grumbel

Most of them I would assume. Everything from 2006 forward started to use Xinput. DirectInput support only shows up in racing sims, flight simulators, fighting games and emulation. But all the big AAA games have been built around Xbox360 style control schemes for two decades.

But it's all a bit theoretical, since most modern gamepads have Xinput support, and the generic HID devices are mostly flightsticks or SNES-style gamepads that wouldn't have enough buttons and axis for modern games in the first place. Another issue is that most games don't offer input remapping for gamepads.

But with SteamInput and homebrew tools like x360ce there are many ways to make generic USB devices compatible Xinput, so it's not like you can't use them. It's just not something that works out of the box.

> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.

We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.

> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.

Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.

> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?

Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.

It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.

Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.

Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.

On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.

> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.

I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.

Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:

>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.

Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.

[1] https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Cache

Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.

Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.

Would the model even need that breath of knowledge? Humans just look things up in books or on Wikipedia, which you can store on a plain old HDD, not VRAM. All books ever written fit into about 60TB if you OCR them, and the useful information in them probably in a lot less, that's well within the range of consumer technology.

As long as the application is made aware of the permissions and can prevent functioning when they get denied, that doesn't really help much. It's the choice between getting mugged or never leaving the house.

The ability to deny permissions without the app noticing or filling it with fake data doesn't exist on either system.

One big thing I still miss with org-mode are explicit section endings. Just as with markdown you only have headings, the end of a section is implicit. This often leads to text getting swallowed up by the last chapter and makes any kind of restructuring fragile. HTML's <section> makes things much easier.

Having explicit header levels (similar to HTML's <h[0-6]>) is another annoyance, as that makes inclusion of one org document into another problematic and requires restructuring (somewhat workaroundable with "#+begin_src org").

Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end.

On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself.

ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).

> you're going to be writing the (name value) form for 99% of it.

That's exactly the part that is wrong with Guix, and Scheme in general. Scheme has associated lists, they are written as '((name . value) ...), but since that's too ugly everybody makes macro wrappers around them to get them down to just (name value). But that means you aren't dealing with an obvious data type anymore, but with whatever the macro produces and if you want to manipulate that you need special tools yet again. And then you have record-type and named arguments which are different things yet again, but all serve the same name->value function as an associated list. Names themselves are sometimes symbols, sometimes keywords, and sometimes actual values. Same with lambda, sometimes you need to supply a function, other times there is a macro that allows you to supply a block of code.

It's like the opposite of the Zen of Python, there are always three different ways to do a thing and none of them as any real advantage over the other, they are just different for no good reason and intermixed in the same code base.

> A user’s identity is their domain name.

That's dead on arrival. The domain name system is one of the core reasons why everything has become so centralized in the first place. If one wants to fix anything wrong with the Internet, finding a better way to naming things should be the first step.

> Is this avoidable?

Instead of interacting with the cloud model directly, run a simple local model to interact with the cloud model and have it filter out all the ads before they reach you.

This is already what the chatbots do when it comes to interacting with rest of the Web, instead of you visiting websites yourself, they collect the information from the websites for you and present it in a format of your choice without the websites ads.

I don't see the ad model working out for chatbots in the long run given that those AI models already are the perfect ad filter.

Grokipedia is at 6,092,140 articles, English Wikipedia has 7,141,148. So it's pretty close already after just four months.

I use Gemini for that. Split the PDF into 50 page chunks, throw it into aistudio and ask it to convert it. A couple of 1000 pages can be done with the free tier.

> structured language that eliminates ambiguity

That has been tried for almost half a century in the form of Cyc[1] and never accomplished much.

The proper solution here is to provide the LLM with more context, context that will likely be collected automatically by wearable devices, screen captures and similar pervasive technology in the not so distant future.

This kind of quick trick questions are exactly the same thing humans fail at if you just ask them out of the blue without context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Newpipe doesn't clutter the screen with constant recommendations. You can just subscribe to the channels you want, get updates when they release a new video and that's it. It's a much more focused experience than regular Youtube.

All the legal uncertainty problems the cookie law produces aside, the core problem with the law is that it's fundamentally stupid. Cookies are a client side feature: You store the cookie, not the server. If you don't want to store the cookie, complain to your browser, that's the software responsible here. But instead of fixing the issue in the one place actually responsible, we make laws that force millions of websites to adopt.

> "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

Expand the GDPR "Right to data portability" to publicly published content for third parties, i.e. open up the protocols so you can have third party clients that themselves can decide how they want to present the data. And add a realtime requirement, since at the moment companies still circumvent the original rule with a "only once every 30 days" limit.

Also add an <advertisment> HTML tag and HTTP header and force companies to declare all their ads in a proper machine readable way.

The core problem with addictive design isn't the addictive design itself, but that it's often the only way to even access the data. And when it comes to communication services that benefit from network effects, that should simply not be allowed.

It's worse than just illegal content. Copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute anything without the permission of the copyright holder. IPFS however has no means to track the author or the license of content.

That means even distributing a piece of perfectly legal Open Source becomes illegal. Unlike a tarball or even a torrent where you can bundle content and license, IPFS allows addressing individual files or blocks, thus stripping the license from the content, which most licenses forbid. This does not even require an intentional action on the user, but happens automatically by partial content landing in your cache.

