AnimalsDream
@AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
- Submitted 3 days ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 5 comments
- Comment on Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered 6 days ago:
I am looking forward to playing the Remaster. It sounds like they’ve fixed pretty much everything I didn’t like about the original Oblivion - like the awful level up system. Hopefully they rebalanced the “difficulty” in a good way too. Last time I played Oblivion I remember higher difficulties being boring because it mostly meant even the weakest enemies would take a billion hits to kill.
Skyblivion will be fun to play too.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 1 week ago:
This will never happen.
15 or so years ago people were saying the same thing about decentralized social media. Yet here we are.
The problem with decentralized stuff is that anyone can put anything, so piracy will be omnipresent there
This isn’t unique to decentralized platforms. Piracy is omnipresent. Yet people still buy stuff. But to address your question more concretely, imagine the store system is designed to be federated. Any instance owner can decide to what degree they would enforce anti-piracy measures. DMCA law requires a good faith effort on the part of a site owner to stop piracy, so any instance owner who wants to run a legitimate shop must properly vet game submissions to make sure they aren’t infringing copyright, and aren’t plagiarizing. They would also have to defederate from all pirate instances, but they would not be responsible for instances that have nothing to do with their own. People who choose to use the instances for piracy would be off on the margins of the internet, just like they are now.
why would you pay for a game when the seller next store is giving it away for free (or much cheaper)
Good question, since you already have that option for virtually all games, why do you pay for them? My reasons are because I generally do want to support the creators I like, as well as because a lot of pirated content is questionable in quality (ie., potential malware). Why do people pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when they can get the same OS for free, even legally? Continuing support in that case. Point is, people buy because they believe the value of buying is greater than what’s available for free, whatever reasons those might be.
and how would you distinguish between “EA” selling the Sims 1 there and “TheRealEA” selling the Sims 1 there for the same price.
I dunno dude, how do we do this now? A stupid checkmark? There’s gotta be better ways than a stupid checkmark. PGP signatures would probably be a good start. Maybe incorporate a web of trust implementation? How does Valve do it? I’m not an expert on the subject, here’s a Wikipedia page about the topic.
Also decentralized card information is a bad idea, so you would either need a centralized paying hub, setup your card with every seller, or only be able to use crypto to pay, all of those are bad in their own way.
Yeah, let that be a problem for the person who wants to decentralize payment systems. A more practical solution? Just include the popular payment methods that already exist. Except crypto currencies, that shit can fuck off.
You gave all these explanations for why a decentralized game shop couldn’t work, but all of them are not only not especially hard to solve for such a platform, but are also just common challenges for all of the internet. It’s like the 90s all over again when people insisted that open-source software itself couldn’t work. Yet, again, here we are.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 week ago:
Lol. All I’m trying to say is that Vi at least tries to adhere to the Unix philosophy, and knows it’s a text editor. Emacs is more of an Eldritch creature.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 1 week ago:
I’d like to see an open-source decentralized game store, like a competitor to Steam, GOG, etc. However, I think it should also target emulators. There’s still an unfounded stigma toward emulation even though emulators themselves are legal, and even though the big AAA game companies themselves are now using them as a lazy way to repackage and resell their old games on new platforms.
One of the biggest barriers to entry into emulation is the setup. Even with super user-friendly frontends like Emulation Station, people are still required to either go out of their way to either legally backup the games they already own, or told to “do some searches,” because of legal issues. Nevermind how this exposes new users to potential malware.
But people still make new games for these old systems. It’s entirely possible to make a store that can sell ROMs legally - one already exists, itch.io. But imagine a federated open-source game store, one where game makers can choose to legally sell their own games, and then create plugins for the emulation frontends to allow people to buy roms directly from those interfaces. It would turn emulation into a fully complete console-like experience, all while being available on more platforms than any console could ever hope to be (including those same consoles when they’re jailbroken!)
I also think it would be the final puzzle piece that legitimizes emulation.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 week ago:
I get the joke, but does it really make sense to even begin comparing Emacs to Vi(m) anymore? It’s almost like comparing a full Linux distro to nano.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 week ago:
I don’t know how it compares, but I’ve been meaning to give Zettlr a try. The thing about notes apps is, to me at least, few digital tools are more personal. For some people it’s their diaries. Because of that I would consider privacy to be such a critical feature that I would never even consider using a proprietary app no matter how many bells and whistles it has, or how many people swear by it.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 1 week ago:
I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.
If I remember correctly, Blender began it’s life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.
- Comment on LG TVs’ integrated ads get more personal with tech that analyzes viewer emotions 1 week ago:
I guess that would beg the question, how much is it worth to you pay extra to not have additional spyware in your home? Or as others have said in this thread, there is at least one brand of television that still sells dumb tvs.
- Comment on LG TVs’ integrated ads get more personal with tech that analyzes viewer emotions 1 week ago:
Simple solution I use: Fuck television sets, get a computer monitor and basic speakers instead. A display should do only one thing and do it well.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’m sorry but none of this seems to add up. I read the book you linked, the entire thing, and I didn’t really learn anything new from it. In my own searches I’ve found a number of competing image generation systems, most of them just use Stable Diffusion - including Horde, which makes sense as it is open-source and readily available. But others have their own solutions, and some even use their own datasets. I’ve also done other searches and found a variety of instructions on how people can put together their own datasets. Between all of the options, it seems pretty clear to me that even now it is entirely possible for people to use these AI tools without ever needing to come into any contact with “stolen” (ie., copyright infringed - it’s not theft) artwork.
