AnyOldName3

It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.

I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.

Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.

Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It’s that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there’s no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it’s part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn’t.

We also don’t know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren’t true, and they settled out of court, so the public can’t see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they’d make Yuzu’s position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn’t require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

Not long before this, Dolphin’s Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn’t at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they’re generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.

Look at the wheels to check for bogies. A train or tram without bogies will come to a stop. One with bogies will multi-track drift until the tracks get too far apart.

The legalese in the US (which might as well be everywhere as you need to have compatible copyright with the US to have a trade deal with the US, and your country is in trouble if it doesn’t have a trade deal with the US) is basically that:

• If you buy a physical copy, you’ve become the owner of that one copy of the IP contained within. As the owner of that copy, you can do stuff with it like read it, display it, destroy it, or sell it on to someone else thanks to the First Sale Doctrine (but you can’t do other things like copying it, unless it’s a DVD as there’s a specific exemption for the copy your DVD has to make to RAM in order to decode the DVD). There’s nothing the copyright holder of the original can do to stop you exercising these rights.
• If you buy a digital ‘copy’, you’ve not bought a copy, you’ve bought a licence to use one of the publisher’s copies that they’ve given you permission to have on your device(s). They’ll also have given you permission to do things like read it if it’s an ebook or play it if it’s a video game, but as it’s their copy, not yours, you don’t automatically get rights to do anything they’ve not explicitly permitted you to, and it’s not in their interests to permit you to sell it on unless they think you’ll pay enough more for a resaleable copy that it covers a potential future lost sale.

I’m sure plenty of publishers would love for the second set of rules to apply to things like books, and from a quick googling, it seems like occasionally academic textbooks have included a licence agreement instead of you actually owning the physical book, but I imagine that most publishers are concerned about bad PR from attempting this with a hit novel and also don’t want to be accused of fraud for having their not-a-book-just-a-licence on the shelf next to regular books and thereby tricking consumers into thinking they were buying a regular book. EA attempted to double-dip over a decade ago with Battlefield 3, which included a copy of the game (with regular First Sale Doctrine rights) and a licence key for the online pass (which wasn’t transferrable) and got bad press because of it. Newer PC games often come as a key in a box with no disk or a disk that only runs a web installer, so you’ve not got a copy of the game to claim you’ve bought and obviously only have a licence, and this seems to have caused less upset. This wouldn’t work with a book, though, as you have to fill in the pages at the printing factory, and can’t magically do it only after the user’s got it home.

Again, you’re reading things into my comment that I specifically avoided saying. If perfect, good and mediocre can’t exist, then obviously what I said isn’t applicable, and you shouldn’t be applying it in that context. It’s just like you wouldn’t reply to a post about it being necessary to outlaw the slavery of elves by saying elves are fictional and the author is demonstrating that they’ve not considered this.

This segues nicely into my original point - if you try applying adages to situations they’re unsuitable for, dumb things will happen.

I didn’t, otherwise I’d have said bad was always better, which would be silly. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that most of the time, at least one of the perfect, good or mediocre solutions would be actually achievable, so settling for a just barely tolerable one would be unwise if it was going to block one of the better solutions happening later.

Anyway, my main point is that people have a tendency to bring up the perfect being the enemy of the good when the thing people were objecting to wasn’t even good, and a better solution would be perfectly feasible.

The perfect, good, mediocre, and just barely tolerable are all enemies. Sometimes bad is better as it doesn’t erode the motivation to solve the problem and means you’re more likely to end up with a good solution later. Often, when people accuse others of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, the option was neither perfect nor good, just mediocre or barely tolerable. The exception is when one solution can go on to evolve into a better one, but it can still be better to wait until it does before deploying it.

I’m not convinced this is exactly applicable to the story in the OP, though. The compromise would have eroded the motivation to vote for the original legislation in that election, but probably made it more likely that it could have happened in the next one, and made the consequences of putting it off that long slightly less bad.

If things are done according to the spec, the logo’s engraved/embossed on one side and not the other, so you can learn to feel that and get it right first time even in the dark.

Sounds like you’ve got some Dells with USB ports, and some Dells with off-spec not-USB ports.

Shared components work brilliantly in a fantasy world where nothing uses new features of a library or depends on bug fixes in new versions of a library, and no library ever has releases with regressions or updates that change the API. That’s not the case, though, so often there’ll exist no single version of a dependency that makes all the software on your machine actually compile and be minimally buggy. If you’re lucky, downstream packagers will make different packages for different versions of things they know cause this kind of problem so they can be installed side by side, or maintain a collection of patches to create a version that makes everything work even though no actual release would, but sometimes they do things like remove version range checks from CMake so things build, but don’t even end up running.

Not that I agree that removing/banning archive links is sensible, but reddit has a much bigger budget for lawyers than any instance admin, so is in a much safer position with grey-area and black-area-but-no-one-complained-yet content. It’s not like reddit was ever particularly anti-piracy, either - the corporate interests they bowed to were advertisers and their shareholders.

The way I like to think of it is that non-copyleft licences are like giving everyone freedom by saying there are no laws - suddenly, you can do anything, and the government can’t stop you! However, other people can also do anything and the government can’t stop them, either, and that includes using a big net to catch other people and make them their slaves. The people caught in the nets aren’t going to feel very free anymore, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a lot of people will end up caught in nets.

Copyleft licences are like saying there are no laws except you’re not allowed to do anything that would restrict someone else’s freedom. In theory, that’s only going to inconvenience you if you were going to do something bad, and leaves most people much freer.

The idea is basically that you shouldn’t be able to restrict anyone else’s freedom to modify the software they use, and if you’re going to, you don’t get to base your software on things made by people who didn’t.

You’re not going to be able to do an FDM print without there being layer lines and without there being a plane in which the part is more fragile thanks to layers being easier to delaminate from each other than to break. A resin printer can more or less avoid these problems, but you’ll need an expensive engineering resin to get the same strength. None of the problems affect everything you might ever want to make, though, and there are plenty of things you might only want one or two of, so obviously would never machine a mould for.

Usually FOSS is specifically copyleft licences like the GPL, which Microsoft don’t use. Their open-source stuff tends to be MIT.

You should only get rid of computers when your home, your parents’ home, and your parents’ garage have all run out of space. My parents’ garage used to be an industrial building and is about as big as the house, so can fit many ancient computers.

Plenty of people are calling for Amazon to be stopped, whether it’s by being broken up in a trust-busting operation, fined to the point of bankruptcy for various things including illegal exploitation of its employees, or as an extreme example, starving former Amazon employees simply eating Jeff Bezos. Whether or not someone agrees, and whether they think it applies to brothels, multinational mega-corporations, or any other category of business, it’s not a particularly controversial take that some kinds of business are inherently too exploitative of their employees, and should therefore be unable to legally exist.

I’ve read that part of why GIMP is the way it is is because it’s meant to be a testbed for the GTK UI library, so features are added to use new UI elements as much as they are to aid photo manipulation, and in some cases it’s considered preferable to use a weird widget so it’s got a test case rather than whichever widget leads to the best UX. I don’t think I’ve ever looked for a more definitive source than a Lemmy/Reddit comment, but it’s at least consistent with my experience of using GIMP.

I could scare people by mentioning that with OpenMW, our release process for 0.48 has been ongoing for eleven months as people keep finding release-blocking issues in our RC builds. Maybe we’ve just barely started waiting for the next release of Lemmy, and just don’t know it.