FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 4 days ago:
I just spent a bunch of time talking about PC emulators, why would I just keep repeating myself? I just checked, that game came out in 2001 so I assume it runs on Windows 98. You can install that on DOSBox.
The PS1 hardware isn't being made any more, it's not going to last forever either. PS1 emulators will be needed for that as well.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 4 days ago:
perfectly tuned for it.. for how long though?
Perfectly tuned forever, just keep the game bundled with the same emulator.
If eventually the system that the emulator runs on diverges too far from what the emulator was able to run on, then wrap it in another emulator to emulate that. Or just update the emulator, DOSBox is under the GPL.
How many indie titles on PC aged out of the platform and have no maintainer?
If you have an emulator then you don't need a maintainer. As far as the game is concerned it's still running on the exact same computer that it did when it was first released.
A person who purchased Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for PC would be unable to launch the game in any modern OS. But if they have it on PS1, it still works.
They'd need a PS1 emulator for that. DuckStation, for example.
A person who purchased Minecraft in 2011 can no longer play that game on the same computer they purchased it from.
The newer versions of Minecraft can't. The old version they purchased in 2011 still can because it hasn't changed.
I'm saying PC is a moving platform.
And I'm pointing out that an emulator need not be a moving platform. It can be a frozen snapshot of a particular moment in time. Get a game working on an emulator and you can freeze that emulator's code and configuration and then you'll know that the game will always work on it from then onward. Bundle the emulator with the game, like GOG does, and there's no "fiddling around" - you can indeed just sit down and play it.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 4 days ago:
You can swap out their dosbox.exe with a version that includes CRT shaders, such as DOSBox Staging or DOSBox-X.
Or you could wrap the existing DOSBox window in an external shader using ReShade, it's a universal post-processing injector that can add a CRT filter.
My search also found all-in-one frontends called ExoDOS and LaunchBox/RetroArch to do this to a whole library of GOG games so that you don't have to do it individually to each.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 4 days ago:
The answer there is emulation. Goid Old Games sells old DOS games and they work fine on modern computers because each comes wrapped in a DOS emulator.
- Comment on Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening? 1 week ago:
Miranda rights are only required during a custodial interrogation, which means you are in police custody (arrested or not free to leave), and the police are actively questioning or interrogating you. If the police arrest 50 people at a protest, put them in a van, process them at the precinct, and never ask them a single question about their conduct, the police never actually need to read them their rights.
Any self-incriminating statements you make before your rights are read to you generally cannot be used against you in court as primary evidence (this is the Exclusionary Rule). Note that that's as primary evidence, though. If you mention the kilogram of illicit substances hidden in your shoes before they Mirandize you they can't use that statement in court, but they sure can use that kilogram of illicit substances as physical evidence.
So other than the bare minimum of what the law says you have to say, always remember that it's Friday.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 1 week ago:
Trying to legislate the world to go back to the way it was in 2023 probably isn't going to work any better than DRM does.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 1 week ago:
Guess we'll see, then. I suspect the result is going to be a bunch of websites going "huh? Where did all our traffic suddenly disappear to?"
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 1 week ago:
Also Moonshot, Alibaba, Baidu. Can they also be reined in?
It doesn't matter who invented DRM. My point is that DRM fundamentally doesn't work. If you pubish a web page in a manner that allows humans to read it then it's also readable by AIs. A pinkie-promise not to is the best you can get.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 1 week ago:
And they may also want a magical unicorn for a pet. Simply wanting a thing doesn't conjure it into existence.
They want the same thing that people who want DRM want - a way to show their content to a viewer without that viewer being able to copy what they're seeing. It's just as impossible either way. As with DRM there may be tricks one can come up with to hinder it temporarily under some circumstances, but fundamentally data is data. If someone can see it then someone can copy it.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 1 week ago:
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
Sounds like they want DRM,
- Comment on How did you guys deal with the death of a parent? 2 weeks ago:
There's no one "right" way to deal with it, for starters. People will give lots of advice and describe a bunch of scenarios but don't feel like you "should" do it any particular way or that you're doing something wrong if you grieve in your own way.
For me, I "talk" to my dad now and then. It's been six years now and I still find comfort in doing that. I'm an atheist, I don't believe he's actually hearing me, it's just a thing I do that feels nice psychologically. I've been imagining I'm keeping him "up to date" on stuff, since one of the things I told him on his deathbed was that I'd let him know "how it all turned out" - he was always future-focused and I'm sure it annoyed him that he wouldn't be around to see it.
