korazail

@korazail@lemmy.myserv.one

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll admit that I should have been more clear that I was paraphrasing and interpreting instead of actually quoting you. The previous message was right above mine, though, so I though it was pretty clear.

  Just as you have written me off, I’ve done the same for you. I’m just responding for anyone else who reads this far down and finds this thread, and only because I’m in a waiting room and this is more interesting than HGTV.

  I said, and I quote:

  I still don’t get your angle. Why are you defending this… I assume the lack of a defense is clear enough proof that you don’t have one.

  Palantir scouring the internet, cloud cameras like Flock, Facebook and Google retaining your data forever to maximize profit. None of that is defensible. We should be sounding alarms like OP did and making sure people are aware. Putting others down for ‘not having caught on yet’ (interpreted, you can still correct me if I’m misunderstanding) is counterproductive. We can still resist or reverse the power these huge companies have… but there might be a point where it becomes too late.

  Would you prefer to be someone who helped fight, or someone who complained it was futile until it was?

  Call your Senators and Representatives. Demand privacy. Elect and support people who are against these kinds of overreach if the current ones won’t.

  Love you!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Anyone could already do this, so why bother being worried that it’s easier now” they said.

  I still don’t get your angle. Why are you defending this, or at the very least downplaying it’s impacts? You seem to also be aggravated by this data collection and spying, so why are you so mad that other people are catching on?

  “Oh, I’m so smart” they said. Enjoy your useless internet points?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s not what I said. Widespread data collection and searching used to be something only state actors could accomplish and there were at least theoretically guard rails. Now the barrier of entry has been seriously reduced, the data is owned by a corporation, and being fed to AI. That has a chilling effect as well as being ripe for abuse.

  I don’t see an upside.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to say that this is actually spooky.

  Not that it’s unreasonable, but that the scale of what AI can surveil is so vast that there’s no more personal security-via-obscurity.

  It used to be that unless someone had a reason to start looking at you, anything you did online or off was effectively impossible to search. You might be caught on some store’s CCTV, Or your cell provider might have location pings, but that wasn’t online for anyone and needed a warrant to have the police use it to track your activities. Now cities are using Flock and similar tools to enable tracking vehicles across the country without any reason, and stores are using cloud-service AI cameras to attempt to track your mood as you move through the store. These tools can and have been abused.

  Now, due to the harvesting of this data for AI, anything that’s ever been recorded (video footage, social media posts, etc) and used as training data can be correlated much more easily, long after it occurred, and without needing to be law enforcement with a warrant.

  I’d call that spooky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨soda⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And you are a hero to that plow driver. And others like you are heroes to the people that also had to be out on terrible weather days and holidays.

  I assume a gas station could run without anyone present, leaving the convenience store part closed, but having someone on-hand to hit an e-stop if needed is pretty important.

  My goal is not to devalue your work, but rather to support it. “Essential workers” are called that for a reason. We should work to ensure that they are paid their worth. Just because it’s not necessarily a “skilled” job doesn’t mean it’s not important. The bro running the local hedge fund is providing way less actual value than anyone in a service job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No excuses⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is so me.

  I live in a neighborhood with a school. Lots of children roam the streets. Presumably, they are taught to always look both ways, expect cars to misbehave, and otherwise look out for their safety. I haven’t heard of any injuries from cars.

  I constantly watch cars, especially the oversized trucks, blow through stop signs, or accelerate to 35 mph on a 1/4 mile stretch of road with side street parking. It really boggles my mind when these same drivers then stop just before the school and drop their kids off to walk the rest of the way. Do you not understand that you put local neighborhood kids at risk from the driving you do, just to save a few moments of avoiding the actual car rider line? Where child safety is a priority.

  “Nice stop!”

  And then at night, delivery drivers blast through the area. Ignoring stop signs, driving excessively fast past parked cars. Kids live here, and they don’t always remember to look. Especially at dusk, when kids are still playing, but visibility is poor. These drivers gamble with three lives: the inexperienced child, their own, and that of the family that would grieve. For what? A few seconds?

