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GabrielTFS

97 karma · joined May 8, 2022

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GabrielTFS··on Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages
What's the distinction, then ? I can't imagine a company can set precedent to their liking on basically any issue by suing someone who has a vague relation to that issue and doesn't have to money to fight back to get them to sign up to some random settlement that says "the company is right, please set a precedent on this issue. - person who didn't have the money to fight back", right ?
GabrielTFS··on Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages
People have a license under the GPL to redistribute Yuzu, and the devs know this - I don't think a settlement can compel them to commit perjury (which is what they would be doing if they knowingly lied in a DMCA takedown)
GabrielTFS··on Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages
I don't see how it could establish legal precedent in a way that would be meaningfully useful to Nintendo in other court cases (well, I guess the fact the Yuzu devs settled could scare others into also doing so, but I mean in a legal sense)
GabrielTFS··on 3DS Emulator Citra is closing up shop and removing all their sites/code
I don't think a random settlement where no judge never decided much of anything can serve as useful precedent in a meaningful way...
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
I don't really see any measures that they could feasibly put in place that wouldn't be one of:

- Incredibly easy to get around

- Extremely cumbersome for legitimate users (especially given I would bet it would get workarounds that are way more convenient for pirates within hours of the measures being put in place)

- Require laughably massive amounts of resources to put in place

GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
Legally it doesn't matter - in fact you could say the courts practically endorse making emulators to compete with existing platforms, given quotes like this from Sony v. Connectix (where Sony attempted to sue Connectix for making a commercial (sold on shelves) emulator for the PlayStation which was then being actively commercialized):

> The Virtual Game Station is a legitimate competitor in the market for platforms on which Sony and Sony-licensed games can be played. See Sega, 977 F.2d at 1522-23. For this reason, some economic loss by Sony as a result of this competition does not compel a finding of no fair use. Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly. See id. at 1523-24 ("[A]n attempt to monopolize the market by making it impossible for others to compete runs counter to the statutory purpose of promoting creative expression and cannot constitute a strong equitable basis for resisting the invocation of the fair use doctrine.").

- 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.

GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
Yuzu certainly doesn't seem like a project that promotes piracy. They've made it very clear that they do not endorse piracy in any capacity, and in fact anyone found to be pirating games on e.g. their Discord server gets an insta-ban from what I've heard.
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
I have not heard of anything indicating they themselves released patches fixing issues with ToTK - only that other people made patches for that which the Yuzu team refused to accept until ToTK release. I don't see how random people making patches for an open source project should make the project liable for the existence of the patches.
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
Legally it doesn't really matter at all whether or not the console is currently commercialized, at least from precedents like Sony v. Connectix (Connectix was selling a commercial (literally in shelves) emulator directly competing with the PlayStation while it was being commercialized and won the lawsuit Sony filed against them)
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
Nintendo might try to get an injunction to stop the Patreon (or just DMCA Patreon) to prevent them from getting funds...
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
Yuzu is open source though ?? I don't get what you're saying. I should also add the previous commercial (as in, sold in shelves) emulators competing with current-gen consoles have been previously declared legal and fair competition (see e.g. Sony v. Connectix, with Connectix emulating the PlayStation)
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
It doesn't change much legally to my knowledge, given that Sony v. Connectix was about a commercial, for-profit emulator (literally sold in stores) that directly competed with a console being commercialized at the same time (the PlayStation) and Sony lost in that case, with the 9th Circuit declaring it was fair competition and legal for Connectix to emulate PlayStation games.
GabrielTFS··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
What exactly do you mean by "patches were created before the game got officially released" ? It was my impression that some patches had been going around, but that they certainly weren't created by or endorsed by the Yuzu project in any official capacity - I don't see how random people creating patches for open source projects should give rise to any legal liability to the original project.
GabrielTFS··on Out of bounds memory access in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 120.0.6099.224
I would expect "untrusted code" to mean "code in a sandbox" or "code I'm not gonna run at all anytime soon", so running code from thousands of dependencies in node is effectively trusting all of that code, unless it is your direct expectation that it is malicious (and even then, aren't you trusting it to be malicious ?).

The trust we give to random dependencies like that is quite arguably unwarranted to a large degree, but it doesn't mean the code isn't trusted.

GabrielTFS··on Epic vs. Google: Google Loses
This is true in one sense (that the jury doesn't always have the final word) but does not seem to actually argue against the point made in loaph's comment.

I think what loaph is saying is that a jury, when making a decision, can make any decision it wants, without consequences (except in exceptional cases, e.g. jury tampering).

The jury might never get to actually make a decision, and a guilty verdict can be overruled by a judgment notwithstanding the verdict (or as a result of an appeal, etc.), but legally, when a jury has made a decision, they can't be punished for making it, even if they were unreasonable in reaching that verdict.

