I do feel like even if they skipped Clair Obscur because of recent controversies, the author should have addressed it. I think it’s certainly deserving of being in the list, so saying nothing kinda seems contrarian at best.

I’m not an expert by any means and find this a little confusing too. The three possibilities seem like:

1. The business needed a cash influx and because CD Projekt and Michał Kiciński still seem to believe in GOG’s mission, “purchasing it” was a way of injecting money while setting a ceiling on risk for CD Projekt versus simply keeping it on the balance sheet and spending more on it.

2. They truly think that separate businesses will operate more efficiently and that the missions weren’t aligned enough to be in the same org structure. This seems possible but no way to really know.

3. They want to make GOG more appealing to developers who may not trust it if it’s tied so closely to CD Projekt. This seems unlikely, since Epic, Valve, etc all have self-published games by the platform owners on their storefronts.

Or some combination of the three… The timing seems to be to do it by end of calendar year to make a clean break on the books, at least.

Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped.

This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.

Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”

I’m always up for a good AI dystopia article, but this is pretty poorly written, taking a very long time to say very little new or interesting. For this reason I wouldn’t be surprised if the author used AI assistance in writing it, which would certainly tell you something about the author’s objectivity. (It has a lot of earmarks of recent-model AI essay writing, like repeated use of the rule of threes, though I admit a human could have produced it. )

The thesis appears to be that AI can be an equalizer to put individuals on equal footing to corporate data processing tasks. But conversely that it may not be because viability, quality and reliability depends on who controls the model and whether it hallucinates in critical or non-critical ways. Thanks for the clarity, article.

None of this is new thought, but just another part of an inherently AI-normalizing line of thinking that AI is just another democratizing technological tool (but that could be used for evil - or good! - or evil!). The author addresses some of the AI flaws but ends almost where it began, with that flawed premise, which elides how unlike other tools, AI actually degrades our abilities to think and communicate once we start relying on it. The article doesn’t address that communication, meaning, thought, and reliability are degraded when either individual or corporate systems integrate AI.

Instead, the author would like you to think individuals can level a playing field by using AI against corporate algorithms. And sure, a person denied a medical claim by a health insurer low effort AI can now write a generic low effort appeal, but that appeal can just a efficiently continue to be denied by better funded AI. It’s a spurious and illusory benefit to the individual.

What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power. AI just floods the zone with more output, but the result of us all adopting AI will change nothing to the power imbalance in our system. The solution to low effort slop won’t be more low effort slop - we’d just be burying ourselves deeper in it.

There’s some similar work done with the Pretendo network for Nintendo systems, but my understanding is it’s just for server-hosted and multiplayer game features and not copyright authentication.

I think it’s inevitable that someone creates an online server that authenticates online games, the lawsuits will be swift and vicious. The best solutions will probably be to create a local network authentication method, but who knows if it’s even possible.

Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that’s about to happen will absolutely dwarf what’s there now.

That’s a great sign.

Welp, time to make a straw doll of Sam Altman and start sticking it with pins. This bubble is taking way too long to burst.

It’s interesting you are disappointed in the art style - it makes more sense, though, if you haven’t played HOMM3. Because the map art style and layout feels very HOMM3, moreso than the other 3D modernization attempt in HOMM5 (which I hated). My guess is you would have really enjoyed HOMM3, if this one plays how it looks.

Thanks for putting this on my radar, it really looks like a return to the HOMM gameplay I enjoyed.

The article is all speculation about RAM availability, but somehow doesn’t even mention AI.

My comment is speculation too, but Nvidia almost certainly has one of the most reliable supplies of RAM. This would suggest they’re doing the obvious thing and putting their supply in enterprise AI products, while leaving the gaming community (who they owe their success to) fighting for price-gouged scraps.

This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I’d edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.

IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).

Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there’s a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/

I don’t know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think “torrenting” is considered the OG piracy method now.

Interesting. So you have *arr set to auto-download from certain lists and see it in Plex for the first time, as options? What kind of lists? How do you cull content you don’t end up liking so it doesn’t fill up your server?

What? Do you have a link? That’s a gut punch if so…

CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.

I mean…sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on retail sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to “gold” high quality discs like Mitsui.

Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.

So I’ll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.

Edit: Words.

Wow, thanks!

Very interesting. I followed BD circumvention on the doom9 forums from that link decades ago, but it looks like the VUK database method is more reliable now.

Is there some version of Handbrake or workaround for BD copy protection? This is the excerpt from the site, and matches my understanding that it isn’t a circumvention tool:

Supported Input Sources:

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Thanks for sharing this review, it’s great to see your reviews and interviews here.

I’ve seen a similar recent DS-emulation system review and they were playing Rhythm Heaven, and what really looked like it would bother me is the emulation input latency (it appeared roughly 10-20ms). Have you played Rhythm Heaven or other latency-sensitive games and do you notice any input delay?