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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

This abusive business model is the dominant strategy.

If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Only legislation will fix this.

mindbleach ,

As if it’s just Netflix.

mindbleach ,

Hasn’t worked yet.

mindbleach ,

Again, not a Netflix problem. This is becoming the entire industry. More big names are using it than avoiding it. There is almost no cost to adding this greedy bullshit.

We’re not going to shop our way out of this.

mindbleach ,

‘Ignore the systemic problem and there is no systemic problem’ is never sound advice.

No kidding there’s always going to be some games that don’t commit this abuse - but anything with marketing and payroll will be tempted, and damn near all of them will go for it, because the downsides are fucking slim. The market brought us here. The market will not magically get us out of here.

mindbleach ,

Yeah sure, it’s my fault for describing a problem, that’s what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people’s wallets.

Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?

mindbleach ,

‘Why are you ignoring the problem?’ cannot be answered with ‘why are you ignoring not the problem?’ The existence of things outside a growing issue don’t make the issue go away.

This is half the industry, by revenue. ‘But it’s only half!’ is aggressively missing the point.

I’d be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it’s not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.

Some of the alleged “retreat” from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They’re not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They’re not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.

Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.

Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever’s already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’

mindbleach ,

That’s downplaying how Sony tried forcing everyone to switch, once they’d already bought UMDs. They just could not stop themselves from fucking over their own customers. Buy a PSP! It needs Sony’s special memory cards. No, extra-special ones, not the kind your Sony digital cameras use. Upgrade your PSP! Fuck you, buy new memory cards. Yeah it’s the same shape, but it’s special-er, you peasant. Upgrade your PSP again! And throw out all your games, because we didn’t include a slot this time! It’s all on the memory card, and of course you have to buy a new one, from us, specifically for this single gizmo, priced like it’s made out of gold recovered from deep-water shipwrecks.

If they’d just launched with forced internet connectivity it might be a different story. God knows the OG PSP never spent long without getting leashed to a wall, so yet another game could forcibly install new firmware, once your battery reached exactly 100.0% charge.

mindbleach ,

Words cannot convey how sketchy the MP4 codec scene was, pirating media in the Windows XP era. Every month you’d have to find some DivX CCCP K-Lite [cracked].7zip.exe and roll the fuckin’ dice.

We were very proficient at reinstalling our operating systems.

mindbleach ,

Wasn’t.

mindbleach ,

Flash and Java, honestly, albeit in different ways. Both saw the web as a platform above all platforms.

Flash was the only way for browsers to do anything high-performance or good-looking from like 1997 to 2010. Any idiot could slap together a cool spinning animation with gradient-colored vector graphics. There were countless genuinely-free games, apparently made for the fun of making them, and even more interactive animations, apparently made to be as offensive as humanly possible.

Java was the big-grey-rectangle alternative, where you knew your browser was about to spend five entire minutes loading something, just to demonstrate a bouncing ball experiment or whatever. But: it was a real general-purpose executable format, with no installation or setup. You stuck a program on a page and it worked right there on the page. Eventually. And once it loaded it’d hitch and jerk constantly, because garbage-collection was always a terrible idea. But sometimes you’d find a page that’d hitch and jerk through playing Quake 2 in your goddamn web browser.

What ultimately killed them was that Adobe is among the worst software companies in the world and Oracle is number one. Flash was a security nightmare. It was hacked together for impressive functionality, and then repackaged for ease of use, so it was about as exploit-hardened as a wet paper towel. The fact it ran poorly on phones (and Steve Jobs was a dick) was just the excuse to stop tolerating its endless vulnerabilities. Java meanwhile was an okay format owned by the devil. It served kinda the same role as WebAssembly does now, except absolutely no-one wanted to put up with licensing it, because Oracle likes to sue its competitors and fuckin’ loves to sue its customers. The company name is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. And if two devices running Java connect via wifi, he expects the air in-between them to be properly licensed. If the free software movement had not been founded to say “fuck printers,” it would have sprung into being in order to say “fuck Oracle.”

Anyway.

