They definitely tested the water. I can recall several Pokemon games on mobile, as well as something like a Mario infinite runner. I don't think it will happen anytime soon, but it's not "complete" fantasy to think it could happen.
949 karma · joined July 4, 2017
There are tons of these games that 100% are already pirated and available online - why not just officially release them and start getting some revenue out of it. Some of these titles are going to get harder and harder to access as the official consoles and carts rot and that is a REAL shame. I would by it almost anyway they wanted to sell it too. Stand alone executables, straight ripped ROMs, whatever.
I think the nostaligic crowd that would play these older games would more than likely pay for them, and being as they're already widely available (if not extremely sus downloads), there wouldn't be much incentive to redistribute them.
Is this a thing now? I hadn't seen any big browser vulnerabilities recently. Did I miss something? Or are the vendors not releasing horrifying bugs they found internally with AI fuzzing?
[1]: https://sciter.com/
[1]: https://forcesunseen.com/blog/stop-storing-secrets-in-enviro...
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
Your phrasing makes it seem like that's a bad thing. Americans are bombarded by a firehose of headlines about Big XYZ doing all kinds of blatantly illegal or harmful things, but never get any sort of meaningful resolution before the next terrible thing takes it's place in the news cycle. I'll admit, there are a few people that I am personally wishing a modicum of health so that they live long enough to get some sort of public shame and justice - if only to show the rest of us that it's not a completely rigged system.
No good will come from this for the consumer. Websites are suddenly all going to start accurately reporting their content rating, especially ancient documents that have been "online" since before css and javascript were a thing. The only ones that will be implementing these checks will be adtech people that shouldn't have it in the first place. Letting out of touch geriatrics make tech policy decisions in a time when the bleeding edge is moving faster than ever is going to be disastrous for generations to come.
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
This is the sad truth. Some of these projects are just WAY too big for anyone to meaningfully digest what's happening. Chromium or Android? That's cool that their open, but they could just leave huge swathes of unobscured, liberally commented code - detailing how they're ravaging the host machine or sending deeply private telemetry home to Google and 99% of users would be none the wiser. All while being "open".
You could liken it to those 100 page ToS agreements most people just click "accept" to and never read. There could literally be anything in there, and even if you had the motivation to try and peruse it, the odds are definitely NOT in your favor.
On the other hand - I really hope this isn't a segue into more DRM or something similar to what steam does - providing a client to play games instead of actually downloading and having them. GOG is one of the last few bastions that lets you buy and own games. They've got a few in their catalog now that require proprietary launchers/drm etc and I really hope it doesn't become a trend.
Humble Bundle increasing sells steam keys instead of actual games, or sells keys to 3rd parties that DRM, or sells DRM'd ebooks etc. GOG, Humble and Itch are the last big players holding the line on DRM free stuff. I worry that if any of them slip (further) into the lucrative darkside it would be disastrous for consumers.
I feel like I can't put enough disclaimers on this though: actively searching for a community/identity/place to fit-in is a pretty vulnerable place to be and there are organizations (e.g. cults) that actively take advantage of that.
[moved from child comment]
Spotify is running ads for a design "thing", that's basically a generative AI logo creator. Isn't that one of the few instances that's already been clearly put into law - that you can't copyright AI generated stuff? How can you create a business that's selling uncopyrightable logos (which definitely would need/want to be copyrighted/trademarked)? It's the Wild, Wild West out here.
Legally, it's probably also unlawful, unless you believe that smoke they're selling that it was trained on code that was open licensed or in the public domain.
Professionally, it's a poor choice to ship code that wasn't produced with human care and consideration or even thorough oversight or understanding based on recent trends.
Software developers like to call themselves "engineers", but more and more they're showing they're more than happy to be configurators of black boxes of modular software. Whether that means pulling random NPM packages with thousands of other random packages as dependencies (none of which are even browsed or licenses checked), or "vibe coding" slop the LLM spits out.
When the main problem was people assembling random packages, I always likened it to "sandwich artists" at Subway. They just stand behind the counter and configure the product of random combinations of ingredients (someone else's NPM packages). Now it's like they can't even see the selection of ingredients, they just grab handfuls and shove it together until they get something sandwich shaped. Bad times in software.