  Be nice to each other!!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for your reply, and I can still see how it might work.

  I’m curious if you have any resources that do some end-to-end examples. This is where I struggle. If I have an atomic piece of code I need and I can maybe get it started with a LLM and finish it by hand, but anything larger seems to just always fail. So far the best video I found to try a start-to-finish demo was this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AWEPx5cHWQ

  He spends plenty of time describing the tools and how to use them, but when we get to the actual work, we spend 20 minutes telling the LLM that it’s doing stuff wrong. There’s eventually a prototype, but to get there he had to alternate between ‘I still can’t jump’ and ‘here’s the new error.’ He eventually modified code himself, so even getting a ‘mario clone’ running requires an actual developer and the final result was underwhelming at best.

  For me, a ‘game’ is this tiny product that could be a viable unit. It doesn’t need to talk to other services, it just needs to react to user input. I want to see a speed-run of someone using LLMs to make a game that is playable. It doesn’t need to be “fun”, but the video above only got to the ‘player can jump and gets game over if hitting enemy’ stage. How much extra effort would it take to make the background not flat blue? Is there a win condition? How to refactor this so that the level is not hard-coded? Multiple enemy types? Shoot a fireball that bounces? Power Ups? And does doing any of those break jump functionality again? How much time do I have to spend telling the LLM that the fireball still goes through the floor and doesn’t kill an enemy when it hits them?

  I could imagine that if the LLM was handed a well described design document and technical spec that it could do better, but I have yet to see that demonstrated. Given what it produces for people publishing tutorials online, I would never let it handle anything business critical.

  The video is an hour long, and spends about 20 minutes in the middle actually working on the project. I probably couldn’t do better, but I’ve mostly forgotten my javascript and HTML canvas. If kaboom.js was my focus, though, I imagine I could knock out what he did in well under 20 minutes and have a better architected design that handled the above questions.

  I’ve, luckily, not yet been mandated that I embed AI into my pseudo-developer role, but they are asking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is what will kill vibe coding, but not before there’s significant damage done. Junior developers will be let go and senior devs will be told they have to use these tools instead and to be twice as efficient. At some point enough major companies will have had data breaches through AI-generated code that they all go back to using people, but there will be tons of vulnerable code everywhere. And letting Cursor touch your codebase for a year, even with oversight, will make it really tricky to find all the places it subtly fucked up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have 3 questions, and I’m coming from a heavily AI-skeptic position, but am open:

  1. Do you believe that providing all that context, describing the existing patterns, creating an implementation plan, etc, allows the AI to both write better code and faster than if you just did it yourself? To me, this just seems like you have to re-write your technical documentation in prose each time you want to do something. You are saying this is better than ‘Do XYZ’, but how much twiddling of your existing codebase do you need to do before an AI can understand the business context of it? I don’t currently do development on an existing codebase, but every time I try to get these tools to do something fairly simple from scratch, they just flail. Maybe I’m just not spending the hours to build my AI-parsable functional spec. Every time I’ve tried this, asking something as simple as (and paraphrased for brevity) “write an Asteroids clone using JavaScript and HTML 5 Canvas” results in a full failure, even with multiple retries chasing errors. I wrote something like that a few years ago to learn Javascript and it took me a day-ish to get something that mostly worked.

  2. Speaking of that context. Are you running your models locally, or do you have some cloud service? If you give your entire codebase to a 3rd party as context, how much of your company’s secret sauce have you disclosed? I’d imagine most sane companies are doing something to make their models local, but we see regular news articles about how ChatGPT is training on user input and leaking sensitive data if you ask it nicely and I can’t imagine all the pro-AI CEOs are aware of the risks here.

