That is just blatantly wrong. I'm obsessed with staying on top of new music, and go to the cinema fairly often, but many of my favourite movies and music are way older than me. And books? Forget about it. I don't know if, in the grand scheme of things, many truly great novels were even written after I was born.
The idea that no generation can truly enjoy art created by previous generations is, frankly, laughable. And I don't see any reason why that would be different for games.
Sure, I love replaying some of the games I loved when I grew up. But I also love discovering classic games that I had never even heard of before. Likewise, there are many games I enjoyed in my youth that I just can't get into anymore. Sure, nostalgia is a factor, but it's just one amongst many.
SecuROM can be re-enabled on Windows 10/11 with some reasonably simple steps. But I think that's comparing apples to oranges. That SecuROM game will continue to work fine on a system it was designed for. Playing a game from the Windows 98 era on a Windows 11 system is entering the territory of backwards compatibility. Same as a PSX game will keep running on any PSX, but there are no guarantees on a PS2.
That used to be my experience, too, and I always expected the PC gaming industry would have to make some serious progress on ease-of-use if they were to survive against the consoles.
What I didn't expect was how fast the consoles would catch up to PC gaming in terms of hassle, complexity, slowness, unreliability, and potential incompatibilities. PC gaming did make some progress compared to when I was juggling boot disks and editing AUTOEXEC.BAT, but consoles got so much worse so fast. In my opinion, the last time consoles were noticeably simpler than playing on PC was probably about 15 years ago.
I remember getting some Gran Turismo game for my PS3 back in the day, having to wait for it to slowly copy XX gigabytes of data to the hard drive, then being stupid enough to want to start the game while being online which meant having to download once more the exact same number of gigabytes (hello, incremental patches?) over an even slower Wi-Fi connection. I bought the game on a Saturday afternoon and was looking forward to it, but by the time I got to play it, it was Sunday.
So I figured that the last console with which I really felt like I had a collection of games that were mine, that I got to keep and could play whenever I wanted, was the PS2.
This remains my favourite quote from any user agreement I've ever seen, from the PlayStation Terms of Use:
> Use of the terms "own," "ownership", "purchase," "sale," "sold," "sell," "rent" or "buy" in this Agreement or in connection with the Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content
I mean, this is chef's kiss level of deceit. No parody could top that.
Any jurisdiction where a company can just put "when we say you'll own it, it doesn't mean you'll own anything" in their contracts and get away with it, is broken.
It's just a matter of negotiating sensible licensing deals. But that would require the distributors to actually care a little bit about not screwing over their customers.
Look how it works over at Steam. If a license expires, even if the publisher goes out of business, Steam removes a game from its storefront, but the files are still on their servers and they keep them available for anyone who purchased a license. I think the only cases where they actually removed files from their servers and blocked redownloads were when there was an actual legal or liability issue forbidding them from continuing to offer the files (for example if they contain malware).
They may be more susceptible due to the finer grooves alone, I guess? Although so far I've also never had any DVD or Blu-ray go bad.
Recordable discs are another matter, though. Much more sensitive because the pits are "burned" instead of "pressed" (not sure about the correct terminology). And some of those materials were so bad that back in the day, I often had blank discs that went bad before I even had a chance to burn them. Nowadays I'm using M-Discs and hope they'll hold up their promise. They should outlive me, anyway.
I think we're all agreed on that. What people are upset about is that Sony (and many others) clearly imply in their wording that you're buying a copy when in fact you're buying a streaming license. Same as in the case of Ubisoft's The Crew, which is about people feeling misled about what they were actually purchasing.
I think it's perfectly clear? If you buy a ticket, it's clear you own that ticket. But the usefulness of the ticket is that it can be exchanged for a service (admission to the concert), which is also clear. Nobody would expect the ticket to grant them admission to every future concert by the artist, or at the venue. The date and start/end times are on the ticket you buy, otherwise it would say "lifetime pass" or something.