That's the idea behind C2PA[1], your camera and the tools put a signature on the media to prove its provenance. That doesn't make manipulation impossible (e.g. you could photograph an AI image of a screen), but it does give you a trail of where a photo came from and thus an easier way to filter it or lookup the original.

[1] https://c2pa.org/

The whole discussion is confused from the start. When people talk about the "security of NAT" they are not talking about NAT at all, but about what happens when NAT is misconfigured or switched off. In the case of IPv4 it means nothing works and your computer isn't reachable. The system is fail safe.

Meanwhile with IPv6 it's the other way around, everything is wide open unless you have a working and properly configured firewall.

This feels like the wrong end to optimize. Zip is plenty of fast, especially when it comes to a few hundred pages of a comic. Meanwhile the image decoding can take a while when you want to have a quick thumbnail overview showing all those hundred pages at once. No comic/ebook software I have ever touched as managed to match the responsiveness of an actual book where you can flip through those hundreds of pages in a second with zero loading time, despite it being somewhat trivial to implement when you generate the necessary thumbnail/image-pyramid data first.

A multi-resolution image format would make more sense than optimizing the archive format. There would also be room for additional features like multi-language support, searchable text, … that the current "jpg in a zip" doesn't handle (though one might end up reinventing DJVU here).

We should just have an <advertisement> tag in HTML, regulation could then require it.

> GPT-3 was supposedly so powerful OpenAI refused to release the trained model because of “concerns about malicious applications of the technology”. [...] This has, of course, not happened.

What parallel world are they living in? Every single online platform has been flooded with AI generated content and had to enact counter measures, or went the other way, embraced it and replaced humans with AI. AI use in scams has also become common place.

Everything they warned about with the release of GPT‑2 did in fact happen.

> If the model was closed, it would violate the license.

Training is fair use. The closed models wouldn't be impacted. Even if we assume laws gets changed and lawsuits happened, they just get settled and the closed source models would progress as usual (see Bartz v. Anthropic).

Meanwhile if somebody wants to go all "GPL AI" and only train their models on GPL compatible code, they'd just be restricting themselves. The amount of code they can train on shrinks drastically, the model quality ends up being garbage and nothing was won.

Further, assuming laws got changed, those models would now be incredible easy to attack, since any slip up in the training means the models need to be scraped. Unlike the big companies with their closed models, Open Source efforts do not have the money to license data nor the billions needed to settle lawsuits. It would mean the end of open models.

That is a complete fools errand. If it ever passes it would just mean the death of Open Source AI models. All the big companies would just continue to collect whatever data they like, license it if necessary or pay the fine if illegal (see Antropic paying $1.5 billion for books). While every Open Source model would be starved for training data within its self enforced rules and easy to be shut down if ever a incorrectly licenses bit slips into the models.

The only way forward is the abolishment of copyright.

TikTok, Youtube, news, blogs, … are getting flooded with AI generated content, I'd call that a pretty substantial "change in output".

I think the mistake here is expecting that AI is just making workers in older jobs faster, when the reality is, more often than not, that it changes the nature of the task itself.

Whenever AI reached the "good enough" point, it doesn't do so in a way that nicely aligns with human abilities, quite the opposite, it might be worse at performing a task, but be able to perform it 1000x faster. That allows you to do things that weren't previously possible, but it also means that professionals might not want to rely on using AI for the old tasks.

A professional translator isn't going to switch over to using AI, the quality isn't there yet, but somebody like Amazon could offer a "OCR & translate all the books" service and AI would be good enough for it, since it could handle all the books that nobody has the time and money to translate manually. Which in turn will eventually put the professional translator out of a job when it gets better than good enough. We aren't quite there yet, but getting pretty close.

In 2025 a lot of AI went from "useless, but promising" to "good enough".

> The question and buttons appear in that dialog.

The error/retry dialog is for the failure of moving an individual file, not for a failure of the move operation as a whole. Those individual error dialogs provide no means to deal with cascading errors. All you can do is "Skip All", but that means you get no further information on errors anymore.

The error reporting should be part of the Moving dialog itself and provide a list of everything that failed in the move, along with potential ways to resolve it. More detailed reporting than "Could not read" would also be welcome (io, permission, ...).

> As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?

Change the floppy disk. In the MSDOS days those messages were useful, as read errors might be caused by having the wrong floppy in the drive. The OS had no way to know when the floppy was changed and "Retry" allowed you to swap the disks back and try again. In modern days it is less useful, the behavior just got carried over.

Windows addresses this issue somewhat by scanning the directory tree before the actual copying starts, this can catch some errors before they happen and gives you better progress reporting on top.

But a single dialog that keeps track of the whole copy/move operations, not a modal dialog attached to individual read/write calls would be the way to go here. This is a case of the GUI sticking to close to what the OS is doing instead of what the user intended to do.

That's something C2PA[1] might be able to help with, i.e. your phones camera puts a digital signature on the photo confirming that your phone took it. If that doesn't work out due to people photographing an AI image of a display, I would expect custom shop apps to be required to make warranty claims, as they could make use of all the phones sensors and make forging much harder.

Either way, I am not sure how big of a problem this is to begin with, since you'd leave quite the paper trail either way. It's not a stunt you can pull off repeatedly without getting caught.

[1] https://c2pa.org/