MudMan

OK, so ignore him. Other people who would know are making similar points about “the campaign”. Argue with one you like in good faith.

If you make it about the Youtube drama you won’t be taken seriously, and some of the points being raised are legitimate. Dismissing them based on the personality of the one guy just because he’s more accessible or more susceptible to ad-hominem dismissals like these won’t help there.

And I’m saying, very seriously, that you don’t “support a person”. Either you think the argument is right or you think it’s wrong (or somehwere in that spectrum, it certainly isn’t a binary choice).

Agreeing with something because you think is right is not a judgement of character. I don’t get to choose whether the guy is right, I don’t have a particular stake on his personality and my stance is entirely independent of his.

And the same goes for Faliszek, incidentally.

I don’t know how entirely serious you were, but those are absolutely the parameters of this conversation, not just with you but with everybody chiming in. And those parameters suck. They are extremely toxic and I reject them entirely. Seriously.

I agree, but if one of these persons is piratesoftware I have to do a double take. In fact I originally understood Chet’s position but now that I know this guy agrees with him I’m not so sure.

Look, I don’t know you, but you must be able to see how that is a horrifying sentence, right?

If we’re looking at the issue based on whether we like the people and not on the merits, or on whether people agree with other people we don’t like, then it’s all pointless. It’s just taking sides for no reason, or a popularity contest.

Let me make it absolutely clear: I don’t give a crap if Faliszek’s writing changed my life and the other guy skins puppies as a hobby. All I was saying earlier is that there seems to be a significant gap in expertise between the people actively having this argument. The fact that they both agree on this has no bearing on whether they are right.

For the record, I think they’re not, for similar reasons. I would love to have a chat with Faliszek about it (although I’m pretty sure I’d have better subjects to bring up), but I’d certainly not do so over the Internet because there is nothing to be salvaged from this conversation at this point.

The more you guys talk the more this seems like crappy high school drama transplanted to the Internet and the less interested I am. Game preservation remains important and hard, but at this point I’m just kinda sad that we’ve wasted the energy debating it with this particular cast of characters and in these particular terms. None of this seems serious or productive at this point.

It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.

The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.

The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.

Well, then I disagree with the guy because he doesn’t go far enough.

I mean, I disagree with you, because the stuff on his website and on his Youtube channel does not at any point claim that live service games should be allowed to go offline.

But I don’t care if he says it, I’m saying it: live games should be preserved in some form.

For the record, games came with the ability to host your own server when the server was not handling matchmaking and handling discrete games with a beginning, an end and a handful of players.

That is still very much a thing. In some cases you can self-host servers (Terraria, since it’s in the news today), in others you can rent a server (Conan Exiles, if I remember correctly).

But what you can’t do there is run global matchmaking or have oversight over the entire game. This isn’t a problem of “writing the server software”, it’s a problem of having a centralized infrastructure to handle the parts of the game that aren’t related to an individual session. “Server software” doesn’t come in interchangeable “server software units” you can exchange or move from wherever the developer is hosting them to a local computer. That’s not an easy transition to make. That’s where saying things like these starts making devs scoff at you and stop taking you seriously.

But that doesn’t mean I’m fine with those live service games dependent on a larger infrastructure going away entirely. I do want to find a form of storage and preservation for them. Maybe that form means they’re still not playable at all times for people who paid for them, but I do care about them as cultural artifacts existing in some form.

I mean… yeah, but when the people in question are professionals or experts in the field (let’s say we’re talking about Faliszek and whoever the Pirate Software guy is, I’m not filing a resume to this conversation) and the other one is… not, Occam’s Razor starts to look perilous.

Because you’re all giving me homework I started to listen to the Pirate Software videos referenced in the other guy’s videos (and man, we are reaching flat earther levels of Youtube cross-referencing here). It seems that, like Faliszek he’s coming at it from the perspective that live games are not the problem here.

I would disagree, this isn’t about shutting down single player games or single player components of games. This is about preservation, including preservation of live service games.

That doesn’t mean I agree with “Ross” (is that a first or last name? I can’t tell). If the problem is preservation, then the requirements aren’t what he says they are. The point isn’t to keep everybody’s game running in some magical rebuilt server somewhere. It’s to keep some representative sample of the server code that can either be spun up to recreate the game or at most used as a starting point for a community server replacement.

But on the flipside… well, yeah, maybe that adds a bunch of cost if you force it on the developer. Maybe the real answer is to let the community reverse engineer the server if they want to, whether the publisher likes it or not. Maybe there’s some intermediate body playing a role here.

Of the discussion under Faliszek’s post on BS, perhaps the response that makes the most sense to me is this:

https://bsky.app/profile/dungenrobot.com/post/3lsdg2udgbc2s

Hey, if two separate people look at the same issue separately and raise some of the same concerns there’s a possibility that the concerns are legitimate.

