By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!

The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.

Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.

But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.

Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)

Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.

well, at my current job they use NoSQL, in this case it's DynamoDB and it's been frustrating at times. So I asked the question: why are we dealing with these problems day in, day out, if the problems we're trying to solve have been solved half a century ago with SQL?

The answer is cost. The way we access data may be convenient to do with SQL, but it's also expensive. We have big (not webscale but large) volumes of data coming in every day. Having this on SQL would cost us tens of thousands a month. Keeping it in DynamoDB costs us a few hundred. And it's stupidly fast - if we wanted to get that kind of performance from SQL we'd have to pay for a supercharged overprovisioned server.

And honestly it's been fun. It's turned "boring business software development" back into more of an engineering problem.

I see the problem as a more "get off my lawn" types here. They have fully adopted "vibe coding" as "anything made with AI assistance" as much as older people call anyone younger than them "millennials".

There's a big difference between an experienced programmer providing the AI with clear, concise prompts and guidance; than having someone with zero knowledge trying to build an entire app from scratch.

One is "augmented capabilities", the other is vibe coding. But the haters here just refuse ANY sort of AI involvement.

I refuse to believe the claim that "this would require billions of dollars and at least five years to get a factory operational."

There is clearly enormous amounts of money circulating in the industry right now. If a company like Nvidia genuinely wanted to manufacture its own memory, it absolutely could. Even with initially poor yields, the economics could still work. A 50% yield rate is far less concerning when RAM prices have increased by 200%, especially for a company purchasing memory in massive volumes alongside its hardware partners.

From my perspective, this looks less like an unavoidable technical limitation and more like market consolidation and price coordination. Companies have become comfortable charging substantial premiums for RAM, and the current situation provides a convenient justification for it.

It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

they also remove drag-hover-drop . it's so infuriating to have to organize your windows in a specific way to drag a file over to another window, OR use ctrl-c/ctrl-v

it was as easy as drag the icon to the next window "through the taskbar" which made the other window come front, and drop the icon.

i guess they removed that option since they started forcing taskbar grouping by default. a feature i remove from every windows and KDE machine I set up. I don't see any benefit in "grouping" or "compacting into an icon". if i wanted that behavior i'd just get a mac.

we have two options: live with a bug, or hope the fix doesn't introduce another bug.

Duke 3D's soundtrack was not exclusively the work of Bobby Prince; Lee Jackson, Apogee's go-to music guy, also did some of the tracks, including the title theme, Grabbag.

Prince used not only his MIDI skills but also his experience as a lawyer to ensure his 'inspired' derivatives were as close as legally possible to the originals. The relationship between individual tracks is often very clear and sometimes even hinted in the metadata of the source files.

i mean that's not a bad thing either. I sometimes DO NOT want to learn "new to me" things. I've been contributing to an ancient, but still used software called Xastir. It's VERY OLD spaghetti code, low level X11 with Motif. I DO NOT want to learn Motif. It's not a marketable skill or something I'll ever need. But I let the AI code a few contributions (one of them was replace some parts with Cairo fonts for antialias in high dpi scerens, and the other was fixing a very old screen drawing routine that took 2-3 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 2 and cut it down to 5 seconds). Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.

Say it with me, now. As we all know, the infamous saying goes:

A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

It's really incredible how marketing departments can radiate amnesia like this with such proficiency.

Lol imagine defending a 75% tax rate. Fucking communists.