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Comment $5 to $20 games exist now; IARC self-rating (Score 1) 102

Digital games themselves did not lower prices, despite them being marketed as doing so without the cost of materials/packaging/handling/shipping

From the summary: "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing." As I understand this, paid downloads did not lower prices of AAA games because of retail price parity contracts. Paid downloads did, however, make the $5 to $20 tier for indie game pricing viable.

One thing not mentioned in the summary is that publishers of games distributed in physical copies owe a royalty to the age rating agency of each region in which a game is published. Publishers of downloadable games do not, instead relying on self-certification through the IARC form. The age rating agencies allow this because it's a lot more practical to update a game once it is found to have been misclassified.

Comment Re: They are all garbage is the problem (Score 1) 75

Easy for me to find lots of interesting things on Mastodon. I think, despite what people say, they love the rage bait on the bigger networks. Mastodon is just normal people discussing normal topics.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who ever posts in the tag for a particular toy line. Either I guessed the wrong tag, or I'm the only person on fedi interested in that topic. Which is more likely?

Comment Re:I don't understand why this is considered... (Score 1) 187

What exactly do they owe you?

The summary states that Reddit owes the OP a reason why the user was banned, as well as a complete, untruncated copy of the user's posting history.

Can you cite the law that says so?

The summary states that the relevant law is Article 17 of the EU's Digital Services Act.

Comment GOG is for poaching more than launching (Score 1) 49

And like I said I don't see anyone talking about GOG.

How much of that is related to GOG's reputation for being selective about what games and genres they accept? I get the impression that GOG is a bit more "curated" than some other PC game stores. The curators don't really want visual novels (a style of menu-driven adventure game). And apart from new releases by CD Projekt (which owned GOG before the end of 2025), I suspect that GOG seeks to poach "catalog" games that have already been successful on the competing store Steam as opposed to having a game at day one.

Sources include GOG forums (thread; thread)

Comment Emulators on GitHub (Score 1) 45

GitHub has deleted projects because it didn't like them too or considered them too much of a hot potato. Try safely hosting an emulator on there for an older games console or something similar.

My own NES emulator is on Codeberg, but there are well over a dozen emulators on GitHub. Start here:

- LIJI32/SameBoy (Game Boy)
- TASEmulators/fceux (NES)
- mgba-emu/mgba (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance)
- nesdev-org/MesenCE (NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, PC Engine, Master System/Game Gear, WonderSwan)
- jsgroth/jgenesis (Mega Drive/Mega CD, Super NES, Master System/Game Gear)
- dolphin-emu/dolphin (GameCube, Wii)
- stenzek/duckstation (PlayStation)
- ares-emulator/ares (numerous)
- Dwedit/PocketNES (PocketNES on Game Boy Advance)
- FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan (WonderSwan on Nintendo DS)
- FluBBaOfWard/NGPDS (Neo Geo Pocket on Nintendo DS)
- FluBBaOfWard/NitroGrafx (PC Engine on Nintendo DS)

Which emulator of a 20+-year-old console did you see deleted from GitHub, unless it included ROMs or system software copied without permission?

port forwarding your residential cable Internet service to a Pi

The problem is that a lot of home ISPs don't let their customers port forward because there just aren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around, and I'd bet a lot of your audience are behind ISPs that don't provide IPv6 (such as Frontier fiber). When an ISP is using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put an entire neighborhood behind a single IPv4 address, how would the ISP's router know to which customer to direct a TCP SYN packet received at that address? I guess each Forgejo instance operator could pay per month for some sort of proxy service using a reverse SSH tunnel.

AI

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against 'Premature Restrictions' of Open-Weight Models 18

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are "broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands." "Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect," the letter said. "And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk."

Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also amplified the letter on social media, writing that it has his "full support" in a post on X. SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said Thursday that the company believes in broad access, and that he has not been involved in any conversations with the Trump administration about potentially banning Chinese open-weight models in the U.S.

"I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize," Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. "And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the letter in a post on X on Friday, writing that he wants the U.S. to win with both open-weight and proprietary models, and that he is "glad to see this."

[...] In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks" instead of with "sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation." "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter said. "This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country."
The letter follows a separate appeal signed by nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, warning that restricting U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models could cripple the next generation of American startups. "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards.

Of course, these signees "have an obvious economic stake in seeing open AI models flourish," notes TechCrunch. "Companies like Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers have a vested interest in pushing for commoditized models: If models are interchangeable, people will buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, and build more applications."

Comment Consider a static site generator (Score 1) 24

I'd like to see Wordpress broken in half so the admin and clever bits are in one place and the actual hosted stuff is somewhere else. The server part of it needs to be as dumb as possible, and definitely not allow any sort of logins.

If you want "as dumb as possible", the search keyword for that is "static site generator". Then you can redirect /wp-admin/ to Automattic's front page.

Comment Master System, Genesis, Game Boy (Score 1) 42

People still develop new games for the Master System (which uses a Z80), the Genesis (which uses a Z80 as a sound coprocessor), and especially the Game Boy (whose Sharp SM83 CPU isn't exactly a Z80 but is similar). And they're selling these games both as ROM filess on itch.io and as cartridges.

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