I dislike when people gatekeep like this. Go volunteer for a more "worthy" cause with your own time, and don't complain about what other people do for fun. It's their own time, and people like spending that time on their hobbies, or topics that interest them.

"We actually care quite a bit... just not about you or your concerns."
- Management, clarifying

It's not just that either. Not all languages are created equal. They have strengths and weaknesses. This is kind of like asking "why are these so many different types of hammers?"

Turns out there are a lot of different problems solved by programming languages, and in many cases, these problems have vastly differing priorities. I write videogames, so top concerns are: performance, compatibility with ecosystem, expressiveness.

That's probably going to be an entire different set of priorities from someone writing in some other domain. In that case, maybe they'd prioritized safety over performance, in which case, a managed language might be a better fit.

Probably about the same time the OK gesture got re-interpreted as a hate symbol.

I think it would be incredibly difficult to get a 20 year old large-scale AAA project up and building again. That's mostly because the build process for games are always a custom, fragile nightmare, relying on a hodge-podge of scripts, compilers, libraries and APIs, custom tools, exporters, data conversion utilities, etc. It's hard enough to keep things running smoothly during development, let alone recreate it decades later.

The thing is, if you don't get the complete data-centric build pipeline working, then you're restricted to just working with either run-time moddable data (like scripts), or recompiling the code (and even that can be a challenge).

You're looking at this from a very theoretical viewpoint. I'm telling you based on my experience in the industry that it probably is not going to work out as nicely as you're imagining.

There's really no need. Anyone can legally download and play around with the tools and source for the latest Unreal or Unity engines for free, and start building your own projects. Or there are decent open source game engines available as well, like Godot. Lots of free content packs, tutorials. And what you learn is going to be more relevant than trying to get a 20 year old project to compile and run.

Valve is just taking the default safe position. There's no real downside for them in being conservative here. And I think you're somewhat optimistic if you think that all legal issues surrounding AI-generated works have been resolved.

Just FYI, AAA game devs I know (and certainly in my own company) are not touching AI-generated *anything* with a 10-foot pole, because there's really no way to attribute the source of that content. It's easier and safer for now just to pay coders and artists to create what you want, with zero question about legality. Like Valve, my company (and probably most others) are just taking the safe position until these issues get hashed out.

OceanGate seemed to be all about the whole "move fast and break things" method of modern entrepreneurship. Apparently, though, physics doesn't give a fuck about your disruptive business model when it's crushing a sub-standard pressure container at the bottom of the ocean.

Some people just enjoy watching the world burn... or at least making other people unhappy. A few years ago, some Grinch DDOSed Xbox Live over the Christmas Holiday.

People have been predicting the end of consoles for decades. Yet a new generation always shows up.

Reasonably performing videocards can be acquired much cheaper for console, by using slightly older tech and cutting deal with manufacturer, building stuff at massive scales. Consoles have *always* been significantly less powerful than equivalent PCs. They try to compensate with more specialized hardware that remove some bottlenecks, but consoles have always been about the price point and form factor, not about top-tier performance. Consider how well Nintendo consoles sell, with typically underpowered hardware.

My book club at the videogame company I work at read it a few months ago. Results were fair to positive. I agree, it was pretty interesting for the first half, or maybe two thirds. Then things went into la la land, at least from the perspective of a videogame programmer. The author apparently was much more interested in advancing a narrative than paying attention to the remotest bit of technical feasibility, which was kind of disappointing to the group. Funny story: our server programmer, who had extensive MMO work experience, claimed he was "deeply offended" by that part for it's sheer hubris. Up until that point, it seemed like the author had done some pretty good research, as I only had a few nits about technical aspects, but overall pretty spot on.

The characters were very... interesting, which is good, and actually, fairly accurate. But I had a hard time with the book because none of them were very *likeable*, and I have tons of very likeable colleagues - most of us are not nearly that edgy. Oh, and apparently, almost everyone in videogame development is bi or gay, and we all do a lot of drugs. I had no idea. Well, okay, creative license and all that, or maybe I just missed out somehow. We definitely have a lot of very interesting characters, certainly, so I'll give that a pass.

For me, the best part was the sense of nostalgia the book invoked, as I started my game development career right around that time as well. So all the references, I totally got them all, and it was a lot of fun walking down memory lane like that. I think it's a worthwhile read if you can put aside a few of the technical quibbles (hard for me as a videogame programmer), but the nostalgia trip is worth the muddled direction near the end, if that's your thing, or are interested in a fictional historical narrative about videogame development.

I'm typically a private property rights and capitalism cheerleader, but I'd have to give this type of service some thought. Why? Because there's a pretty big difference between private and commercial use in many cases. This ends up turning your private residence into a commercial venue.

When it starts disturbing your neighbors, it's not always about "muh freedums!" You need to be a good neighbor as well. A home is not just a person's sanctuary... that previously quiet house in the suburbs is also literally the biggest single investment someone is likely to make in their entire lives. So I'm not entirely sure I think some sort of oversight may be unwarranted here, since such rules are mostly designed to protect those investments for everyone, not to mention neighborhood tranquility. After all, you're probably not legally allowed to simply convert your home's rooms into office space and rent it out to businesses. I hope the reason for that (for zoning laws) are self-obvious enough that I don't need to explain. It seems like this sort of activity is skirting perilously close to the same sort of thing.

No one is outlawing private pools. But commercial businesses ARE regulated, and frankly, for pretty good reasons.

Exactly my first thought. "Why should I give a shit about China's heavily subsidized solar manufacturing industry?" China can bail out those companies if it wants to keep them afloat. That's a danger of trying to speculatively capture an emerging market.

I use Ublock Origin, and I still saw this popup ad. Oh, and I turned off "studies" ever since they pulled that stupid shit with the Mr Robot promotion that made it look like malware might have infested my machine. Nope, this was an ad built right into the browser, so of course a plugin is not going to stop it. I only saw it once after I hadn't touched my machine for a while, though.

Seriously, Mozilla management constantly makes such bad decisions, it's not hard to understand why they keep losing marketshare. How did they expect people to react to this? Do they understand who their last remaining users are at all?

P.S. Some people keep writing "full screen" ad. It's not full screen, but it IS a modal dialog that hijacks your entire browser window, if you want to be pedantic... and I know that's how we roll here.

It's a good point. This sort of promotion is going to self-select people who, almost by definition, are not looking to spend much of their own money.