scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 2 days ago:
Yeah, that’s fair
- Comment on Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪 3 days ago:
The company did many things wrong, it’s an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.
Most importantly they decided they didn’t need to test the software on their new machines because they’d already shipped previous machines running the software, so they “knew it worked”. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.
Also they had exactly 1 “very smart” engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, I’m sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.
Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineer
sfor investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).Also they didn’t even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didn’t need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 3 days ago:
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
- Comment on Four arrested in terror raids in West Midlands, Derbyshire and Yorkshire 1 week ago:
Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?
- Comment on Little Pea Shooters 1 week ago:
I guess the original claim works if you imagine it along a specific axis only (1 dimensionally) in that perspective you either fall quickly then leave slowly or fall slowly and leave quickly, matching up to a change in velocity along that axis.
But yeah, I wouldn’t have explained it that way.
- Comment on Little Pea Shooters 2 weeks ago:
You mentioned “from the perspective of the planet” before, and I think perhaps that’s the key, from the planet’s perspective you fall and rise with equal velocities and equal accelerations, but crucially the planet is moving relative to other things and curves your orbit, so whilst you might might have the same falling and rising speeds relative to it, they’re not in the same direction, so you’re velocity has changed, and from an external perspective you’ve gained velocity from it.
Imagine you start stationary relative to the sun, with Jupiter barrelling towards you (not on a collision course!). From Jupiter’s perspective you fall towards it, and so from the suns perspective you gain velocity opposite jupiters orbit, but you’re not directly head on so it twists your course (let’s say 90 degrees to keep things simple) then as you leave Jupiter it indeed decelerates you relative, but crucially you’re in a different direction now, (from jupiters perspective) you’re pointed right towards the sun, so as you pull away Jupiter is decelerating you in the sun direction (aka accelerates you away from the sun). So you were both accelerated in the anti-Jupiter-orbit direction and then again in the anti-sun direction. Added together those give you a vector which is non-zero, so you’ve gained speed from Jupiter.
- Comment on Over 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard have unionized 2 weeks ago:
Industries are made of people. People require goods and services. Goods and services are purchased with currency. Currency can be extracted from companies more effectively with the use of collective bargaining.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
Damned software devs, they ruined software!
- Comment on ‘It’s gruesome’: fears of grave-robbing amid rise in sale of human remains 3 weeks ago:
Stealing human remains is illegal, but selling (correctly sourced) human remains is legal.
I think their point is that it’s very hard to prove bones are illegally sourced, meaning they can only prosecute if they’re able to prove the bones were sourced illegally.
If instead it was always illegal to sell human remains (presumably with exceptions for medical/educational purposes), that might make policing them somewhat easier.
An alternate strategy might be to require strict tracking for human remains - you can sell a skull but it must have a certificate listing the full chain back to its original owner (presumably deceased). Failure to retain that chain of custody gets you in legal hot water regardless of how you obtained it. Possibly with a little extra security to prevent duplicate use of legitimate certification. (eg each sale is logged with a trusted 3rd party so you can’t keep claiming that every skull you sell is the same guy until one of them gets inspected, forcing you to find a new legitimate doner to act as cover).
- Comment on YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE 3 weeks ago:
I believe no blind spot, which is the place where all the nerves bundle together and pass through the sensing layer, leaving a hole in our vision (the brain works hard to hide this hole from our perception, but it’s still there and can cause accidents) Also maybe better vision in general?
- Comment on Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’ 4 weeks ago:
Technically it’s nothing to do with Palestine itself, you can protest that fine.
The issue is the group Palestine action, which the gov declared a terror group because they wrecked some military planes, and we have a law forbidding the support for declared terror groups.
An overreaching dumb law applied badly by m a way to overreach even further. I admit this is not much better than arresting Palestine protestors directly, it’s a pretty thin cover…
- Comment on What's your thoughts on this? 4 weeks ago:
Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.
- Comment on What's your thoughts on this? 4 weeks ago:
It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.
