MudMan

So… not sure if that’s where the picture comes from, but what seems to be happening in Europe right now is roaming gangs of nazis causing violence.

I’m impressed by the dilligence seeding the lie, just in case the news pierces the veil.

People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.

There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.

And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.

There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.

Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.

What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.

Was it missing? I don’t remember that. Did all the DLC make it to the remaster? I kinda remember it did.

EDIT: Checked. The Steam page says it did.

Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.

Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but… yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also… it’s really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.

Romania’s relationship with flowers is weird and it freaks me out.

Going there for the first time and finding weird flower selling stalls in every corner is a very surreal moment and if you dare ask for an explanation people look at you like you are about to be wrapped in roses and sacrificed to some weird pagan deity.

Yes, that’s the point. You put them in there, try to enforce them, see if that plays out or not. Ultimately you’re punting the determination of how far they can apply to the courts.

Which ends up being why a lot of these never get enforced. In some cases the companies would rather let you quietly break their terms than roll the dice and find out that they don’t have the protections they tried to give themselves.

Ultimately the limits of EULAs are set in legislation. What really matters is consumer protections. And in issues like these and copyright more generally we are in a bit of a no man’s land where the regulations are woefully out of date, not keeping pace with the new online-driven economy of digital goods and companies are mostly not trying to enforce a bunch of their EULAs anyway.

We end up in a system where a significant chunk of our online economy is decided by Google and social media companies by default.

Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.

Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.

Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn’t see what the fuss is about.

My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.

I couldn’t tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.

I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they’re very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don’t play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.

And they still look great today, too.

It’s telling the guy went “what did Brave do now?”, though.

Maybe telling that we have a couple meme opinions in our head for these recurring arguments and we don’t particularly consider anything else, but telling nonetheless.

Maaan.

I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it’d make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.

For sure. There’s plenty of unenforceable stuff in EULAs. For one thing a bunch of these are trying to apply globally across places with way different laws managing customer protections.

But if you don’t mind that logic getting turned both ways, just because a EULA clause isn’t enforceable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add it.

If the idea is your lawyers think there’s a risk of people buying a copy, refunding it and keeping it and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen it makes some sense to add the clause. If a judge ever says that clause doesn’t apply to a given situation you still mitigated the risk from the intended applicable situation.

That’s why these license deals also tend to have boilerplate about how a clause being unenforceable or made illegal should not impact the rest of the clauses. It’s a maximalist text, by design. It mostly exists like a big wet umbrella to keep companies out of the splash zone. Whatever ends up being used in practice is anybody’s guess. The world of civil law and private deals is way less of a black and white exact science than most people getting their legal intuition from crime dramas tend to think.

I am mad about how dumb we all are, and how easiy swayed by simple narratives that reinforce our biases.

From the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA:

This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.

You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.

This didn’t cause any stir when it came out. That makes sense, right? Nobody reads these things.

Except everybody in the press read this one, because it went viral for being written in character as a D&D document and having a bunch of jokes in it.

Admittedly this is meant to apply to refunds and things like refusing the privacy agreement, but that’s the point, it’s fairly standard boilerplate for that reason.

Not what it says.

It’s in the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA.

Read the article.

What they’re saying is this is a relatively common temrination clause. It’s meant to apply to, say, refunds.

Wait, who wins between scissors and wax tablet? Does that count as rock?

Yeah, I had to dig a bit further for this figure. They display the same data more prominently in percentage of the time devoted to each bug, which gives them smaller error bars, but also doesn’t really answer the question that matters regarding where the time went.

Worth noting that this is a subset of the data, apparently. They recorded about a third of the bug fixes on video and cut out runs with cheating and other suspicious activity. Assuming each recording contains one bug they end up with a fourth of the data broken down this way.

Which is great, but… it does make you wonder why that data is good enough for the overall over/underestimate plot if it’s not good enough for the task breakdown. Some of the stuff they’re filtering out is outright not following the instructions or self-reporting times that are more than 20% off from what the recording shows. So we know some of those runs are so far off they didn’t get counted for this, but presumably the rest of the data that just had no video would be even worse, since the timings are self-reported and they paid them to participate by the hour.

I’d definitely like to see this with more data, this is only 16 people, even if they are counting several hundred bugs. Better methodology, too. And I’d like to see other coder profiles in there. For now they are showing a very large discrepancy between estimate and results and at least this chart gives you some qualitative understanding of how that happened. I learned something from reading it. Plus, hey, it’s not like AI research is a haven of clean, strict data.

Of course most people will just parrot the headline, because that’s the world we live in.

Sounds about right.

I’d like to see numbers for inexperienced devs and devs working on somebody else’s code, though.

EDIT: Oh, this is interesting. The full paper breaks down where the time goes. Turns out coders do in fact spend less time actually working on the code when using AI, but the time spent prompting, waiting on the output and processing the output eats up the difference. They also sit idle for longer with AI. So their forecasts aren’t that crazy, they do work less/faster with AI, but the new extra tasks make them less productive overall.

That makes a lot of sense in retrospect, but it’s not what I was expecting.

The Youtube version will give you a transcript.

Monkey’s paw curling at its finest.

I’m gonna say if the OS of a public administration can run while not being updated that’s the OS’s fault and not fit for purpose.

Nothing keeping you from changing that if you manage the distro. But still.

Now that I’m done with my popcorn, I thought the video was fairly even handed.

No, it cannot.

They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.

Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.

You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.