We need to get to a place where all consumer-focused apps and games include full source code, including any server necessary to play multiplayer or store cloud files.
In this I see Stop Killing Games as a half-measure that the industry supports to avoid us waking up and realizing what we should have.
Something is going on over a TI. They tried to scrub their old datasheets from the web a few years ago too [1]
[1] - Texas Instruments sent a DMCA takedown to a site archiving data sheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785 -
354 points by DyslexicAtheist on Jan 8, 2021 | 122 comments
I got one of those take down notices because I had their catalog of Space Grade Rad Hard parts on my website. About six directory levels down; did I give TI permission to invade my site?. Any Human would have seen it as promoting their parts, which was not the direct intention. The Bot just said it was a Copyright violation and I had to remove it from my site or they would send lawyers after me. It wasn't worth the time to fight.
I've been screwed by TI many times in one way or other. As have colleagues.
They did a die-change of a MSP430 and it stopped working in their product. No answer was forthcoming from TI.
I had designed in a Silicon Labs Bluetooth module a few years ago. Now that TI has bought SiLabs, I'm designing it out. I simply don't trust TI. They once were a good company. They went downhill fast after they got rid of all of the support people and moved support online via forums.
Why do companies always do this? Always the largest companies with all the money to quietly host what at most a couple hundred mb of data and they just don't. Kill the old download links. Ruin all the old support articles that point to those old download links. Ruin all the old forum posts that point there. What is even crazier is sometimes they still have the files they just don't expose them, they make you beg for them with the support agent from across the world who asks if you have tried unplugging the thing first when you ask for the download you know you already want. Infuriating, boring dystopia.
I realized that the belief that datacenters are bad for the water supply (either evaporating it or polluting it) is weaponized self-delusion. People don't care if it's true or not, because it gives people a way to fight back against (perceived) AI job losses.
> The dead economy is not one where nothing happens. Plenty will happen. The GDP might even go up; AI-related investments are already propping it up. The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on. Where the people who built it told you they don’t think you should have a say
Who cares what they think? If the people feel that the economy is bad, the economy is bad. Full stop. Unless the tech oligarchs remove human labor entirely, there will always be a mortal threat to them posed by a disenfranchised population.
That's where this article loses the plot. Even if the world is just AI buying and selling goods and services to itself, so what? That's not a "dead economy", in the "secretly dead but only the wealthy notice" that's "dead economy" as in "french revolution is ongoing so commerce has taken a pause".
It's not like the market for middleware changes by this. I honestly don't see it having much of an effect on price. They're gonna take their middleware and go where exactly?
I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.
As someone in the movement since basically the beginning, this bill is enough in a lot of areas.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.
Right, well, the courts will figure it out, and if they decide on something you disagree with, and someone else in SKG agrees with it, is that not exactly what I predict?
...I wasn't expecting the argument to be that Linux interoperates poorly with AI Agents lol.
I think the author is actually on the right track at first then dismisses it with: These are "why a person did not switch to Linux last" and not "why the desktop, as an institution, will continue to belong to Apple and Microsoft". You can absolutely get to the root cause of the former and find foundational issues that explain the latter.
Yikes, you can't find a single sentence in there that doesn't basically say "we're clueless, so we assume that the most convenient thing for us is true". Reads to me like: "We have no idea where the collection is! So we assume it's not our problem!"
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