  3. How much pen-testing time are you spending on this code, error handling, edge cases, race conditions, data sanitation? An experienced dev understands these things innately, having fixed these kinds of issues in the past and knows the anti-patterns and how to avoid them. In all seriousness, I think this is going to be the thing that actually kills AI vibe coding, but it won’t be fast enough. There will be tons of new exploits in what used to be solidly safe places. Your new web front-end? It has a really simple SQL injection attack. Your phone app? You can tell it your username is admin’joe@google.com and it’ll let you order stuff for free since you’re an admin.

  I see a place for AI-generated code, for instant functions that do something blending simple and complex. “Hey claude, write a function to take a string and split it at the end of every sentence containing an uppercase A”. I had to write weird functions like that constantly as a sysadmin, and transforming data seems like a thing an AI could help me accelerate. I just don’t see that working on a larger scale, though, or trusting an AI enough to allow it to integrate a new function like that into an existing codebase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d wager that the votes are irrelevant. Stock overflow is generously <50% good code and is mostly people saying ‘this code doesn’t work – why?’ and that is the corpus these models were trained on.

  I’ve yet to see something like a vibe coding livestream where something got done. I can only find a lot of ‘tutorials’ that tell how to set up tools. Anyone want to provide one?

  I could… possibly… imagine a place where someone took quality code from a variety of sources and generate a model that was specific to a single language, and that model was able to generate good code, but I don’t think we have that.

  Vibe coders: Even if your code works and seems to be a success, do you know why it works, how it works? Does it handle edge cases you didn’t include in your prompt? Does it expose the database to someone smarter than the LLM? Does it grant an attacker access to the computer it’s running on, if they are smarter than the LLM? Have you asked your LLM how many 'r’s are in strawberry?

  At the very least, we will have a cyber-security crisis due to vibe coding; especially since there seems to be a high likelihood of HR and Finance vibe coders who think they can do the traditional IT/Dev work without understanding what they are doing and how to do it safely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung brings ads to US fridges⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is my fear. It’s still possible, barely, to buy a dumb TV. When my current fridge/dishwasher/stove/etc dies in a few years, will there even be a dumb version? Will it cost 5x the price of a spyware version? How about my thermostat. HVAC? Car? And will attempting to disable any of this spyware land me in prison?

  Right now, uninformed/unaware/stupid people are affected by this. Pretty soon, everyone will be, or they will have to forego things we consider to be necessities now, like refrigeration and cell phones or be rich enough to buy the privacy-focused models.

  I can’t immediately find it, but I just saw another post about a new privacy-focused cellphone with a huge price tag. The established manufacturers have a cost advantage. Samsung et al. can easily make a new fridge with fewer consumer rights, but a new company will have to spend tons of capital to make a factory to put out a comparable product; and they won’t have the advantage of selling your data to subsidize the price.

  Privacy is and will become more-so a commodity unless we fight for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That new hire might eat resources, but they actually learn from their mistakes and gain experience. If you can’t hold on to them once they have experience, that’s a you problem. Be more capitalist and compete for their supply of talent; if you are not willing to pay for the real human, then you can have a shitty AI that will never grow beyond a ‘new hire.’

  The future problem, though, is that without the experience of being a junior dev, where do you think senior devs come from? Can’t fix crappy code if all you know how to do is engineer prompts to a new hire.

  “For want of a nail,” no one knew how to do anything in 2030. Doctors were AI, Programmers were AI, Artists were AI, Teachers were AI, Students were AI, Politicians were AI. Humanity suffered and the world suffocated under the energy requirements of doing everything poorly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex got hacked.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I fully agree: Companies and their leadership should be held accountable when they cut corners and disregard customer data security. The ideal solution would be that a company is required to not store any information beyond what is required to provide the service, a la GDPR, but with a much stricter limit. I would put “marketing” outside that boundary. As a youtube user, you need literally nothing, maybe a username and password to retain history and inferred preferences, but trying to collect info about me should be punished. If your company can’t survive without targeted content, your company should not survive.

