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In other words, you don't care about preservation, which makes the rest of your arguments moot.

If you think copyright is a goal rather than a means for culture, then you're wrong and everything you say stems from something misguided.

Nodding in agreement again.

I think Aliens has a couple of additions that do make sense, Ripley being told of her daughter and the scene with the miniguns, but that's about it.

Agreed about the rest, you're basically reading my mind about how I feel about movies.

Ah, so they pulled a Moana 2 with Mando?

If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.

Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?

Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).

I think you're simply unfamiliar with the topic. Have you ever interacted with abandonware communities from 20+ years ago? Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.

In many cases, all that remains of these games is the cracked digital versions, the physical versions don't exist anymore. The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release, AI or not.

Also, a lot of "legally available" software from today (say, via GOG who do own the rights) has the fingerprints of crackers who made it possible for the software to run today.

> And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.

Regular pirates distribute recent games, which is obviously an entirely different matter. The abandonware community is/was concerned with preserving digital artifacts and games for posterity, and making old stuff playable today. Games that otherwise would have been lost, forgotten, or simply impossible to play. Those are completely different goals, and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement".

I don't want to offend you, but your initial claim that abandonware crews decades ago should have somehow foreseen AI would make cracking/fixing easier is the most deranged thing I've read in a while. It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.

Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?

Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].

It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)

> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.

It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.

I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...

Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.

It still seems weird to me when I hear people seemingly talking to themselves as if hallucinating. It always surprises me until I realize what's happening.

I mean, "should"?... I don't know. Death is natural, but so is fear of death and not wanting to bring up topics that disturb you.

We're not discussing geological or cosmic eras, just shorter biological processes. Systems can persist for enormous (but still human bound) periods of time.

"Nothing is supposed to <something>" is a meaningless assertion for entropy. Entropy doesn't suppose things. "Suppose to" implies intent.

Also, entropy might not be directly related to the biological process of aging. I mean, that's the point of TFA.

> Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try

"Supposed" by whom?

> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).

Heh, I know what you mean. I enjoyed the action minigames and figuring out what to do, but some people found them frustrating.

Mostly, what I remember is the outstanding voice acting, and the most memorable intro ever.

Yeah, whenever I think of Maureen I think of two things: asphalt, and trouble...

It's the theme and characters. Remember this game predates Coco by a lot!

If the Day of the Dead setting does nothing for you, then you'll dislike the game. But if it intrigues you, you'll likely love it.

The puzzles are arbitrary, it's not really what the game is about.

I also remember the criticism of Full Throttle, but it always rang hollow to me: a game is not just the puzzles, and also some people complained about the action sequences, but for me they were welcome (even if too easy). Everything about the game is golden: the setting about bikers (how cool is that?), the 2D pixel animation, the amazing voice acting and the opening by the Gone Jackals. I fell in love with the game back then, and I still like it on replays.

Agreed. Grim Fandango is a game that's all about the setting and characters. For that alone it's a masterpiece. But the puzzles... ehh..

"That isn't me" in the above comment means "I know I can grieve, but I can only tell indirectly other people can do so as well."

It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".

Haha, sort of. I guess I disagree with your claim the majority of people think math is "more" than proof. The majority of people think it's less: they think it's doing high school arithmetic. Most people don't know what a proof or a theorem are. They think math is doing calculations with numbers.

A majority? I doubt it, simply because the majority doesn't know what math is at all.

At university level introductory calculus, the person teaching class had to reassure students that math wasn't entirely arithmetic or adding up numbers. He did this because it's a common misunderstanding.

Fanfiction.net is a niche. None of my scifi loving, tech friends are aware it exists. And neither did I (or was barely aware or it, anyway), until you just mentioned it. I'm not young either, and I'm more online than the average (I know of Something Awful, Slashdot, 4chan, etc).

A while ago, a friend told me about Harry Potter's Rationality fanfic and he didn't know who Yudkowsky was, he just thought it was some random author doing a parody of HP. LessWrong is of course very niche, my friend didn't have the faintest idea of what LW was.

Even worse: the comment was obviously referencing TFA, which your dismissive retort failed to address, falling back to the cliche of "every generation complains about the new and thinks old stuff was better".

It's a thought-terminating cliche that fails to add anything to the discussion. At least you could have made it a top-level comment about TFA, so it wouldn't read as (empty) criticism of the comment you were replying to.

"This site" doesn't exist. Individual people do. And you'll see plenty of people all hyped over AI or any new tech here.

I think your comment is dismissive of valid criticism. Sorry, but I'm not convinced by the line of (blanket) argument who goes "the old always complain about the young". It fails to engage with the actual details of the criticism.

I thought this was how credit cards were used the world over. It's certainly how I use them. How do Americans use them that differs from this? Color me confused.

(Also: installments. They are often the norm in my country, but I understand they are less common for Americans).

Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like.

Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don't see the contradiction. It's more like "I don't generally like sweet things, but this cake is nice". Where's the contradiction?

I love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;)

I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.

Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!