I wouldn't worry too much about any deep and meaningful "final words" and such, though. I think the words that were exchanged throughout life were just as important, if not moreso.
- Comment on Will the next president of America have to do a world wide apology tour for this administration? Kind of like celebs do when they get their ass in a sling. 3 weeks ago:
As a Canadian, an "apology tour" would feel like this to me.
If the next administration wants forgiveness it'll have to show real progress on fixing America's broken system of government and its broken culture. That'll take longer than four years so the next administration should not expect forgiveness. The best it can hope for is to get started on eventual forgiveness.
In the meantime we need to keep diversifying away from America and building defenses against them because there's no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt. They elected not-Trump after the previous time Trump was elected and where did that lead them? Back to Trump.
- Comment on We found their kryptonite! 5 weeks ago:
I'm not even clear on how the bamboo is supposed to damage the data center.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Ah, in the name of environmentalism, go forth and plant invasive species?
What do people think this is actually going to do to data centers? Oh no, there's plants growing near them... like there weren't already?
- Comment on Bee fly 1 month ago:
In the lower right photo I can hear him yelling "wheee!"
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
It's a process. As long as there are new people showing up, or more rarely people who change their minds, there will always be some disequilibrium.
I was literally told in another thread on this same topic of "AI hate" that I should "leave this community, and not to return" because my views weren't in alignment with the community's. I don't tend to pay attention to that sort of social pressure but other people do and the result is an ongoing filtering of participation.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
But this is exactly the effect I'm pointing out. You say:
More engagement here is less engagement elsewhere, where profits and data mining and surveillance are priorities.
And you're describing "here" in terms that are appealing to anti-AI sentiment and "elsewhere" as being the opposite. Whether the effect is "secondary" or not, it's still an effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
You can drive engagement without money changing hands.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
This place that we're in right now is not a bubble of AI lovers, it's a bubble of AI haters.
Of course Lemmy is designed to feed engagement. If it wasn't then it would lose engagement to other forms of social media. For example, now that I've responded to your comment you're going to see a notification that will draw you back here.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Social media is typically designed to create and strengthen social bubbles, bringing together like-minded people and showing them what they want to see. It is also designed to feed "engagement". Rage is a great way to do that.
Just look at the prevalence of upvoting and downvoting tools in various social media sites. A great way to ensure that opinions that are popular within a particular community become even more prominent, while driving out anything that isn't popular within that community. Little wonder that views inside those bubbles become a bit skewed compared to the outside world as a whole.
- Comment on DOGE cut 20% of APHIS the agency that protects U.S. agriculture and now the screwworm parasite that wipes out livestock has returned to the U.S 1 month ago:
Yeah, IIRC the main "breach" happened during Covid as a result of the disruption caused by the pandemic, it's not something whose root cause can be blamed so easily on Trump. There was a program operating down in Panama to prevent the fly from spreading up through the narrow isthmus there by releasing sterile males and the supply chain disruptions broke it for a year or two, resulting in the flies getting through to Mexico where it's a lot harder to eradicate them.
Trump's cuts and chaos sure haven't helped the situation, though, and with dedicated effort it might have been possible to turn back the tide before now.
- Comment on What are some of the biggest continuity errors in Star Trek? 1 month ago:
The best part of DS9's Section 31 was that Section 31 knew they were the bad guys too.
- Comment on Finally—my XL pack of fragile crushable poison arrived. 1 month ago:
At least it doesn't contain any fire.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
You have an idiosyncratic definition of "extreme" then.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
You guess wrong. C++/C# applications, with a fair bit of Python for various supplementary tasks.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
The implementation. I like coming up with the ideas, grinding out the code to make those ideas actually happen is tedious.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I don't know what you would call extreme, then. There's literally only one country on the chart that's less excited about AI, Belgium.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Actually, the US is an extreme example in the negative direction when it comes to global attitudes toward AI. Most countries are much more excited about AI than the US is.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
reading tech news left me so confused. all these people around me were letting the language models spit out crap code. they gave up on what i thought was the most interesting part of the job
I think I see the source of your confusion: you're assuming that everybody has the same attitude towards things that you do.
I find that LLMs remove all the most boring parts of the job.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Depends where you look, "the Internet" isn't one unified place. Social media forms bubbles easily, and social media like Reddit or the Fediverse is practically designed that way - minority voices get downvoted, blocked, banned, and so forth. So unless a forum is taking significant effort specifically to ensure diversity of opinion you're going to end up with things drifting to some sort of extreme.
