umbraroze

There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

“Yes! We survived!!! (…Ahem…) So that we can die with honour in the next battle!” - Worf, Star Wreck V

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

I love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Sssss, tail number SSS-55555

I’m from Finland. This is how it usually goes in the winter:

During the 2 hours of daylight we get at this latitude:

• Ooooooh this is pretty
• Bet I can get some nice photographs
• …or I would, if the sky wasn’t overcast goddamn it

Other times:

• Rummaging through the closet for wool socks and more clothing
• Put on the headphones, hit the metal music collection on my Nokia, and face the Darkness with a grim stare
• Would hit the beer, but not in this economy

This is literally the old EA stratagem. Give the “independent” developer basically an impossible goal and then go “well you failed to meet the goal, looks like you need a little bit of help from us, and by little help, we mean from now on, you do exactly what we tell you, or else”. EA pulled this off with Origin Systems and (to a different extent) BioWare to name just a few examples. It ended with complete sadness.

To EA’s credit, that charade usually took a long time to come to completion. Sony is trying to pull this this so soon after acquiring Bungie.

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

In Finnish language we already have the kinda rare expression “rapakon takana” (“behind the mud puddle”) about stuff that’s happening in America.

Really?

Has NOBODY told Ubisoft that everyone else has figured out what their grand plan is?

“Same stuff, new box”? Hello? Anyone at Ubisoft heard of this?

If people get same stuff in a new box that’s not a surprise, Ubisoft

The indoors aesthetics of sci-fi spaceships are really a topic that has not been studied enough. I loved it when Mass Effect series went full hard into captain’s quarters customisation and I was like “ooh! aah!”

That’s a good angle to speculate on it. But the main thing to take away is this: Do they want to pursue this angle, or are they more willing to sit on this IP until the end of the time? I mean, sitting on an IP is a whole lot more legally safe than, you know, attempting to make some new wild legally-distinct numbers-filed-off things from it. (PROTIP: EA does this really well.)

And more importantly, is American McGee willing to rework this whole thing from the ground up?

Speaking as a random creative person: If I was in American McGee’s position, I’d drop this stuff right away and go think of other ventures. The moneybagmen sadly won.

Well, if American McGee wants to rebuild the franchise from scratch, then he faces the exact same problem, doesn’t he?

If EA wants to remake the franchise, they’re basically saying “Look, we filed the serial markers off, here’s a new Dark Alice in the Wonderland IP”, and they know nobody will buy it.

If American McGee wants to remake the franchise, it’s basically “Look EA, we can’t actually remake the Dark Alice in the Wonderland IP, but here’s Wark Dalice in the Anderland IP”, and none of the EA’s lawyers will buy it, and he get sued to oblivion by EA.

It’s an extermely uncomfortale stalemate regardless of the fact that the original stories were in public domain.

Sure, American McGee can go “well fuck it, here’s a super fucking cute and lore-friendly happy trippy Alice in the Wonderland remake that totally goes to a whole different direction this time, HEY BACK OFF DISNEY LAWYERS, I said totally different direction”, but that’s no longer American McGee’s Alice, now is it?

I mean, if EA wants to reboot the whole franchise, they can do so. But they can’t use any of the stuff in American McGee’s Alice IP, or anything too closely resembling that stuff. The question then becomes this: do they want to use their creative budget to do that… or do they want to use their budget for something else entirely? In other words: Is American McGee’s Alice an IP that’s financially worth it to rebuild from scratch? Answer: Probably no.