  In bygone days, your car’s manufacturer didn’t know anything about you and we still bought cars. Not to start a whole new thread, but this ties in to right-to-repair and subscriptions for features as well. I did not buy a license to the car, I bought the fucking car; a license to use the car is called a lease.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex got hacked.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand what you are saying, and what you want… but admitting fault publicly is a huge liability, as they have then stated it was their negligence that caused the issue. (bear with me and read this wall of text – or skip to the last paragraph)

  I’ve worked in the Sec Ops space, and it’s an arms race all the time. There are tools to help identify issues and breaches quickly, but the attack surface is just not something that can be managed 100%. Even if you know there is a problem, you probably have to send an issue to a developer team to update their dependency and then they might need to change their code as well and get a code review approved and get a window to promote to production. A Zero-Day vulnerability is not something you can anticipate.

  You’ve seen the XKCD of the software stack where a tiny peg is propping up the whole thing? The same idea applies to security, but the tiny peg is a supply chain attack where some dependency is either vulnerable, or attacked by malicious actors and through that gain access to your environment.

  Maybe your developers leverage WidgetX1Z library for their app, and the WidgetX1Z library just updated with a change-log that looks reasonable, but the new code has a backdoor that allows an attacker to compromise your developers computer. They now have a foothold in your environment even with rigorous controls. I’ve yet to meet a developer who didn’t need, or at least want, full admin rights on their box. You now have an attacker with local admin inside your network. They might trip alarms, but by then the damage might be done and they were able to harvest the dev database of user accounts and send it back home. That dev database was probably a time-delayed copy of prod, so that the developer could be entirely sure there were no negative impacts of their changes.

  I’m not saying this is what happened to Plex, but the idea that modern companies even CAN fully control the data they have is crazy. Unless you are doing full code reviews of all third-party libraries and changes or writing everything in-house (which would be insane), with infallible review, you cannot fully protect against a breach. And even then I’m not sure.

  The real threat here is what data do companies collect about us? If all they have is a username, password and company-specific data, then the impact of a breach is not that big – you, as a consumer, should not re-use a password. When they collect tons of other information about us such as age, race, location, gender, sex, orientation, habits, preferences, contacts, partners, politics, etc, then those details become available for anyone willing to pay. We should use breach notifications like this to push for stronger data laws that prevent companies from collecting, storing, buying or selling personal data about their customers. It is literally impossible for a company to fully protect that information, so it should not be allowed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump posted this in Truth.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Two comments, and I know this is now old news: it’s insane to see someone/somegroup get SO pissy for being hit with a soft, non-lethal projectile; and while I understand how he was likely carrying it, upon further review the clip above seems to show that this man is a sandwich-mancer and can summon subs from thin air.

  I don’t normally like to use the AI summary of a search, but this one was funny: Force of rubber bullet vs sandwich

  Image

  I’m glad they failed to indict him, and I hope he finds success in another place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  HK was that good.

  If you are at all a fan of souls-likes, metroidvanias, environmental storytelling, then you need to give the original more than 10 minutes.

  Enjoy it as a metroidvania and beat the final boss – then realize you still have places you haven’t fully explored…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  not a locksmith, but…

  One of those candidates for ‘worst memorable phrase in history’ is the old “duct-tape for things that move and shouldn’t and wd-40 for things that should move and don’t”.

  WD-40 isn’t a lubricant. It often works to get something un-stuck, but then you need to still clean and lubricate the parts to keep it working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Full agree. It’s scary. These companies have collected enough data on us all – sometimes (often?) through things we didn’t directly use and thus didn’t need to accept any T&C for, such as surveillance cameras in a business or public street – that they can predict our actions, moods, and make inferences about our lives.

  They have been doing this for YEARS, and they are constantly getting better. They don’t even need health data, but I can guarantee they want it. I remember noticing that we had a phase where my wife was being advertised baby products on her streaming service. We were not having another child, but the timing was eerily close to the interval between #1 and #2. I actually just had a hesitation about divulging that I have 2 kids, but then said fuck it, they already know.

