grumbel

> Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff.

That's a little more than a trade off, it means nobody alive today will ever experience those games. And those people 90 years in the future, probably won't care. There is no culture kept alive here, burring it all in a landfill would do just the same.

DRM-free by itself really doesn't help here. DRM-free ala GOG doesn't even allow used sales, as your game ownership is still tied to an account and can't be relinquished or transferred. And buying DRM-free games from random people without ownership track record, ain't exactly a desired good to begin with.

As far as I know, there is no used marked for DRM-free games.

You need a proper copyright reform to actually addresses all of this. Or step outside the law and go the pirate route, which actually keeps old games alive and playable.

> Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them

Share them by bundling them with DRM[1]? Like archive.org does with books and games that you can't download, but only virtually borrow to watch in your browser (trivial to work around, but it's there nonetheless). DRM-free in a word with current Copyright isn't the solution unless you want to wait 90 years to be able to access anything.

> So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible.

Piracy has been preserving games since the dawn of time, so yeah, that'll continue as usual. The games that are hard to preserve are the dynamic ones, the MMORPGs that get updates every week and where large parts of the game are the player communities within it, none of which fits neatly into a DRM-free .zip file.

[1] https://help.archive.org/help/borrowing-from-the-lending-lib...

Yeah, of course you can, but that isn't exactly an argument for DRM-free GOG if you need the evil Steam to get your games running, or mess around with DOSBOX, Wine, Heroic, Lutris or whatever else is the workaround of the week. If you want to jump through extra hoops you can strip Steam DRM with a few clicks too.

Meanwhile with Steam you click once and the game runs, since they jumped through all the hoops for over a decade to make that work, while GOG sat around and still hides their MSDOS games in a self extracting Windows executable, that neither runs on DOS nor Win9x.

Anyway, back to the point: DRM-free is just a teeny tiny fraction of what might prevent you from running a game.

Also it's not like GOG is digital rights management free in the purest sense: You still have to have an account and they still track what you own, it just isn't enforced at the .exe level, but it makes things like used games sales still impossible, since you can't relinquish or transfer your ownership.

Overly focusing on DRM-free just misses how the software landscape has changed in the last two decades and what things actually matter.

Whenever an AI hallucinates an API call, you run the compiler, give it the error messages and it fixes it. A proper agentic workflow might do it all automatically. These are arguments form 2023 ChatGPT3.5 days when it didn't have tool access or Web search.

The modern problem with AI is more the opposite, you give the AI a task that is impossible with the tools at hand and instead of saying "That doesn't work", it starts elaborate workarounds to make it happen anyway.

DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.

If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.

On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.

Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.

That's how it should be. Make the Internet 18+ by default and sites targeted at younger audiences can add a more detailed rating. Let people configure their devices however they like it.

The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.

I thought it was the other way around, X11 has supported multiple cursor since 2009 and Wayland didn't add support for it since toolkit developers weren't making use of it anyway.

Enabling in X works via:

    xinput list  # find second mouse id
    xinput create-master second
    xinput reattach <mouse-id> "second pointer"

and to get rid of it:

    xinput reattach <mouse-id> 'Virtual core pointer'
    xinput remove-master 'second pointer'

Works great for clicking, but keyboard doesn't work in some applications when enabled. Dragging windows might attach them to the wrong cursor and other issues. Playing around with xinput can also crash some apps (libgdk-3 here) or leave you in a state without a keyboard or mouse.

Veho[1] is experimenting[2] with similar kinds of robots for package delivery.

[1] https://www.shipveho.com/rivr

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d6jU_4XjkTU

There is Radicle for completely distributed hosting.

Gemini3.5 Flash didn't have a problem OCR'ing and base64 decoding it, despite the OCR step having errors, it just fixed them in the base64 decoding step.

They all degrade and hold less charge over time and eventually fail completely, it will just take years or decades. But with today's forced obsolescence on the software side I tend to agree. The chance that a device becomes useless long before the battery causes issues are pretty high. The only device I ever had the battery fail first was the PSP (user replaceable), and that was after 20 years. Everything else had other hardware fail (buttons, sticks, flash memory) or run out of software updates ages ago.

That said, this will get more important going forward, phone and tablet hardware updates get ever smaller and incremental, and longer software update cycles are another thing the EU is starting to regulate. So devices reaching 10+ might not be that unusual in the future.

And as an aside, the one type of battery that very frequently fail isn't the built-in LiPo, it's the good old user replaceable Alkaline AA and AAA batteries, and they don't just run empty, they leak and destroy your hardware in the process, even long before the expiry date and with charge left. It's so common that I am surprised that that hasn't seen any regulation or consumer protection jump into action. Using NiMH instead helps, as they don't leak.

It's not about the console itself, but the accessories, anything that makes you buy more controllers means more money for them. And batteries aren't even the worst offender here.