- Comment on Farage adviser said UK would be better off if it had not fought in WW2 4 weeks ago:
Right, but to be fair Britain had no access to the nazi leaderships’ private writings at the time, and really couldn’t be sure if they felt that way, and we can’t be sure the nazis might have changed their minds in the face of a meeker and weaker British response.
So overall, I think perhaps the British response was pretty close to forced out, despite the theoretical full knowledge scenario of coexistence.
- Comment on Cyclist injuries dropped by half after “hated” cycle lane installed, but mayor still claims scrapped lane largely used as “bike run” for drug dealers to “get through traffic" 5 weeks ago:
Criminals are famously environmentally conscious, and never have any spare cash for a pricy car as a mode of transport. Of course.
- Comment on Dirt Man 1 month ago:
She sorta was the cult leader, iirc the aliens didn’t understand humans and trusted her organisation to decide how to get things done (at least until they finally realise how humans actually work and decide to just shut it all down), so the cult was probably her idea
- Comment on [VIDEO] Japan Sanctions Visa after the Censorship of Anime and Manga 1 month ago:
And we’re equally disappointed in both of you for following our terrible example.
- Comment on 'Friendslop' Isn't Real, But People Love Posting About It Anyway | Aftermath 1 month ago:
Sure, that’s absolutely true, but the games that have done well recently have found ways to properly take advantage of an “easy” market. I suspect the lesson is just that this particular market is well suited to smaller and simpler games but with quick turnaround, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, if anything it means small games companies can shoot for big wins, which can only be a good thing.
- Comment on It's just loss. 2 months ago:
Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard
- Comment on It's just loss. 2 months ago:
If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
- Comment on Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles 2 months ago:
Oh for sure, I was being tongue in cheek. I do think they should make a system for returning things stolen that would be appreciated more where they came from (I’m fine with guarantees of quality preservation and public display, but I think that’s as far as can be justified). We really can’t justify keeping things that we couldn’t buy today because they mean more than money to the people we stole them from.
- Comment on Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles 2 months ago:
To be fair, I’m sure there’s some British things in the British museum, I assume those could be kept.
- Comment on Owen Jones: This column does not express support for Palestine Action – here’s why 2 months ago:
I really think we need to distinguish between terrorism in the sense of “are they going to keep blowing people up?” and “terrorism” in the sense of “are my taxes going to go up because of this?” I feel like the word is being stretched for the second example…
- Comment on European game publisher group responds to Stop Killing Games, claims 'These proposals would curtail developer choice" 2 months ago:
Yeah, “I don’t like this proposed change to the law because it has an effect” is not the compelling narrative they seem to think it is.
- Comment on Steam now generates three times more revenue for Capcom than PlayStation 2 months ago:
There are 2 schools of thought. Those that are against the entire concept of software that tries to control how you use it, drm/anticheat/etc in any form is malware to them. And those that accept it might be acceptable in principle (eg for anticheat especially), but believe denouvo and certain other drm programs go too far and cross a line (especially when they hook into the kernel or start tracking things outside the game that they have no business tracking).
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 2 months ago:
Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.
- Comment on British passenger in seat 11A survives India plane crash, reports say 2 months ago:
people improbably survive plane crashes all the time. It’s not likely in a crash like this, but there was 241 opportunities for it to happen, 1 seemingly got lucky.
People survive falling out of planes or getting struck by lightning sometimes too. Shit happens in both directions.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025 3 months ago:
On the one hand, the ship was one of the most fun parts for me, but on the other, I do wonder if it was a mistake because it makes the game so much more frustrating for anyone who hasn’t been trained on kerbal space program or some other Newtonian space control game to get the hang of it.
It’s like riding a bike, if you know how to do it you have trouble even imaging why it’s hard, but nobody can do it at first, and it takes ages to get the new instincts to actually enjoy it.
- Comment on observer 👀 observed quantum state 3 months ago:
Are you sure? I don’t think the Nomai would stand for scientific inaccuracy…