15,266 karma · joined November 13, 2013
ChatGPT polish adds no value to this.
I don't buy this argument, much like I don't buy the similar "they said the same when calculators were introduced".
It negates that some changes are qualitatively and scale-wise different. Also, by gradually chipping away at things that humans do, you (we) keep shrinking and shrinking until there's nothing left, every step of the way some people claiming "well, the telegraph operators said the same". Keep in mind that, while it's hyperbole, some AI entrepreneurs are actually saying stuff like "maybe jobs will become a hobby". Unrealistic for now, maybe, but if they do become a hobby, what leverage will we have at all?
In other words, it's true the past is worth keeping in mind, but not to the exclusion of the possibility that this time it's different. Or that the trends of the past actually point to harm in the near future.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I subscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
It's obvious to me this is from Miyazaki's point of view, it never crossed my mind while reading it that it needed clarification.
There's probably a regression in beliefs, actually. Even here on HN, for more tech-savvy people.
We used to know all the hard lessons of lack of privacy in browsing the internet, using Google services, etc. I remember when (tech) people were up in arms that Gmail scanned your emails, remember that?
Well, all of that is seemingly forgotten in the age of LLM chat bots. It's back to square one. People need to relearn all the lessons, it's as if AI magically erased all of what we used to know about online privacy.
Not sure why you need to mention the "renter" thing, this is literally a service you're paying for and that you can stop paying the minute it stops being useful to you. There's no vendor lock-in, just stop paying for Premium when if it ever becomes shit.
The OP is not saying Premium will always be good, they're saying why they find it useful to pay for Premium now.
As for sponsored content, I don't think that's under YT's control (other than that they allow it, imagine if it was forbidden: authors would complain about that arbitrary restriction). Sponsored content is like product placement, if you pay for a cinema ticket, why does the movie advertise products, cars, stores, etc? And is it the movie theater's fault?
This gives me vibes of that famous HN comment about Dropbox.
I don't watch ragebait videos either, I watch either music videos, or stuff about my hobbies.
Ads would kill either. I hate random ads popping up.
Imagine if, instead of a friend, he had asked an AI chatbot. Would he have been reported to the police?
Aren't our private thoughts just that, private?
I get that a cloud-hosted AI chatbot is, to tech-savvy people, immediately "not private", but a lot of people don't understand this. What if Stephen King was talking to his friend about planning the murder, and his phone was listening? What if he was typing it up in MS Word and the program decided to phone home and report him to the police?
For the sake of even more argument, imagine if she was writing her thoughts with a pencil, on a good old fashioned paper diary, and she had a phone nearby and the phone took a picture of her diary, OCR'd the words, and reported it to the police?
And here we all are, happily typing our stuff into these spy chatbots. "AI" happily made our fears go away. Hopefully we're not planning anything criminal like this woman, but still.
Do you mean something like: the LLM gets the input from the player, then interprets it to mean something built out of the available verbs? I guess the risk here is that the LLM would be overly generous with its interpretation and help the player too much (e.g. "the player wrote 'slice the tapestry' but there's only a rope in the description of the room, let's assume they meant 'pull the rope'").
> As someone who has known Nick in the past, I’m a bit surprised by this multitude of articles and books. However, I think you’ve missed a fifth possibility that would suggest gentle handling: a mental health issue. The papers and books on philosophy, religion, and issues well beyond anything econometric plus the videos on the Riemann Hypothesis suggest someone who is no longer bound by the intellectual boundaries or social mores of proper research.
I don't know whether the commenter is legit, and whether this actually happened, but I wonder if AI-psychosis (or at least, AI-amplified psychosis) might not become a real thing. People already on the edge having "productive" conversations with LLM chatbots and going down rabbit holes. It can't be a good thing, especially since LLMs are sycophants that indulge every crazy idea you have.
I'm not saying this didn't happen before, I just wonder whether LLMs enable a whole new scale of crazy.
> I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.
As established previously, this all stems from you not valuing preservation. If you value copyright over culture, you don't value culture. "Piracy" and "copyright" are arbitrary terms, and copyright is not a goal in itself; it sometimes gets in the way.
> This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.
