loupol

That's a bit better but it shifts the question:

Why did they not mandate national (or at least EU-based) hosting and infra ?

It feels a bit insane in retrospect for such a critical digital service ?

Yet another AI company where the logo follows the butthole convergence rule [0] ?

As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today.

[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

[1] https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/

I received the email telling me I am impacted today.

Ironically it changes nothing for me as that same data had already been leaked by the French government agency that handles unemployment benefits a couple years ago. Silly me had not bothered deleting that account even after it was no longer necessary due to finding a new job.

Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.

A good reason to outlaw bribes is that politicians tend to be incredibly cheap and offer an extremely high ROI. Albeit at the cost of a nice democracy.

I take it you are not a member of the Church of Interruption[0] then.

https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html

There's also nothing saying they are not dog fooding at least a little bit.

Suing made Grooveshark disappear. I still miss Grooveshark's UI.

You should probably check out Wargroove on Steam. It's very close to the Advance Wars games in terms in terms of mechanics.

As far as technical resources are concerned, gbatek is probably your best bet:

https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm

You've outlined the steps but not named the process outright : This is basically establishing a dominant platform and then abusing the dominant position that comes with it.

Article is missing some context imo :

* Annapurna Pictures (the parent company of Interactive) had some financial issues previously at least (see [0] from 2019) while Annapurna Interactive was doing well for itself.

* Annapurna Pictures wanted to integrate the gaming division in-house (possibly to prop up the rest of the company)

* Staff and exec at Annapurna Interactive wanted to be spin off (see [1])

* Negotiations fell through, so most exec and staff at Interactive left

[0] https://variety.com/2019/film/news/annapurna-resolves-more-t...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-12/annapurna...

Recently there's been a uptake in free procedural construction games like Townscaper. There's Tiny Glade and SUMMERHOUSE that have attracted some attention on Steam.

Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title :

"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"

"It's been determined with more than 86% accuracy that you are likely to commit a crime within the next 6 months. You will be detained until the probability goes down."

I remember reading someone's conclusion about Logitech accessories several years ago :

"Good hardware, terrible software."

I guess that still holds somewhat true today.

I think I would have preferred .intra (Unless it's already used somehow ?).

Just 5 letters is less annoying to type repeatedly than .internal, while still conveying the overall purpose relatively well.

It might just be my laziness talking though.

We might never know if it was "justified", but we have everything we need to judge how the termination was delivered though, and that one is a shitty look for Cloudflare.

Agreed on all points, the tweet feels like an allergic reaction to what copyright has morphed into, which is a tool for big corporations to extract money from existing IP for an insanely long duration.

But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP.

Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn't seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.

Haven't read the book, but the author wrote multiple blog entries about different maze generation algorithms[0] prior to its publishing which I found personally useful.

[0] http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/archives.html (the maze posts date from early 2011)

> Sgt. David Fikes is still featured on the Brookhaven Police Department’s Facebook page even though he is conducting plain-clothes drug interdiction operations at the airport and elsewhere.

> Sgt. Fikes has been involved in the seizure of $1,163,047, according to records Atlanta News First Investigates obtained through an open records request. His department’s cut is about nine percent of that money, but Brookhaven is responsible for his salary, police car, K9 and other expenses.

So a cop's department gets a direct cut of the money they seize. Textbook example of a perverse incentive.

Agreed that web search quality has been deteriorating since much earlier than LLMs gaining popularity.

Interestingly, we are in spot right now where I feel that for certain types of queries LLMs can outperform search engines. But from what is shown in the article, it seems like that state might only be temporary, and that in the same way that shitty content farms mastered SEO and polluted search results, we might see the same happening with LLMs that have access to the Internet.

I wonder how many images from Street View it has been trained on.

I've seen top Geoguessr players be able to pretty consistently determine a location worldwide after seeing a photo for just one second. So I would assume training an LLM to do the same would definitely be doable.

I think you and GP are right at the same time. The fee was probably knowingly overshot and then right after they offered to practically waive it to people who would be using their ad delivery services.

Getting people to use their ads was imo the main plan for them.

But they completely botched it by using a stupid fee structure and disregarding all the non-ad supported game developers who obviously won't get the waiver.

It might cause them to migrate to another game engine, but it won't kill them. As long as there's good profit to be made, there will be people creating them.

Predictability of costs is important.

If I use Unreal, if my game generates 2M$ revenue, I know exactly what I'll need to pay Epic. With Unity's model it's a coin toss. Are lots of people going to reinstall my games ? Am I going to get install bombed ? I have no idea.

It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue share which is much more easily auditable.

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game:

Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales.

It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-to-play and low-priced (0.99$, etc...) games will never choose Unity for new projects, because the percentage of revenue you will lose on those is going to be prohibitive.

A less worse metric to collect on would be actual game sales count, but that's still horrible for promotional sale events and low-priced games (assuming fixed cost per sale).

The sensible and simpler option would simply be a percentage of revenue past a threshold like Unreal Engine and CryEngine for example.

I see two possible outcomes:

  * They stick with this pricing policy, and cash in on the fact that a lot of game studios are heavily invested in Unity at the moment and will take time to move away to extract a shit-ton of money short term in the meantime. Long-term it will probably crash and burn, but they're fine with it as long as they can milk enough before that.

  * They wait for the outcry, say they've listened to the community, roll it back and introduce a more sensible royalty system with percentage of revenue, which the community grudgingly accepts since it's less worse than the initial option.

From news article :

> Diese Form des Freiheitsentzuges ist umso problematischer, da den Protestierenden, sollten sie für eine Blockade verurteilt werden, keine Haft droht. Die entsprechenden Verfahren enden regelmäßig lediglich mit Geldstrafen.

The crime they might have committed usually doesn't even result in jail time, only fines. Hence why such long detention seems especially unjustified.