cyd

Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

Google was angsting so much about Facebook’s success at the time, and weirdly enough if Google was actually good at product management, Google Reader would have been a great basis for creating a social network. Instead they went all in for Google+, whose value proposition over Facebook was… well… slightly nicer web animations.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

Ultima Underworld

It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. What it boils down to is that if you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone who’s using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.

It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.

How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.

That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.

Maybe he wanted to build Deepsea Challenger II, III, and IV simultaneously, and it took longer than expected.

Spez won’t agree to the API demand, because it’s a matter of ego and credibility for him now. His whole big shot tech-bro CEO shtick depends on ramming this through, like his hero Elon.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

They’re okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can’t use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids’ trinkets, because they contain lead.

It’s worth mentioning the Interactive Fiction Archive, a massive catalogue of hobbyist-created text games, many based on free text game engines like TADS.

I think it’s the other way round. AI writes, the human editor touches things up a little, and together they poop out hundreds of low effort articles a week.

Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.

The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to “design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content” and “publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training”. The devil is in the details, and I’m not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.

Well, here’s my worry. From my understanding, the EU wants (say) foundation model builders to certify that their models meet certain criteria. That’s a nice idea in itself, but there’s a risk of this certification process being too burdensome for FOSS developers of foundation models. Worse still, would the FOSS projects end up being legally liable for downstream uses of their models? Don’t forget that, unlike proprietary software with their EULAs taking liability off developers, FOSS places no restrictions on how end users use the software (in fact, any such restrictions generally make it non-FOSS).

One major issue that concerns me about these regulations is whether free and open source AI projects will be left alone, or whether they’ll be liable to jumping through procedural hoops that individuals, or small volunteer teams, can’t possibly deal with. I have seen contradictory statements coming from different parties.

Regulations of this sort always bring the risk of entrenching big, deep-pocketed companies that can just shrug and deal with the rules, while smaller players get locked out. We have seen that happening in some of the previous EU tech regulations.

In the AI space, I think the major risk is not AI helping create disinformation, invading privacy, etc. Frankly, the genie is already out of the bottle on many of these fronts. The major worry, going forward, is AI models becoming monopolized by big companies, with FOSS alternatives being kept in a permanently inferior position by lack of resources plus ill-targeted regulations.