  Add to all that the ‘for the children’ angle, which I’ve always hated. It’s such a transparent lie that anyone with a lick of common sense can see through it. For anyone even on the fence, this is the foot in the door: Allow them the ability to track you ‘for the children’ and they will track you for the corporation as well, and the government, and your ex-boyfriend who is now a cop.

  Fight this shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s almost like the privacy alarmists, who have been screaming for decades, were on to something.

  Some people saw the beginning of Minority Report and thought, ‘that sounds like a good idea.’

  We used to be in a world where it was unfeasible to watch everyone, and you could get away with small ‘crimes’ like complaining about the president online because it was impossible to get a warrant for surveillance without any evidence. Now, we have systems like Flock cameras, ChatGPT and others that generate alerts to law enforcement on their own, subverting a need for a warrant in the first place. And more and more frequently, you both can’t opt out and are unable to avoid them.

  For now, the crime might be driving a car with a license plate flagged as stolen (or one where OCR mistakes a number), but all it takes is a tiny nudge further towards fascism before you can be auto-SWATted because the sentiment of your draft sms is determined to be negative towards the fuhrer.

  Even now, I’m sacrificing myself to warn people. This message is on the internet and federated to multiple instances. There’s no way I can’t be identified by it with enough resources. Once it’s too late, I’ll be already on the list of people to remove.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The time and expense of commuting is theft, if that job can be done from home.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Which CEO downvoted this?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The time and expense of commuting is theft, if that job can be done from home.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Upvoting, but also commenting to say that employees are at a disadvantage in almost all cases: a company can almost certainly absorb your loss but most people cannot absorb the loss of their income.

  Asking for a raise could get you fired (sorry, “let go”), especially if you’re in a position where there’s an eager new applicant just waiting for a position to open up, such as any service-industry job.

  Even niche skilled jobs are not immune. If your cost approaches the value your employer extracts from your labor, then you will be left jobless and you may find it hard to find a comparable position if your skill-set is tightly focused. If you’re the one COBOL programmer at your company, you are underpaid; the moment you demand your actual worth, they will figure out how to pivot that old code-base to something more modern, even if it costs millions of dollars to license and switch to a new ERP platform or similar bullshit.

  I’ve turned this WFH rant into a worker protection rant, so back on topic: Wouldn’t it be nice to just … not have to drive to a place to put your butt in a seat when your butt could be at a seat at home and do the exact same thing? I get that some jobs don’t work that way, but many (probably most) do.

  In 2020, we witnessed most jobs at company headquarters around the world being done at home and nothing exploded. Almost everything done from a cubicle can be done from home. Wouldn’t it be nice to knock down those buildings and make them green spaces instead?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breaking the generational barriers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Another thing you can do is to separate the grease from any residual solids.

  If you have a jar of bacon grease with brown bits floating around in it, you can put it in a pot with a similar amount of water and bring it all up to a boil or just near it for just a moment. The grease will sit on top of the hot water, but anything else will fall down. Then let the pot cool and put it in the fridge to solidify the grease. You can then scoop the now-solid grease in big chunks and put it back in the jar and discard any bits in the water.

  I learned this from people who do at-home soap-making from their rendered fats. They would repeat it a few times before adding lye, as it will leach impurities such as salt, aromatic and favor compounds from the fat, but I find doing it once or twice leaves me with a nice cooking fat that still has bacon-y aroma.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2 is "ready" for early access says co-founder ousted from studio, but the publishers seem to disagree⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey… They have a public contact page that looks like it would be taken somewhat seriously, as it feels legal in nature. I’ll be letting them know that their leadership is engaging in unfair deals shortly. Anyone want to join in?

  Speakup@krafton.com Via krafton.com/en/speakup

  Worst case, we get ignored. Best is that they take notice that the audience they bought isn’t theirs blindly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica 2 is "ready" for early access says co-founder ousted from studio, but the publishers seem to disagree⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same. Fuck greedy publishers/IP holders. I want to see more Subnautica, but also want to ignore anything krafton touches.

