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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2024

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  • Without a doubt, Patents and Software are a bad mix.

    But there’s definitely a truth to the idea that Palworld in particular were aiming for a legal battle against Nintendo from the beginning with provocative action. There’s a reason why Nintendo has rarely gone after Pokemon-likes but have decided that this particular company is worth pursuing.

    This is kind of a lose-lose situation. Palworld was clearly kit-bashing existing Pokemon models and were engaging in creative bankruptcy, but software/game patents serve only to hurt creatives and developers around the world and Japan in particular is poor around SLAP suits.

    So, I agree, grab the popcorn. But I hope that whatever patents they’re choosing to enforce here don’t have a major ripple in game development as a whole. There’s a world with the brazen IP theft of palworld actually does us all a disservice by making it an easier case for Nintendo to enforce Patents that would otherwise be unenforceable or difficult purely out of optics.














  • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.mlIs Linux (dumb)user friendly yet?
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    15 days ago

    I mean, yes. But also no, it sort of depends.

    If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.

    If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)

    I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.

    My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.



  • This is a false equivalency.

    Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.

    Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.

    It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.



  • “Wouldn’t it be much nicer and easier if we lived in an oligarchy?” Said the man who would benefit the most from an oligarchy.

    It’s such a crazy stance to have when you consider the fact that America is basically already a corporatocracy and this guy literally owns parts of the corporations that have huge influence on American law and policy. Like, I guess already being able to lobby and fuck over the people just isn’t enough for these people and they need to have full authoritarian control?

    I guess it’s true what they say, “Give them a inch…”