GabrielTFS··on Tata Consultancy Services ordered to cough up $210M in code theft trial
It seems normal to me that if someone implements the same thing twice in a row they're gonna do it faster the second time. Though I don't know the specifics of your case (maybe they did copy-paste the original, who knows), it seems perfectly plausible that they did so without copying any code.

To say that this always involves illegal copying of code in some way would imply that an employee is effectively forbidden from ever writing similar code in two different companies - are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ?

GabrielTFS··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
A single 4-0 decision would imply the bylaws allow any group of members to oust all the other members by making a single proposal to oust everyone but their group, thus automatically forcing everyone else to recuse themselves :p
GabrielTFS··on Why SQLite does not use Git (2018)
I agree - that's why I use the git package in MSYS2, which afaik is just as capable (and makes it much easier to use git with the full array of UNIX tools I might want to use that don't necessarily ship with Git for Windows).
GabrielTFS··on Why SQLite does not use Git (2018)
> I know no one who is using git switch and git restore instead of the overloaded and confusing git checkout.

Welp, I guess there's me, but it does indeed seem like adoption of the new commands hasn't been very forthcoming - I guess that's what happens when "the old way still works just fine" - but personally I'd expect that more and more people will change to the new commands over time.

GabrielTFS··on Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market
> they still called Linux a Unix (which it's not)

Uhhhhhhh, on what basis ? The only arguments I can see for this would be either of:

- Pedantry, as technically the Linux kernel itself isn't UNIX certified by the Open Group, who owns the trademark - though multiple distributions have been certified to past standards, with no meaningful changes necessary. As an additional note, if you want to only count implementations conforming to the latest standard as being "real UNIX", then AIX is literally the only UNIX in existence.

- Purity, as Linux doesn't directly use any of the original code from AT&T-created UNIX OSes. But by that standard, it seems like modern BSDs wouldn't qualify as "UNIX", given that all of the AT&T code was stripped out a long time ago, and MacOS would qualify even less given it uses a non-AT&T kernel and only a few parts of some BSDs in the userland. Also, if including AT&T-produced code suffices to be "UNIX" then I must ask whether a Linux distribution that comes with ksh qualifies (...or even if Windows with UWIN or Cygwin+ksh qualifies). Generally though, the argument just reeks of ancestor worship to me.

...and neither of them are satisfactory to me.

GabrielTFS··on Fast
I would assume it's for the same reason I've seen many instances of this in similar cases: because it's funny.

(e.g. https://unicode.org/L2/L2016/16325.htm#149-A93)

GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
> I wasn't asking for languages that don't run on UNIX.

That sure is quite a useful precision to make - personally I found what you were asking for confounding given I can't really think of much of any language that doesn't run on UNIX, save for particularly obscure, often long-defunct ones (i.e. languages that basically don't run on anything at all or on stuff I couldn't possibly check out myself anyway). The fact you've also implicitly added the stipulation that only languages that derive from C and not all those that are related to it are excluded is also quite useful - I was excluding languages like BCPL or Algol on that basis (and I was quite iffy on Fortran/Pascal and a few others too, though since most ran on UNIX I wasn't even considering most of them anyway).

Also, while I broadly agree with your point about most people not even thinking stuff outside of Windows/UNIX exists and indeed find it quite acutely accurate in many cases, I'd say I'd hope I wouldn't be counted in it - I could have named most of the OSes and languages you did, save for a few like Microware OS9 or Bliss, simply I did not name the languages when prompted to because I'm not really aware of any that can't run on UNIX-like OSes, which I had then thought you were excluding before you clarified things.

Anyway, I'm aware of my ignorance of many of the details that are involved, but more importantly for what we were discussing, I would find it remarkably unlikely that any of these languages has a dependency handling system quite alike to that which is involved in Plan 9.

Are you actually telling me that you know of many examples of languages and/or compilers that handle dependencies like in Plan 9 ? That want you to manually specify all the dependencies of all the libraries you want to use before you can use that library, and which consider this sane in any way ?

If any actually exist, then I'd expect there's either: 1. Tooling around them specifically made to work around this exact issue by automatically specifying the dependencies when needed without having to spell them out manually 2. Preferred alternatives that don't have this problem in the first place

Meanwhile, the `#pragma once`-style model (i.e. make it so that imported libraries can use a separate library without ending up with asinine "double definition lol" errors if the program that uses the first library also separately uses the second one) seems like the evident standard that all the other languages use, such as:

- Ada

- Fortran

- Pascal

- APL

- Cobol

- Algol

- Prolog

within which I've found no examples of needing to do something like `import definitions_every_single_library_or_module_relies_on` and `import definitions_from_the_library_almost_every_single_other_library_or_module_uses` at the top of almost every file.

GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
> Specifically I am asking for examples that are not C compilers, do not compile languages derived from or related to C, and which do not run on Unix-like OSes, because what we are talking about here is what came after Unix. Plan 9 is effectively Unix 2.0: it is what the people who designed and built Unix did next.

You want me to cite compilers that don't compile C that support a C extension ? And you want the language it compiles to be completely unrelated to C ?

Frankly, I'd already be quite hard-pressed to even cite a compiler that compiles a language that is completely unrelated to C in the first place and doesn't run on any Unix-like OSes (I guess maybe something like cmd.exe (...though it's an interpreter, not even a compiler) or some assembler written entirely in assembly - I think there's a few I've seen for Windows (though an assembler isn't typically considered much of a compiler) or something like that ? Does Windows even count as "not Unix-like" ? Does Wine mean it runs on Unix-like OSes ?)

This just makes your criteria seem like it can't match any compiler at all, quite frankly, unless you're asking to trawl through truly ancient stuff from the 60s that I wouldn't even be able to test at all in the first place (since by the criteria you've given it must not be able to run on my laptop)

Also, I'll add that you're likely to be correct in the most literal sense - I don't expect many compilers for languages that don't directly descend from C to include anything like `#pragma once`, because they're using a completely different model from C: almost no languages these days use "copy-paste" style file inclusion to handle libraries, and if they do anything like that, `#pragma once` is implied and never needs to be manually specified.

But in practice, `#pragma once` allows C libraries headers to work just like in many other languages - they can freely include other libraries without forcing the user to do so themselves manually.

Just imagine if you had to follow the Plan 9 C scheme on other languages, imagine if everyone that did `import argparse` in Python had to then add `import os`, `import re`, `import gettext`, `import warnings` and `import sys` because `argparse` can't do it itself without fear of double inclusion (...and then you'd also have to manually add `import abc`, `import stat`, `import enum`, `import functools`, `import unicodedata`, `import copyreg`, `import posix`, `import posixpath`, `import nt`, `import ntpath`, `import subprocess`, `import io`, `import locale`, `import builtins`, `import linecache`, `import tracemalloc`, `import traceback`, `import types`, `import operator`, `import reprlib`, `import collections`, `import weakref`, `import typing`, `import genericpath`, `import pwd`, `import errno`, `import time`, `import signal`, `import threading`, `import contextlib`, `import fcntl`, `import msvcrt`, `import select`, `import selectors`, `import grp`, `import encodings`, `import tokenize`, `import fnmatch`, `import pickle`, `import itertools`, `import textwrap`, `import keyword`, `import atexit`, `import gc`, etc. as the nested dependencies of os/re/gettext/warnings/sys/etc.)... I can't imagine anyone would consider that a good thing.

GabrielTFS··on P1030680: Unbroken Enigma message (U534, 01 May 1945)
I actually would find it quite unlikely that this is LLM output, if only because I bet it would have instantly been censored the moment it uttered something alike to "Heil Hitler"
GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
Examples of what ? Also, what exactly do you mean by "outside of the Unix and C family" ?

(note: if you want examples of compilers that have `#pragma once` then I don't know what to say because I'd be hard-pressed to name a compiler that does not support it - similar situation w.r.t. header-guard detection)

GabrielTFS··on Removing official support for Red Hat enterprise Linux
What is a "cowbot" ?
GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
Are you including UTF-8 in "those things" that are "objectively bad and a tumor" ?
GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
Isn't the kernel API banned from usage by userspace applications that aren't kernel32.dll (plus deliberately breaks ABI all the time) ? I can appreciate the strengths of the NT kernel, but if nobody is allowed to use it... (I suppose kernel drivers can, but that's still a very narrow range of applications)

Also, while IOCP has the advantage of being older w.r.t. availability, I wonder how io_uring competes - I haven't used IOCP myself, but from what I've seen io_uring seems to fill its role quite well and I've seen several people complain about various problems with IOCP (in particular poor documentation)

GabrielTFS··on Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
> No includes that contain other includes is obvious and sensible and takes orders of magnitude off compilation times. That rarely gets mentioned.

That seems like an insane concept. I honestly can't see how it can be justified in a world where pretty much every compiler since the 90s has support for `#pragma once` and detects include guards automatically without re-reading the header.

GabrielTFS··on GCC 13 Supports New C2x Features, Including Nullptr, Enhanced Enumerations
See https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2023-May/241264.html for why this might not be the case anymore soon - although I suppose that adding in -fpermissive or -Wno-error=conversion or something like that isn't too much effort.
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