The confusion is only created by you. Out of malice, I must assume at this point, since you've implicitly acknowledged you didn't engage with abandonware communities and therefore can only infer (incorrectly) what their motives were. I, in contrast, did engage, talked to the owner of HOTU (one of the largest ones back in the day) and know how they collected games and what their motives were. Having no counter to this, you keep ignoring it and instead rehash the same debunked points.
There's only one kind of preservation: the one that actually preserves stuff.
At this point I know you understand this, you're just willfully ignorant or maliciously distorting the argument.
No, I'm not the only one: you mentioned what you thought was the goal in your initial comment (copyright infringement) and you're restating it now. Again it's very telling this is your "belief", but you acknowledged tacitly that you are unfamiliar with how abandonware projects worked, never having talked to the people. But I have. Do you think it would be maybe wise to acknowledge your beliefs are not based on actual knowledge?
The goals matter. In fact, they matter to you as well, because you've been arguing from a position of belief about the goals ("justify why the pirate things") that is simply incorrect. Why not update your knowledge instead?
> In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.
This is simply false. I don't think you are into "the retro hardware / software" community at all, I dare you to claim otherwise. Also, rare things do come up on auction, but this doesn't mean as a norm they exist! And the people involved in these projects are breaking all kinds of copyrights and have always been persecuted for this, which you'd know if you were involved in those communities.
> But both of those groups [pirates and abandonware groups] distributed pirated software.
I talked about goals. Your answer is a non-sequitur, because it argues about something that wasn't in dispute. Please try not to do this.
> Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.
You haven't the faintest idea of what I do or don't do. More importantly, we're not discussing me, are we? Please try sticking to the point.
At this point you're sounding like a mix of dishonesty and willful ignorance.
The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.
Often those copies are legal (as in purchased; e.g. the abandonware archive of Home of the Underdogs started with the personal collection of legally purchased games of the owner; she also scanned manuals, cover artwork and whenever possible any goodies that came with the games; as much as possible from the game was preserved). Other times the legal copy just doesn't exist. In either case, the goal of games preservation is that the games are played; these are paintings hanging on a wall.
> Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
Games are not wine, and you're wrong.
> Preservation does not justify piracy
Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation. You went as far as claiming that it's ok for games/software to die; do you realize anything else you claim about "using AI" or "keeping copies somewhere" and "temperature controlled rooms" is more or less nonsense? The fundamental thing is that you don't care about preserving games. Everything else you're saying is a red herring. If you're ok with games being lost forever, then of course every measure to preserve them will seem excessive or pointless to you. (Please don't insist with "copyright holders surely have a copy...", I've already explained that they often don't. Do me the courtesy of not rehashing refuted claims).
> Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight. Also, you more or less didn't dispute you're completely unfamiliar with abandonware, only basing your opinions on prejudice (and some deranged nonsense about AI), so it's very hard to take your arguments seriously.
Edit: looking at the list of changes, this is exactly what I wanted. Well, an excuse to watch Blade Runner yet again :D
Which one is it? Before, you claimed it was their goal (what they wanted to do). You cannot have it both ways. The actual goal matters.
> These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.
As I said, this just shows you are unfamiliar with the goals of abandonware. They were preserving the games in playable form, and they needed them to be played, because games are not static artifacts; they must be experienced. Besides, asking them to keep copies in temperature controlled rooms is ridiculous, these were passion projects done on a budget, out of commodity hardware and rented servers. This started before torrents by the way, and some abandonware communities frowned upon the notion of just downloading a big file of everything anyway.
> Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere
No, there often wasn't. Resist the urge to reply "well, theoretically..." and consider that maybe I know about this a bit more than you.
> You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.
I'm taking this the way you wrote it, how else? Don't backpedal. The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different (though, of course, there was some cross-pollination).
> No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.
"Right" is a made-up thing (often broken by the industry that later enforced similar rights; do you know the history of Hollywood studios?). And no, it's not ok. Just because you think some made-up legal right trumps human cultural experience doesn't mean you're right.
It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost. It matters. Just not to you. I think basically 99% of your argument boils down to "I don't care enough about games preservation, and therefore I don't see the problem".
No, that's the point. "Can" doesn't mean they do; only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.
I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.
> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.
All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.