Google Chrome, intolerable leash that it now is, made Javascript usefully fast in 2008. Prior to that it was interpreted. Javascript calculators in the AOL days could lag. Mozilla responded with asm.js, inviting the language itself to be performant. Nowadays just about anything could be WASM + WebGPU, and quite frankly most things should be. But for some stupid reason even the chat programs written in Javascript bundle their own browser.

mindbleach ,

The forced updates were definitely to prevent piracy… and didn’t work.

The new kinds of Memory Stick were naked rampant greed.

mindbleach ,

Ruffle is obviously as good as Flash, by emulating Flash - but yeah, the creative environment is missing. We need some .io page that clones the old way of churning out 2D games and animations.

We’re in a stupid period of computing where a legitimate way to get games on smartphones and computers is to publish software for DOS because everything has some kind of emulator for that archaic platform.

mindbleach ,

Media Player Classic still rules. Feature-rich with zero bullshit.

mindbleach ,

Two decades of tweaking to balance a hundred-odd weird-ass characters, and these geniuses still can’t figure out any way to detect cheating besides crawling up your computer’s butthole.

mindbleach ,

You don’t know what any of those words mean.

And I’m including “a.”

mindbleach ,

Layer two of ‘nuh uh, no u.’

Dull.

mindbleach ,

Layer three.

mindbleach ,

Thirty years from publication.

No exceptions.

Copyright is only an incentive to create new works for the public. For us. Once you’ve sold it, it’s ours. That’s what the money is for. If thirty years isn’t enough then it’s just not gonna happen.

People have a right to culture. Anything you grew up with is yours to build on.

mindbleach ,

Google’s become shitty enough that it barely matters. “We didn’t find many results for the thing you typed, so here’s something else.”

mindbleach ,

Vile SEO scum aren’t why “open watcom” returns “did you mean: wacom tablets?”

mindbleach ,

Fuzzy is not the first f-word I’d choose.

mindbleach ,

Show me that dictionary.

mindbleach ,

The efficacy of advertising is sold primarily by advertisers. It’s possibly worth a vanishing fraction of what these ghouls say it’s worth. But so long as buying it and acting like a greedy invasive bastard is more profitable than ignoring it, even by a tiny margin, corporate giants will keep doing it, since the cost to them is a rounding error.

The industry enabling this is large because they get to sell the same garbage to so many bastards.

mindbleach ,

If you’re not selling them, they should be free.

mindbleach ,

Fingers crossed for some ARM devices running PC games through user-space shenanigans. Basically emulating the stuff Proton doesn’t handle - or hand off to the GPU. They won’t play the newest games any time soon, but a $60 gizmo might run Hades for two hours.

mindbleach ,

Box86, FEX-Emu, and qemu-user are vying for that user-space emulation… space. It’s gonna be fascinating watching the winner shake out.

Though for gaming, all of them seem to share Dolphin/ARM’s primary obstacle, which is that SOC drivers blow.

mindbleach ,

They’re rarely the best option, but they’re always the best choice.

mindbleach ,

Ticketmaster still took $37 for that.

mindbleach ,

That’s compressed cholesterol.

Compressterol.

mindbleach ,

Edibles are a spell with a verbal component.

mindbleach ,

(why, Google)

Massive incentives to innovate The Next Big Thing and zero incentives to maintain shit people actually use. See also 2000-era Fox killing off every fantastic new show that wasn’t instantly as big as The Simpsons. And also constantly letting football interrupt The Simpsons.

mindbleach ,

Say it with me now:

Stallman was right.

mindbleach ,

“The trinity makes as much sense as Javascript” is a vulgar condemnation of Christian dogma.

mindbleach ,

I’d say it isn’t, but I’d be saying it about the existing applications (and near-future stuff that currently sorta-kinda works), not the tech-bro delusions that wind up on billboards and cause aging suits to both sweat and drool.

AI is the kind of bubble where the tech involved is halfway to magic. And it’ll run on your local hardware. No matter how hard the offices-and-capital side crashes and burns, that’s not going anywhere.

Right now is the worst that image AI will ever be again.

