I just finished Hail Mary Project which I started last week - really enjoyed it. It scratched a perfect itch for some optimistic sci-fi.

I think I am starting to lean towards ebooks for the convenience when reading novels and prosey nonfiction.

However for reference books a physical thing is easier to flip through, and for anything with illustrations, physical still has better quality.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn’t mention steam or valve. I don’t know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they’ve explained it very badly.

My point was that brave’s solution, like Signal’s, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don’t want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.

I picked up Project Hail Mary from the library this week. Only just started but I’m enjoying it so far.

They haven’t blocked the windows feature, they’re using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

I take issue with this article using the language “lagging behind in the use of generative AI”. That language seems to imply there is something wrong in this behaviour.

Good idea - if you also cap car speeds at 15mph

Netflix’s short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that’s a problem.

This is why you keep a several hundred megabytes history file set to remember “forever”

fiercely confident of their own independence

In fairness, if you let the average cat out into nature it would be fine. Dump the average libertarian into nature and they wont last the night.

This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.

If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as ‘Palantir says it has given up on AI’. Then I read the article and was left dejected.

Adjusted to the initial sale value of the car - Less easy to cheat by not declaring income, and bigger cars (likely more expensive) that take up more space, pay more.

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It’s an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

“Key franchises”? And they don’t think WW is a key franchise? Out of all their films from the past few years, the WW ones have been some of the best. If they don’t want to do anything with it, they don’t deserve the IP.

I’m not sure if this counts as gameplay mechanics or rather narrative structure, but games like Outer Wilds, Fez, Tunic, where the exploration and discovery of the game is the end goal of playing the game, not just getting to the game’s end state.

I’m not sure if there’s an accepted term for these games, but I’ve always thought of them as “archaeology” games. There’s a bunch of stuff, both plot and gameplay, that is hidden (sometimes in plain sight), until you discover it and find out what meaning it carries.