I don’t know if we’re raising the same “talking points”, though. I haven’t heard his “talking points”, beyond a ten second clip in this guy’s video. I didn’t agree with the clip (a comment about how it’s fine for games to end), although I wouldn’t be suprised if there was more context to it.

Look, I think preservation of live games is a huge problem. I think there are probably only partial solutions available to it, and I think any solutions will likely impact the business to some extent. I think everybody is going to have to live with that impact at some point, though.

I think the request of legislation to drive consumer protections around this is perfectly legitimate, but perhaps the person driving it as a campaign isn’t super aware of what some of those concerns are and is presenting a bit of a distorted picture of what he’s asking for and what it’d entail.

That depends on what pump you’re using and for what. We installed one this year that handles heating and hot water, but is currently not plugged in to do AC (it can do it, the rest of the installation just can’t support it).

I don’t think anybody refers to those as reverse cycle AC. Certainly none of our installers or the people handing the government grants we got as part of the process. That’s generally used to refer to window units that can do both heat and cold air. Maybe Americans use the term for their crazy outdoor towers to do centralized air heating and cooling? I wouldn’t know.

We are absolutely at that stage, though. That’s why you make a petition in the first place. Even if knowing what you actually want wasn’t a key element in gathering support (which it obviously is), it certainly would be fundamental in the process of advocating for legislation in front of the EU and other governments.

See, I get this feeling that this guy wants to be the Louis Rossman of this issue but perhaps lacks some of the insider knowledge and expertise to take on that role. Which is no defense of Rossman, I disagree with him on a lot of things (political things, primarily), but there’s no denying the guy knows the specifics of what he’s talking about and can defend them in public. This Ross guy is stuck trying to defend his project with “well, we’ll figure it out later, we just want it to work” when developers take issue with it. Even in the places where I think he’s right he would benefit from being able to be a lot more specific and accurate about what he wants to do.

Nope. First time I heard of the guy was watching the bow out video where this Ross guy “reponds” to him. I still don’t know who he is. I don’t care. This is about policy and business practices, not Youtube drama.

I knew of the petition (and signed it, because as I said above I don’t have a problem with the generalities it contains and I agree with the spirit). I don’t follow the guy promoting it. Even the Faliszek caveats I only saw this week and I only watched the petition’s promoter recent videos in full because people are clearly being dramatic about it and I knew I’d probably have to deliberate it if I mentioned something here. I was right. Good times.

Less bad, maybe?

Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.

If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.

Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.

Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).

Sure, but he has a whole website and a youtube channel, right?

I get that there’s some tension between making the materials you present digestible to end users so they will support you and making them technically sound. That’s fine.

But legislation does need to be technically feasible. I think the “games need to be able to run on consumer hardware, both server and client” bit is probably past that line. You can’t just go “but old games ran on local servers and some games have been reverse engineered” and assume that means this is feasible across the board. And a piece of legislation would, in fact, have to be applicable across the board.

I think there’s probably some way towards this. Maybe we need to just create some term of mandatory support, or a mandatory refund policy within some term. Maybe we need to carve some exception to copyright to ensure that abandonware owners can’t go after server replacements, or some semi-public repository where users can contribute to paying for a server directly. I do think there needs to be better regulation for this.

“Your server needs to be able to run on the same machine as your client in all cases” is… probably not it? (EDIT: In the guy’s defense, and after reviewing the full video in context, he does acknowledge the option of having a proper server at some cost, although his answer to dependencies and shared services still seems to be “well, I guess games need to be made fundamentally differently, then”). Some of the things in that FAQ (which I had already read, by the way) are also outright incorrect, objectively.

I will say for it that the petition itself is super vague and does not include many of these incorrect statements (beyond the characterization of losing functionality in a game as “robbing”). I think the vagueness here helps avoid some of the problems, and as a result I don’t have a huge problem with the petition itself as presented.

How the guy visualizaes this working in the rest of his materials and through his online persona is a different story.

So there’s an opt-out.

The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?

I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.

Chet Faliszek, of Valve fame, has been railing against the guy (and this initiative) recently

https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsd7rsd3j22n https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsf4vxbtls2p

I mean, he does have a point. I do think there should be some obligations and disclosures to enable third parties to take over unsupported games, the specifics of how this particular project presents that seem… not super technically or legally sound?

Maybe we can try again in a bit with a project built by people who have a clearer view on both the legal and technical side of what’s being asked.

I think maybe I’m spoiled by the movies, but… I kind of hate it? I hate all the ways they had to cherry pick Dune stuff to turn it into a survival crafting MMO like Conan, especially in the parts where the lore fits worse than Conan. And the story is extremely videogamey. I think the new films are already a bit overly literal when it comes to choosing between the politics and the psychedelia, but man, does Dune Awakening do videogame-ass videogame dream sequences.

The disconnected, patchy reality of the original Cryo Dune got to the right feel accidentally, but there’s something to seeing the setting reduced to a skin over Conan Exiles that seriously rubs me the wrong way.

Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.

Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there’s little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.