the_af

Someone in the comments mentioned this:

> As someone who has known Nick in the past, I’m a bit surprised by this multitude of articles and books. However, I think you’ve missed a fifth possibility that would suggest gentle handling: a mental health issue. The papers and books on philosophy, religion, and issues well beyond anything econometric plus the videos on the Riemann Hypothesis suggest someone who is no longer bound by the intellectual boundaries or social mores of proper research.

I don't know whether the commenter is legit, and whether this actually happened, but I wonder if AI-psychosis (or at least, AI-amplified psychosis) might not become a real thing. People already on the edge having "productive" conversations with LLM chatbots and going down rabbit holes. It can't be a good thing, especially since LLMs are sycophants that indulge every crazy idea you have.

I'm not saying this didn't happen before, I just wonder whether LLMs enable a whole new scale of crazy.

> If their is a goal to allow people without a license to play a game protected by copyright to play the game, I can not support it.

> I do support preservation but not the flavor of preservation which is piracy. For example someone finds "lost media" and since it's "lost media" that means they can just upload a TV episode protected by copyright for others to watch for free.

As established previously, this all stems from you not valuing preservation. If you value copyright over culture, you don't value culture. "Piracy" and "copyright" are arbitrary terms, and copyright is not a goal in itself; it sometimes gets in the way.

> This confusion is intentionally done by pirates to make what they are doing sound legitimate. There are 2 flavors of preservation. Legal preservation which follows the law in how one preserves the work and illegal preservation which is essentially piracy.

The confusion is only created by you. Out of malice, I must assume at this point, since you've implicitly acknowledged you didn't engage with abandonware communities and therefore can only infer (incorrectly) what their motives were. I, in contrast, did engage, talked to the owner of HOTU (one of the largest ones back in the day) and know how they collected games and what their motives were. Having no counter to this, you keep ignoring it and instead rehash the same debunked points.

There's only one kind of preservation: the one that actually preserves stuff.

At this point I know you understand this, you're just willfully ignorant or maliciously distorting the argument.

> You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.

No, I'm not the only one: you mentioned what you thought was the goal in your initial comment (copyright infringement) and you're restating it now. Again it's very telling this is your "belief", but you acknowledged tacitly that you are unfamiliar with how abandonware projects worked, never having talked to the people. But I have. Do you think it would be maybe wise to acknowledge your beliefs are not based on actual knowledge?

The goals matter. In fact, they matter to you as well, because you've been arguing from a position of belief about the goals ("justify why the pirate things") that is simply incorrect. Why not update your knowledge instead?

> In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.

This is simply false. I don't think you are into "the retro hardware / software" community at all, I dare you to claim otherwise. Also, rare things do come up on auction, but this doesn't mean as a norm they exist! And the people involved in these projects are breaking all kinds of copyrights and have always been persecuted for this, which you'd know if you were involved in those communities.

> But both of those groups [pirates and abandonware groups] distributed pirated software.

I talked about goals. Your answer is a non-sequitur, because it argues about something that wasn't in dispute. Please try not to do this.

> Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.

You haven't the faintest idea of what I do or don't do. More importantly, we're not discussing me, are we? Please try sticking to the point.

At this point you're sounding like a mix of dishonesty and willful ignorance.

This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".

The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.

> So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.

Often those copies are legal (as in purchased; e.g. the abandonware archive of Home of the Underdogs started with the personal collection of legally purchased games of the owner; she also scanned manuals, cover artwork and whenever possible any goodies that came with the games; as much as possible from the game was preserved). Other times the legal copy just doesn't exist. In either case, the goal of games preservation is that the games are played; these are paintings hanging on a wall.

> Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.

Games are not wine, and you're wrong.

> Preservation does not justify piracy

Yes, it does. It's just that you're not interested in preservation. You went as far as claiming that it's ok for games/software to die; do you realize anything else you claim about "using AI" or "keeping copies somewhere" and "temperature controlled rooms" is more or less nonsense? The fundamental thing is that you don't care about preserving games. Everything else you're saying is a red herring. If you're ok with games being lost forever, then of course every measure to preserve them will seem excessive or pointless to you. (Please don't insist with "copyright holders surely have a copy...", I've already explained that they often don't. Do me the courtesy of not rehashing refuted claims).

> Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy

Wait, before you claimed it wasn't. Now you claim it is. Keep your story straight. Also, you more or less didn't dispute you're completely unfamiliar with abandonware, only basing your opinions on prejudice (and some deranged nonsense about AI), so it's very hard to take your arguments seriously.

Oooh! I didn't know of this. I need it.

Edit: looking at the list of changes, this is exactly what I wanted. Well, an excuse to watch Blade Runner yet again :D

> [copyright infringement] It was the means towards their goal at the very least.

