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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • Yeah. Tbh, I always wondered why programming languages weren’t translated.

    I know CS is all about english, but at least the default builtin functions of programming languages could get translated (as well as APIs that care about themselves).

    Like, I can’t say I don’t like it this way (since I’m a native english speaker), but I still wonder what if you could translate code.

    Variables could cause problems (more work with translation or hard to understand if not translated). But still - programming languages have no declentions and syntax is simpler so it shouldn’t even compare to “real” languages with regards to difficulty of implementation.



  • That couldn’t have been the point.

    Companies use (read: abuse) IP to keep an artificial, government-sanctioned monopoly they use to extract money from users. Add to that skins, microtransactions, lootboxes, yearly releases and all the other vilest shit you can find in a modern videogame and you’ll see it isn’t about the studio staying afloat - it’s abuit the publisher raking in the $$$.

    People who are creatives take it as a point of pride when their work is spread, remade and remixed. What they do not like is if that remaking and remixing is done by a soulless company in the vilest and most soulless way to generate profits. Oh, and except for thise with the best deals, IP stays with the company.

    It’s not about cratives “not being paid enough” so they need IP protection - it’s the very same companies whose IP is protected who don’t pay their workers enough. IP doesn’t bring money to workers directly nor does it protect workers from anything since again - the IPs are owned by the studio/publisher.

    Call it “personal feelings”, but it’s how the world works.




  • Is such a strategy really feasible? Adding legislation that a game has to be made operable in a reasonable manner after the publisher discontinues support for it in no way influences this strategy.

    If someone wanted to do such elaborate botnet defamation attacks in hopes of getting the game playable on 3rd party servers they could’ve done that already without legislation.

    Bots making the game unplayable is a problem, but opening the servers in general would help the problem as private servers can implement harsher requirements for players than official ones usually do, opting to rather make a huge bot-filled cesspool as you’ve already said.

    However, this proposal isn’t a general “all games must have FOSS self-hostable servers” proposal. It’s just a “if you kill a game it still has to be alive afterwards” proposal. Whether publishers open servers or not before they shut theirs down is their decision without the proposal as much as it is with it.


  • Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits

    Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game

    If, as you said, as the game is EOL it doesn’t make profits, then it can’t cause losses either. Otherwise it’d have to be kept alive.

    Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy)

    Uh… If they’re 3rd-party servers then hosting isn’t paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don’t pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they’d axe that too if it induces any cost.

    This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio.

    It absolutely can’t. The game is DEAD. It causes no profits or losses. Nothing aboit the game matters to the publisher anymore except for brand/reputation for a possible sequel.

    forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of

    Nothing explicitly forces release of source code, any reasonable server application wpuld suffice, open-source or otherwise.

    The “corpos” usually make the games. The monetization concern is minimal since a server for a game isn’t anything a corporation couldn’t make on its own if it wanted, nor is it something groundbreaking.

    Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China)

    The bots would attack servers nit owned or operated by/for the publisher.

    and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation

    What does any of this have to do with antitrust legislation? If anything, this would curb the publisher’s monopoly over the game servers although that in and of itself isn’t even an illegal monopoly.






  • As far as I know Google doesn’t let some pretty basic stuff from Crome into Chromium, for example translation (might even go as far as the inbuilt password manager). Potential forks either lose those features or have to implement them seperately.

    Now that Manifest v3 is rolling out, apparently Google is able to somehow block the change from being easily reverted which is additional developmental load (or just show ads). Manifest v3 won’t impact Brave too much since it only applies to extensions, while their adblocking is baked-in, but it’s worse than uBO.

    Firefox is fully open-source and doesn’t artificially make enabling adblock an issue which might attract more simpler forks (as opposed to Opera, Brave and Edge having companies backing them, Firefox forks mostly have volunteer developers or open source collectives making them).



  • For Firefox forks, it’s viable since the forks aren’t doing all that much in the grand scheme of things. That isn’t to say what they’re doing is in any way bad, it’s just that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

    Firefox is a secure browser and already has 99% of the work done. Most changes which forks make can be done just by changing the config. Some unfortunately have to be made seperately, and that does require extensive testing. Some can even be lifted from other open-source projects.

    Separating from source just isn’t viable. Something nuclear would need to happen for any fork to decide to seperate from Firefox. If we just look at the Chromium side of things, Microsoft found it easier to switch to Chromium than to keep making IE/Edge from scratch, and Microsoft surely has a lot of resources to burn.



  • I’ve also made the switch from win10. There are a lot of “small” things that add up. The constant nag messages. Updates. Start menu ads. That was mist of it on Win10. I’ve had some experience in win11 at work, and I can say the new UI is abysmal (honestly I couldn’t care less about the UI as far as look/textures go, but one thing I can’t stand is slow animations for every little thing. If I open the start menu, I want it open as soon as I press the keyboard button, not 0.5s later. When I snap a window, I don’t need 0.5s of my life wasted on watching the “beautiful” animation. I just want it on half the screen instantly. Whenewer I close a window, I don’t want to have it fade out and distract me, I want it either gone or a popup asking me wether to save, discard or cancel show as soon as I tried to close the window. I want the Control panel back. I knew how to use it, and navigating menus wasn’t animated to consume 0.5s for every screen change. The animations were what pushed me away the most. I assume you can turn the off, but I never bothered since I changed computers often and would just rather put up with it rather than spend time tweaking each and every computer I wanted to use. The UI is why I don’t like win11, and the MS requirement is why I won’t let it touch my computer.

    I have to say, switching to Linux was very frustrating as I had to google every little thing and most sites are filled with ad garbage even with uBlock on Firefox turned in with most of the lists, so that was frustrating. But now, after just under 2 years of Linux use, I can say the switch has paid great dividends. I can do a lot of menial tasks much faster (highlights are fike conversion with ffmpeg, combining PDFs with pdfunite, navigating folders using cd and tab completion (I’m the type to have a lot of folders in one parent directory to whkch I know the names, so typing the name is faster than looking for it manuakly and clicking on it), not to mention all the programs I used that are on Linux open 3-5 times faster.

    Another big quality of life improvement are updates - updating apt packages with one command and Flatpaks with another, not having to reboot while doing it and not having programs prompt for updates individually is all something I never knew was possible before switching over. Linux has really impressed me with how well it works and how much of a laid back attitude it resembles, as opposed to the whiny Windows forcing its will upon you with its updates, ads and bloat.