  Apropos the setting, I think the high seas is the way to accomplish both, but i fear that will just result in the studio going dark altogether.

  Unknown Worlds has done good work, but will probably be yet another casualty of greedy leadership.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI supremo Sam Altman says he 'doesn't know how' he would have taken care of his baby without the help of ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Like many things, a tool is only as smart as the wielder. There’s still a ton of critical thinking that needs to happen as you do something as simple as bake bread. Using an AI tool to suggest ingredients can be useful from a creative perspective, but should not be assumed accurate at face value. Raisins and Dill? maybe ¯\(ツ)/¯, haven’t tried that one myself.

  I like AI, for being able to add detail to things or act as a muse, but it cannot be trusted for anything important. This is why I’m ‘anti-AI’. Too many people (especially in leadership roles) see this tool as a solution for replacing expensive humans with something that ‘does the thinking’; but as we’ve seen elsewhere in this thread, AI CANT THINK. It only suggests items that are statistically likely to be next/near based on its input.

  In the Security Operations space, we have a phrase “trust but verify”. For anything AI, I would use 'doubt, then verify" instead. That all said. AI might very well give you a pointer to the place to ask how much motrin an infant should get. Hopefully, that’s your local pediatrician.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there is potential that this was intended.

  PalWorld was SO on the nose modeled after pokemon plus Breath of the Wild that it couldn’t be anything but a stab at Nintendo. And yet, it seems that (I’m not a lawyer) they skirted around ever actually infringing on copyrights. If you want to build a zoo full of creatures, there are only so many ways you can combine things without making a fire dog or ice dragon, and then comparisons can be made. PalWorld has many creatures that I don’t recognize as being similar to existing pokemon. Given that Nintendo has not gone after PalWorld for copyright infringement, I’d say that means they don’t have a case.

  Patents are another angle, and I’m far from a patent lawyer. Have you ever read one? They are full of jargon and what seem to be nonsense words, especially a software patent for a video game. I found an article that describes how Nintendo can use a ‘new’ patent to attack PalWorld, but near the end he clearly calls out that there is a difference between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate.’ I can’t seem to find the actual ‘throwing a ball to make a thing happen’ new patent, but I’d assume PalWorld doesn’t infringe the original patent, or Nintendo would have just used that one. The article author also notes how Nintendo applied for a divisional patent near the end of a window for doing so, which presumably extends the total lifetime of the patent protection. A new divisional patent last year probably means we have 40 years of no ‘ball-throwing mechanics.’

  I hope that this whole thing is a stunt. PalWorld was commercially successful, and even if they lose and have to modify the game, it will remain successful. I think that there’s a possibility that the developer and publisher are fighting against software patents kind of in general and used PalWorld as bait that Nintendo fell for.

  If they lose, then there will be a swath of gamers who are at least mildly outraged at software patents. Popular opinion can (occasionally) sway policy.

  If they win, then we have another chink in the armor of software patents as a whole. See Google vs Oracle regarding the ability to patent an API.

  If we can manage to kill software patents for gameplay mechanics, like throwing balls at things, being able to take off and land seamlessly, or having a recurring enemy taunt you, then we get better games that remix things that worked.

  Imagine how terribly different games would be if someone had patented “A action where a user presses a button to swing their weapon, and if that weapon hits an enemy, that enemy takes damage.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This speaks for itself⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My local one changed the play place into a conference room. That’s where adults have fun… right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This speaks for itself⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The McDonalds near me recently clobbered their tiny playplace and turned it into a … conference room/center?

  About the only time I went there was when I need a place for my kiddos to spend some energy on a rainy day at like 8am, before other things opened. I was happy to buy a coffee and biscuit for myself and maybe a treat for them to pay for my occupancy.

  Now, though, and I know I wasn’t a giant source of income, they have lost my custom and I just can’t see how any real business would ever run a meeting in a McDonalds conference room, so it just seems like a dumb move.

  Maybe they want to discourage parents bringing their children? That also seems pretty stupid.