DSMan195276

Err, Pokemon Champions does not require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to play online.

Right, and then everybody would be in the comments complaining about how "everybody is using a new term for planet and it's ridiculous, just call them planets". It's not a battle that can be won.

Yeah apparently people are getting harassed on the regular about Pluto, I'm a little confused.

Why would you assume that? That's not even true of regular software :D

But also, as long as the game works on the specific hardware it was designed for then that's all that mattered, which was my point. If it reads uninitialized memory or depends on exact cycle counts or some undocumented hardware behavior then that's _fine_ if it still works on the real hardware, plenty of that was even intentionally done to achieve things otherwise impossible on that hardware.

At the same time it makes it almost impossible to verify even trivial changes to a function. Once you start accounting for all the potential state differences the answer to "does this function work the same?" will basically always be 'no' unless the code is identical. The only way to eliminate various kinds of state from being a concern is to analyze where the function is _used_, rather than just the function itself, and that's an entirely different and much harder kind of challenge.

Who said games were well written? Older games are often very sloppy and buggy, and abuse the specific hardware they're designed for to get extra performance, unique graphical effects, etc.

Emulators constantly run into games that don't run because of specific hardware nuances that may or may not have been intentionally used (Ex. relying on exact cycle counts, reading uninitialized memory, changing values while they're used, etc.).

That seems a bit silly considering how many of the most famous paintings and artworks are/were commissions. Do you disqualify anything that was made for monetary reasons?

On its own that seems like a pretty weak justification, at that point we would need to preserve every copy of every book forever because you never know what what useful physical material it has on it even beyond its text. That extends to non-book items as well, and while I understand the idea it's just not realistic in any sense.

I think the more important part is to define what "rare" actually means and save/digitize set copies of those books that are actually at risk of being lost completely (rather than letting them rot away somewhere or get bought up to be privately destroyed). I suspect many of them are just not at all interesting enough to justify the expensive though.

> Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use.

No they're not, the systems that exist today often don't even work and there's no alternative of "just mail a letter to Microsoft and they'll sort it out for you".

"Faster" is also a frankly a silly point - it's not like your parents were waiting at the mailbox until the letter came in the mail, the important question is the amount of time actively spent dealing with these things.

> I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them.

> I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset.

I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways.

I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out.

Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.

Yeah I agree with that as well, the unsafe keyword takes on a double-duty which makes it unclear how it's actually intended to be used. The idea that you might mark a function that's only made of safe code as 'unsafe' is not that obvious and not always agreed upon, I've seen plenty of debating about it.

The fact that 'unsafe' also enables all unsafe operations in the function body just makes it even messier, since you definitely _don't_ want that unless the entire body is really nothing but unsafe operations. Thus the "mark a safe function as unsafe" has a clear downside since it allows all the unsafe operations you didn't want to use.

> But the bug is still almost always in an unsafe block.

That's entirely dependent on how you write your Rust code. If you're derefing an invalid pointer then the bug is usually in how you calculated that pointer value, but the only part that actually requires 'unsafe' is the deref, not the bugged pointer calculation.

Now in properly written Rust code you should be marking all of that code as 'unsafe' in that case and documenting what invariants need to be maintained, but that's entirely on you to do. The only part the compiler actually enforces is that you mark the specific spots where you make use of the operations that 'unsafe' allows.

I agree and would add to that from my experience:

1. Too many people think that having lots of text makes something impressive, really it's just inconsiderate and nobody is reading it all.

2. Helping people often feels pointless because I can tell I'm just getting a cut/paste AI response back.

> A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. 600 years is a very long time; society will be a very thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.

Something to consider: The use of timezones in mostly 1-hour increments over inconsistently placed areas means that the vast majority of people are already living many minutes off from the "actual" time at their precise location, in some cases even more than an hour. "Giving-up" implies that this is something important worth maintaining, where-as for the vast majority of people they gain nothing from leap seconds or even leap minutes. The most important thing for people is simply that everybody agrees on what time it is, which is easier when leap-Xs aren't done.

That said it's also probably true that a leap-hour would never actually happen, but that's not some big issue. By the time we got to the point that a leap-hour would make sense people would have already adjusted their habits and it probably wouldn't be worth it.

For me the problem is that the target performance is in a weird spot - low enough that it's not amazing, but high enough to still be very expensive if you don't plan to play games that actually require that performance.

A cheap $300 mini-PC is a lot weaker but it can still play plenty of indie and other games just fine, ultimately that's what matters. For me, I would have considered buying one of these if they had one at a $300 to $400 price point even though it would have been significantly weaker, but at $1k it's just impossible for me to justify.