The same is true with movie downloads, except that Sony very strongly, probably deceptively and maliciously, implies the "lifetime pass" part while they full well know they're only selling you a ticket for access during a limited timeframe.
We wouldn't have this article or discussion if Sony had been truthful and had their store pages not say "purchase movie", but "purchase temporary ticket".
I agree that this is the main differentiator. Software jobs will be fine in those industries where quality, security, robustness, and liability matter.
It changes the job where software needs to be good; it replaces the job anywhere where it was already possible before to get away with turning in broken rubbish. And I guess that's not a negligible part of the industry.
I think you'd be the first one, so I highly doubt that. If it's true, good on you.
I use Opus daily. It can take some typing off my hands, as long as I keep it to highly specific, limited, straight-forward things. And as long as I spend a long time preparing everything in the most minute detail. Then I have a chance of it being a slight efficiency gain. Veer slightly outside of those preconditions and the output is invariably impressive at first glance, garbage at second glance. Not to mention that it's barely any help for the 80-90% of the job that isn't writing code.
Even Jensen Huang expects the LLM efficiency boost to be about 30% for software engineers. Jensen freaking Huang, who has every reason to exaggerate the benefits! So I'm realistically taking that as an upper bound.
Run rate is easy to get while not meaning much (which is why GenAI vendors love talking about it). Report back in a year about how things are going, and how much of your code you had to rewrite from scratch.
I think it makes a world of a difference who owns the stuff people only borrow. This article is about public libraries, socially funded through a democratic will to do so, to ensure the broadest and most affordable access to anyone, particularly those who couldn't otherwise afford to buy or rent these things. Very similar to informal pools of people lending each other stuff to save money.
The quote you're referring to, or at least that interpretation of it, as I understand it, is about for-profit entities restricting ownership by only renting out their products, maximizing the amount of money they can extract.
Those seem like two almost polar opposites. I'd bet the "owning class" is not very happy about the existence of libraries. (See, for example, Hachette, Wiley, Harper Collins, Penguin Random House & Co.'s legal efforts to get rid of them.)
There's a certain type of Recaptcha challenge (the 4x4 single-photo one) that I have a 100% failure rate on. If Google decide to serve me 15 of those in a row, I will invariably fail 15 times until they decide to serve one of the other types for round 16. I'm very close to believing that that challenge is actually bugged and unsolvable for everyone, and simply nobody ever bothered to fix it.
I report several phishing sites to them per week. They take ages to respond, often close to a week. And often, the response will be that they couldn't find any abuse, because I also report to the host which is often much quicker to respond.
Any process that doesn't take down phishing sites within a few hours at most is inadequate for protecting potential victims. Especially when I compare it to all the other providers I report abuses to, Cloudflare doesn't strike me as a company that takes abuse reports particularly seriously.
I felt the same way up until around Vista. The launch of Windows 95 was probably the pinnacle for me. XP already started having a sour taste with the whole activatin thing, and Vista and 7 weren't really exciting anymore. My reaction to a new version went from curiosity and excitement about what new things might be in it, to dreading finding out about all the things they removed or made worse this time. I went from wanting to try out the new versions soonish, to trying to stay on the previous one for as long as reasonably possible. And I don't think it's just a nostalgia or age thing, it's about very concrete things for me (dwindling customiation options and growing usage restrictions being the main ones).
The former has the advantage that there's some person you can go to and ask "what the heck, what were you thinking when you wrote this?" The result can be either or both sides seeing it from a different perspective, having a productive discussion to find a good solution, and either or both sides potentially learning something.
None of that is possible with the LLM flavour of slop. I can ask, but I will just get more brainless slop to describe the original slop in other words. It's a soliloquy that I find neither helpful nor interesting.
The idea that no generation can truly enjoy art created by previous generations is, frankly, laughable. And I don't see any reason why that would be different for games.
Sure, I love replaying some of the games I loved when I grew up. But I also love discovering classic games that I had never even heard of before. Likewise, there are many games I enjoyed in my youth that I just can't get into anymore. Sure, nostalgia is a factor, but it's just one amongst many.