Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.
Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.
Ultima Underworld
It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.
People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There’s a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don’t suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.
Knowing Google, though, chances are they’ll fuck up the execution.
Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.
Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.
By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.
Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.
I feel like we’ve passed the peak of LOTR as a media phenomenon. As the Hobbit movies and The Rings of Power show, all the stuff surrounding LOTR isn’t as interesting as LOTR itself, and there’s only so many times you can retread the material from those three books. And the Tolkien estate seems to oppose expanding the universe beyond what Tolkien wrote (thank goodness).
The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.
It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.
How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.
That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.
Maybe he wanted to build Deepsea Challenger II, III, and IV simultaneously, and it took longer than expected.
Spez won’t agree to the API demand, because it’s a matter of ego and credibility for him now. His whole big shot tech-bro CEO shtick depends on ramming this through, like his hero Elon.
So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…
They’re okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can’t use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids’ trinkets, because they contain lead.
I don’t disagree, but given the Xbox team’s track record, VR is probably going to explode in popularity now 😂
I think it’s the other way round. AI writes, the human editor touches things up a little, and together they poop out hundreds of low effort articles a week.
Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.
The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to “design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content” and “publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training”. The devil is in the details, and I’m not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.
Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.