Which one is it? Before, you claimed it was their goal (what they wanted to do). You cannot have it both ways. The actual goal matters.

> These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.

As I said, this just shows you are unfamiliar with the goals of abandonware. They were preserving the games in playable form, and they needed them to be played, because games are not static artifacts; they must be experienced. Besides, asking them to keep copies in temperature controlled rooms is ridiculous, these were passion projects done on a budget, out of commodity hardware and rented servers. This started before torrents by the way, and some abandonware communities frowned upon the notion of just downloading a big file of everything anyway.

> Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere

No, there often wasn't. Resist the urge to reply "well, theoretically..." and consider that maybe I know about this a bit more than you.

> You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.

I'm taking this the way you wrote it, how else? Don't backpedal. The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different (though, of course, there was some cross-pollination).

> No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

"Right" is a made-up thing (often broken by the industry that later enforced similar rights; do you know the history of Hollywood studios?). And no, it's not ok. Just because you think some made-up legal right trumps human cultural experience doesn't mean you're right.

It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost. It matters. Just not to you. I think basically 99% of your argument boils down to "I don't care enough about games preservation, and therefore I don't see the problem".

> People who have a legal copy of the game can preserve that copy until copyright expires.

No, that's the point. "Can" doesn't mean they do; only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.

I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.

> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.

Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.

All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.

In other words, you don't care about preservation, which makes the rest of your arguments moot.

If you think copyright is a goal rather than a means for culture, then you're wrong and everything you say stems from something misguided.

Nodding in agreement again.

I think Aliens has a couple of additions that do make sense, Ripley being told of her daughter and the scene with the miniguns, but that's about it.

Agreed about the rest, you're basically reading my mind about how I feel about movies.

Ah, so they pulled a Moana 2 with Mando?

If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.

Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?

Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).

I think you're simply unfamiliar with the topic. Have you ever interacted with abandonware communities from 20+ years ago? Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.

In many cases, all that remains of these games is the cracked digital versions, the physical versions don't exist anymore. The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release, AI or not.

Also, a lot of "legally available" software from today (say, via GOG who do own the rights) has the fingerprints of crackers who made it possible for the software to run today.

> And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.

Regular pirates distribute recent games, which is obviously an entirely different matter. The abandonware community is/was concerned with preserving digital artifacts and games for posterity, and making old stuff playable today. Games that otherwise would have been lost, forgotten, or simply impossible to play. Those are completely different goals, and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement".

I don't want to offend you, but your initial claim that abandonware crews decades ago should have somehow foreseen AI would make cracking/fixing easier is the most deranged thing I've read in a while. It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.

Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?

Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].

It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)

> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.

It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.

I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).

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

Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.

It still seems weird to me when I hear people seemingly talking to themselves as if hallucinating. It always surprises me until I realize what's happening.

I mean, "should"?... I don't know. Death is natural, but so is fear of death and not wanting to bring up topics that disturb you.

We're not discussing geological or cosmic eras, just shorter biological processes. Systems can persist for enormous (but still human bound) periods of time.

"Nothing is supposed to <something>" is a meaningless assertion for entropy. Entropy doesn't suppose things. "Suppose to" implies intent.

Also, entropy might not be directly related to the biological process of aging. I mean, that's the point of TFA.

> Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try

"Supposed" by whom?

> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).

Heh, I know what you mean. I enjoyed the action minigames and figuring out what to do, but some people found them frustrating.

Mostly, what I remember is the outstanding voice acting, and the most memorable intro ever.

Yeah, whenever I think of Maureen I think of two things: asphalt, and trouble...

It's the theme and characters. Remember this game predates Coco by a lot!

If the Day of the Dead setting does nothing for you, then you'll dislike the game. But if it intrigues you, you'll likely love it.

The puzzles are arbitrary, it's not really what the game is about.

I also remember the criticism of Full Throttle, but it always rang hollow to me: a game is not just the puzzles, and also some people complained about the action sequences, but for me they were welcome (even if too easy). Everything about the game is golden: the setting about bikers (how cool is that?), the 2D pixel animation, the amazing voice acting and the opening by the Gone Jackals. I fell in love with the game back then, and I still like it on replays.

Agreed. Grim Fandango is a game that's all about the setting and characters. For that alone it's a masterpiece. But the puzzles... ehh..

"That isn't me" in the above comment means "I know I can grieve, but I can only tell indirectly other people can do so as well."

It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".

Haha, sort of. I guess I disagree with your claim the majority of people think math is "more" than proof. The majority of people think it's less: they think it's doing high school arithmetic. Most people don't know what a proof or a theorem are. They think math is doing calculations with numbers.