LLMs might stumble, because the big-iron approach seems to make a difference for them, but there are local versions and they do roughly the same things. That’s going into video games, for a start, and probably turning every single NPC into a verbal chatbot that can almost hold a conversation.

The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can’t think of anything that belongs in it.

… entertainment is a bajillion-dollar industry where abject failure is routine and hilarious. There will be a boom like there was for CGI, only with even worse treatment of the tiny companies performing miracles. Workers getting screwed while revenue floods in is not the same thing as a bubble bursting. Unfortunately.

I’m disappointed in Doctorow for asserting this technology will remain big and complex and expensive. When has that ever stayed true? Saying it’ll always take forest-eating big iron sounds like predicting computers will only be affordable to the five richest kings of Europe. This whole neural-network revival kicked off because consumer hardware made training feasible. More training equals better models, and more computers equals more training, but Google’s still pouring gigawatts into glorified video-game tech.

If all the creative and academic zeal gets left working with mundane single machines - guess where all the advancements will happen.

mindbleach , (edited )

Vulcans take improv classes to act “normal.” They’re a surprise onstage because they never play the straight man. Being that one degree off from their sincere personality is confusing, difficult, and psychologically troublesome. But they can take a pratfall with comedic timing analyzed to the millisecond.

… actually, improv comedy is a great way to demonstrate understanding of a culture. Vulcans would make analytic connections between subjects in a heartbeat, and with some training they’d be excellent lateral thinkers. The gap between that and comedy is understanding expectations and violating them in a way that safely builds and releases tension.

Vulcans could tell brick jokes separated by months. You would never get them with a shaggy-dog story. They might have absurd reaction times for comebacks, but it would be limited, because I don’t think they’d handle wordplay. You’d never hear a Vulcan mutter “that’s what she said” in a timely fashion.

mindbleach ,

A thread linking to the blog post where they bragged about it.

mindbleach ,

Cursor*10.

mindbleach ,

Knowing Netflix? One more season, a cliffhanger ending, and bitter recrimination.

mindbleach ,

Three slaps per year, doled out as you see fit.

People would get real fuckin’ polite in December and January. Start-of-year, everybody’s got a full magazine. End-of-year… use it or lose it.

mindbleach ,

Hospital.

mindbleach ,

I’ve heard people say this about “Here Comes A Thought” from Steven Universe.

Personally? “Let It Happen” by Tame Impala. The lesson being, just fuckin’ go for it. Don’t fall for the toolbox fallacy: oh I need X and Y and Z before I even begin trying to [blank]. Unless [blank] is practicing medicine or juggling chainsaws, no, you’re probably okay to start doing whatever. Failure is a prerequisite to most things. You have to suck at something before you can be good at it. The right time to plant a tree is ten years ago.

The Barenaked Ladies’ “Next Time” is the same idea, but expressed with typical dry and bitter comedy. Tame Impala’s take is more likely to get your ass out of your seat - literally and figuratively.

mindbleach ,

Daily? Logitech MX-518. I’d still be using my CeBIT 2003 IntelliMouse if it hadn’t been jostled by one too many trips in a backpack. Both are newer than the Max Payne mousepad that is somehow still in tolerable condition.

No, wait. I just glanced at the time on a Westclox digital alarm clock, model 22636, production code 1/10/83. That thing’s older than I am. Had to check the underside again: Norcross, GA. I was unsure if “Westclox” hinted at being produced in West Germany.

mindbleach ,

Your neighbors must love you.

mindbleach ,

If it’s not just the battery finally giving out, it might be the thermal goop on the CPU / GPU. Late IBM Thinkpads could eat fans annually. Early Lenovo models can’t be all that different. Thermal cycling is a rude source of stress… as is the sudden end of routine thermal cycling.

mindbleach ,

I want to make a Wazowski / Wachowski joke but I’m not sure if that implies “Mike” is a deadname.

mindbleach ,

English is an endless deluge of that experience, because our orthography is bullshit. People have tried to fix it. Their clever rules were partly adopted and became even more exceptions and special cases.

mindbleach ,

At that point, surely we’d use the International Phonetic Alphabet instead.

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