Controllers have been using USB and an almost identical layout since the Xbox1 days 25 years ago, yet most game controller remain incompatible with each other, even within the same company. PS3 won't work on PS4 and PS4 won't work on PS5. Ironically, PS4 and PS5 controller will work on PS3, since that was the first and last console that supported plain old USB HID. Meanwhile Xbox360 had a lock-out chip to prevent third party controller and the Xbox360 controller don't work on XboxOne/Series either. XboxOne and XboxSeries at least are compatible. Meanwhile on PC pretty much everything works.

And then you have the whole stick drift problem, that has been solved since Dreamcast and PS3 SIXAXIS with Hall effect joysticks, but even decades later we still have controllers going in the bin due for easily avoidable reasons.

Rubber coating is another very common way to add an expiry date to devices that wouldn't have one otherwise.

If we wanted to get serious with the whole "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there are a lot more low hanging fruit than just the batteries.

> Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?

Yes, but it's a whole lot of extra steps spread across multiple independent parties, each of them adds large delays to the actions and increasing the chance that it is discovered long before it ends up on the users machine.

When you hack GPG it will take years before it trickles down into every Linux distribution, especially LTS releases. And ideally, you want an encryption protocol, not one app, thus you have some people running GPG, some running Sequoia PGP and some running OpenPGP.js. If somebody fiddles with the encryption, different clients won't be able to decode the messages anymore and it will be clear pretty quickly that something is wrong.

Meanwhile on the Web or smartphones, you remove or backdoor the encryption, everybody gets auto updated to the latest version and nobody will know that something went wrong.

Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.

This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.

With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.

All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.

The problem with that "look" is that it's a dead end. These things won't be having a real glasses form factor and high enough specs to be useful anytime soon. They'll remain comically oversized for years/decades to come. So why bother with glasses form factor? I'd rather have something like Hololens or VisionPro, that's big enough to fit in a larger battery, more sensors and more compute, and can be comfortable at the same time because it has room to include a top-strap. With a glasses form factor all the weight is resting on your nose and with anything over 60g that's going to get pretty uncomfortable.

And all that aside, the real killer-feature with AR/VR is the software and so far it doesn't fell like anybody has figure out what people are even supposed to do with these things.

That explanation still seems overly complicated. Iroh isn't a VPN. Iroh just lets apps connect to each other, just like plain old TCP, but without the shackles of NAT, DNS and dynamic IP addresses that made that impossible. It's restoring simple P2P connectivity to the Internet.

> It is important, if I destroy your brain and grow a new one and start running the same program on the new brain your consciousness is still dead and its a new person living.

If I copy a text document from one computer to another, is that the same document or a different one? It's all just information. If you copy it, you have two, it's still the same until the documents start changing and go different directions.

> Computer AI models don't run on a single machine

It doesn't matter on how many machines it runs on. It's information processing, as long as it gives the same results, it doesn't matter how you accomplish it.

Consciousness isn't some magic thing that sits on top, it's the result of that information processing. You take random sensory data, the brain transforms that into "cats, dogs, you, me", it uses uses those percepts to execute actions, gets more data back and checks how the actions changed the world state.

Keeping track of what changes in the world were causes by actions of the brain vs things that happened due to other causes is the conscious experience.

The image capture was done with a robotic camera rig from what I understand, they photographed 360° images of the room from all possible position. They restricted the camera movement to a plane, which is why the player height is fixed. I don't know what they did on the software side with all the image.

Many years ago there was a game called Casebook[1], a small little detective game where you investigated rooms for clues. But unlike similar FMV games where you jumped from point to point, it had photorealistic environments that could be smoothly walk around in, much like later lightfield or gaussian splatting experiments.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-VAaC5BgVE

The point is that the brain operates on information, not things. The thing you think is the external world, that's just electricity flowing through your neurons. When you see a dog, that isn't a thing in the world, but a signal in your brain. In principle we can take a knife and cut that connection at any point and replace the real signal with an electronic box that gives the same signal.

You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body. And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.

The important part of consciousness is being able to figure out what of the sensory input is correlated to your own action and which was caused by the rest of the world.

> If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

If you have hundred different people, they will of course do something different. Just like hundred different AI model will do something different. The question you have to ask is if the same person under the same circumstances would do the same.

Luckily, we have an answer to that: They would. Transient Global Amnesia is a condition where people temporarily lose the ability to form memories and in turn they keep repeating the same conversation again and again[1]. Their brain keeps asking the same question again and again, as it doesn't remember the answers it already got.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fA5uzWDU8

The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important.

If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets.

Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body.

An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself.

The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.

It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.

> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.

There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.

Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.

And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.

Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.

Alternative suggestion: Force them to open up the service and allow third party clients. Take Art. 20 GDPR "Right to data portability" and extend it to public content.

> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server

Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.

That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.