The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?

Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?

> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place?

It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.

That doesn't sound that unlikely to me personally, not everybody has the best tech habits and some life events can result in losing access to both very quickly. It doesn't have to happen often for it to still be a common event in support cases.

The point is that at a minimum you're supposed to bubble the `unsafe` up if the API does not guarantee safety is maintained for all cases (and documents the invariants that have to be kept by the caller), otherwise the system breaks down.

> Assuming the port is actually 1:1 without any behavioral changes

It's not, that's clear from this kind of bug popping up. Functionally this bug exists because `PathString` was converted into a "safe" Rust API but still works the same internally as the original Zig code did (via using `unsafe`), that introduces UB that wasn't there in the Zig code.

If it was attempting to be a 1:1 with no behavior changes (like c2Rust attempts to do) then this would not have been turned into a "safe" Rust API like this.

> They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense.

Why do they need to buy eBay to do that?

Sellers what? You generally don't just drop stuff off at a fulfillment center, when you get to that size you're dealing with large amounts of inventory and you ship it to them.

If you're saying sellers could come into a GameStop to have their individual items packed and shipped out, I suppose, but:

1. They don't really have the space for much shipping volume at any of their stores.

2. You can walk into any USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. store and do that already, you don't need an 'EBay' store. GameStop would presumably get the packages picked up by one of those carriers so it's not saving any shipping time or expense.

For buyers, in many cases there's already alternative drop-off locations similar to GameStop Ex. For UPS deliveries I can get them shipped to a bunch of different convenience stores near me. GameStop stores might be a nice addition to that list but it's not enabling something you couldn't do before, and I would think for most people they already have a closer location than a GameStop.

Yes but I don't need to go to my nearest fulfillment center if they ship everything to my house, that's why I don't know where it is.

What do you think people need to visit fulfillment centers to do?

> Obviously they're going to need to liquidate a lot of this stuff.

If you read online employees have talked about how they donated it or threw it all out, presumably there is very little of that stuff left at this point (and probably nothing left of any real value).

Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameStop/comments/1qceolz/what_did_...

No, why does it matter? I also don't know where my local GameStop is since the few by me closed a couple years ago :P

Plenty of stuff on EBay offers me 2 day shipping clearly via fulfillment centers, as far as I'm concerned that's all that matters. Do you think the addition of GameStop stores would mean EBay can offer faster shipping than that on a significant number of items?

Yeah this is the funny part to me - if you thought EBay was an amazing business then you could have just bought that stock months or years ago. Maybe the combined company will really be worth more than both companies individually, but for the most part this is just GameStop deciding how you should have invested your money months ago.

Well let's be clear, the "trade-in anything" day was a fancy discount day. They gave everybody $5 for whatever they brought in, online you can read from employees that they just donated or threw it all away, no attempt to actually keep any of it to sell.

That said IMO the biggest difference in the two situations you're describing is that EBay is not in the business of buying the items to then sell later, they just facilitate transactions between two parties and some of the logistics (depending on the seller). They're similar as far as dealing with "used goods" but the actual design of the business and risk being taken on is very different.

EBay also not really lacking what you're describing - there are fufillment centers that can be used for EBay listings, there's the EBay "Authenticity Guarantee" program for cards, they already own TCGplayer which does all of this for trading cards way better than GameStop does, etc.

Perhaps somehow these things could be improved by GameStop but I can't imagine it being significantly better than it currently is.

Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.

That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).

It all depends on the CPU architecture, if it supports something like out-of-order execution then both parts of the CPU could be in use at the same time to execute different instructions. Realistically any CPU with that level of complexity doesn't care about SUB vs XOR though.

I think you're somewhat missing the point - if the code from A and B only works if joined with C, then you should squash them all into one commit so that they can't be separated. If you do that then the problem you're describing goes away since you'll only be rebasing a single commit anyway.

Whether this is valuable is up to you, but IMO I'd say it's better practice than not. People do dumb things with the history and it's harder to do dumb things if the commits are self-contained. Additionally if a feature branch includes multiple commits + merges I'd much rather they squash that into a single commit (or a couple logical commits) instead of keeping what's likely a mess of a history anyway.

In this case because Nintendo has an American branch (Nintendo of America) that imports their goods, Nintendo of America is who paid the tariffs and would get a refund. Consumers only paid indirectly via potential price increases, so no they don't get any potential money back.