherency. You’d need to do thorough analysis of the code to determine where special care is needed, and even then, it won’t be trivial setting it up in a way that avoids deadlock because you have to understand what the threads are doing before you can say if it’s safe for one thread to wait for another (since they could end up waiting for each other).

    Whereas running code meant for a different OS just requires implementing that OS’ API (and behaviour, possibly including undocumented behaviour some code relies on, which can vary from application to application, hence windows compatibility modes where they add a translation layer themselves). Not saying this is trivial, but compared to the above problem, it kinda is.

    Not that ARM support is impossible, just if they manage that, it will be proclaimed loudly, not something that requires digging. If they don’t say it supports ARM, just assume it doesn’t.


  • Can’t say I’m surprised by any of this, everything about the guy screamed to me that it would be a shitty experience. They are using purely business things to attract users: paying big for exclusive titles (eg mini monopolies that force interested users to their platform) and giving games away for free. Neither of those require a decent experience, so no shit they cheaped out on that. Those who are just in it for the money are far more likely to end up at a “ah fuck it, it works good enough, ship it” point than someone who wants to build something good, knowing people will come if it’s good enough.

    It also makes it obvious that they’ll lean right into the enshitification as soon as they think they have that marketshare captured. So personally, I hope they don’t fix that shit, because it won’t indicate that they are becoming better but just that their strategy and tactics have improved while the end goal remains the same.

    And tbf, that end goal might be about control instead of money, so only approved video games can be played. Oh right, they already did that with UT because it might compete with their fortnite cash cow.






  • I recently noticed that when a user gets banned, all of their posts and associated threads also get removed but with no notice.

    I’ve also seen entire discussions removed because they included some heated words, despite also including useful discussion or even one sided rebuttals. While I’m under no illusion that things can get solved here, it’s annoying to see shit get deleted just because someone got upset. Even if there isn’t anything useful in comments, it breaks up the discussion because any replies have lost context.

    IMO if it’s a disruptive user, ban them, but leave the evidence of their disruption up, unless it was spam or the kind of illegal shit that can get anyone who sees it in trouble.


  • Personally, I like my PS5 because I don’t really gaf what any games do with my PS5’s kernel. It’s my way to play games that I’d never touch on my PC (even before switching to Linux, kernel anti-cheat/DRM was a dealbreaker).

    Actually kinda ironic because Sony is the company that made me not trust shit companies install on PCs for security purposes after their rootkit (also stopped using autoplay because of that). But between the three console options, Sony is the least shitty today.

    That said, I’m not sure I’ll be ever getting another console because I still do most of my gaming on my PC while those games collect dust.



  • I own or owned every one of their consoles other than the Wii (though can play the games on the wii u). No more, between their pricing (especially on recycled content), wastefullness (all that excess plastic for a case that holds a tiny cart because a small box makes their prices even harder to stomach), and legal bs (going after modders, emulators, and the used game market via anti-piracy bricking depending on what the previous owner of the game did), fuck them.





  • I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.

    And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.

    But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.


  • On Super Mario Wii U this happens. My daughter used it to see how to get through levels she was having trouble with. It’s frustrating to watch, though it showed me I was wrong that levels basically needed the run button to be held to make it across the gaps.

    And then you can either accept that the ghost beat the level for you or go back to trying.

    But, the thing is it’s not very difficult to do this with specific games. You can just record the inputs as they come in and replay those, which is how replays or saved games often work.

    Seems like they want to be able to do this for arbitrary games, which requires a much more sophisticated system that can understand what’s on the screen, what the goals are, and how to achieve them using just video and audio feedback (and maybe hint documents from the makers).