But I’m not going to link to any of these things because I don’t want to endorse or promote anything without taking sufficient time to be really sure that they are in fact ethical, which honestly I’m probably not going to do at least for the time being, since I have no need to use any of these anyway. But yeah, ethical ai art is entirely possible, no copyright ever needs to be infringed, and this is something anyone can do today if they’re inclined to make the searches and assemble free source images themselves.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
When you say, “However what you’re hypothesizing cannot exist, due to the nature of a diffusion model. The source that the images are generated from, all of that was stolen in 2021. It was illegally scraped.”, are you referring to Laion-5B?
- Comment on There’s AI Inside Windows Paint and Notepad Now 1 week ago:
Pinta has become my favorite image editing tool. Every other one I feel like I have to fight with in order to do anything (looking at you Gimp), but Pinta is so easy and intuitive it’s a joy to use.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
No offense taken. It is still a strawman though, because regardless of the realness of what I’m talking about, they’re still referring to something different and then attacking that as if it is the thing I’m talking about.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
I haven’t looked into it too much, because I don’t bother to use these things myself. But if I remember, there are some systems that are open-source, can be run locally, and then a person could train those systems on only public domain and freely licensed works. That is the kind I’m talking about, so bringing up the systems I’m not talking about is just a strawman.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
No, it’s not. Why are you like this?
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
None of the hypothetical methods I described would do that.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
Also wanna add that in theory I’m not against AI art generation, only the way it’s usually implemented. All creativity is derivative, and as long as the user is remixing free and public domain content, I think the gained accessibility for far more people to bring their expressions to life where they otherwise would not have been able to, is worth far more than the perceived threats felt by a stagnant copy monopolist industry.
But the key thing here is proper implementation. It’s like every time we get a new toy, we forget all over again that software freedom is a moral imperative in all forms of software.
- Comment on this is not satire this is not satire this is not satire 1 week ago:
To be fair, sourcing vegan-friendly art supplies is often significantly more frustrating than finding vegan food. But as others have said, doing - do I call it ‘traditional digital’ art? - is going to have a much smaller environmental impact than AI generation systems that are dependent on servers. A used Thinkpad x230 > Midjourney?
- Comment on Hades 2 will be a Nintendo Switch 2 console exclusive at launch 2 weeks ago:
Having already purchased the Steam early access version, I was ready to be pissed off until I read further in.
- Comment on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis 3 weeks ago:
I mean yeah, I just said above that someone almost killed me. They were probably a human driver. But that’s a “might happen, never know.” If self driving cars are rear-ending people, that’s an inherent artifact of it’s programming, even though it’s not intentionally programmed to do that.
So it’s like, things were already bad. I already do not feel safe doing any biking anymore. But as self driving cars become more prevalent, that threat upgrades to a kind of defacto, “Oh, these vast stretches of land are places where only cars and trucks are allowed. Everything else is roadkill waiting to happen.”
- Comment on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis 3 weeks ago:
I imagine bicyclists must be effected as well if they’re on the road (as we should be, technically). As somebody who has already been literally inches away from being rear-ended, this makes me never want to bike in the US again.
Time to go to Netherlands.
- Comment on There are probably fediverse instances being run by governments for surveillance purposes 3 weeks ago:
Something like Tor, and a proper education in keeping identities compartmentalized would be more appropriate for a use-case where someone is trying to maintain anonymity. VPN is mostly only good for a bit of wifi security and piracy.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 4 weeks ago:
Completely agree. I almost said something about PoE, but then I remembered how within a few areas explored I had quickly turned my character into a flying meat grinder who could bonk explosive materials out of monsters.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 4 weeks ago:
The older Final Fantasy games. I made a point of doing a playthrough of the NES version of FF1, and I’m glad I did. The increased difficulty over the GBA version is mostly better than the absolute lack of challenge in later versions, but the added content and qol improvements make it preferable to play a hardmode hack of the gba version in the future.
The NES FF2 is just too much. I lose stats? No thanks.
And I’m really glad the Pixel Remaster version of FF3 exists now, the NES version was pretty unpolished and glitchy.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 4 weeks ago:
This is kind of the opposite for me. I didn’t try the original Diablo until long after playing plenty of more modern arpgs. While it’s very rough around the edges compared to current titles, I feel like it has something unique that later games lost - even D2. I think it’s the combo of your character feeling underpowered, like not much more than a normal person immersed in a world of otherworldly horrors; the way the darkness and aesthetic really comes together to create an atmosphere; and the slower, crunchier gameplay.
Pretty much all newer games put way too much emphasis on letting you play essentially a Marvel-style superhero who fills the screen with bright lights, and more more more numbers go up.
But then again I guess I have to admit I still spend more time playing the newer games.
- Comment on Now that's an interesting question 5 weeks ago:
Yup, that’s the part that drives me most crazy.
- Comment on Definitely didn't waste half an hour making this 5 weeks ago:
If it’s literally only one pencil for the rest of my life, probably the GraphGear 1000 since it would probably last the longest. If I can continue using multiple copies of the same kind of pencil, then it would be number 2 since that would be the most versatile and available one to use.
- Comment on Now that's an interesting question 5 weeks ago:
That’s English for ya! You would think that after the Great Vowel Shift people would have considered re-spelling words and names to more properly fit their roots, but evidently instead they just decided to start pronouncing everything wrong.
