Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.

It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.

So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.

The reality is that if it wasn’t for Jimmy, it’s likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can’t work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn’t wanna be his friend.

So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D

Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich… but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?

There are many games that had that mechanic before Arceus.

In particular, Craftopia (which is from the same developers of Palworld) had capsule devices that you can throw to enemies in a “virtual space” while characters “engage in combat” before Arceus was a thing.

Just because they wrote a patent does not make it enforceable… patents don’t really mean anything until they are actually tested in court so they are just tools to try and scare people away whenever a company wants to bully with the prospect of a lawsuit.

I feel that Palworld is likely to win this, this actually is an idiotic move from Nintendo and a win for Palworld… now they will get more publicity, perhaps another spike in sales, and they are finally given the opportunity to prove how they are in the right, so they can shut up all the naysayers who complained about it. I’m hoping all the paranoic empty claims about “blatant asset theft” will be settled once and for all.

My worry is that the other 20% might actually come from other forms of partnerships and integrations not unlike what they probably had in mind with this, and that dropping Google might actually make them more dependent on seeking this kind of initiatives, not less.

I don’t know how many people you actually need to maintain a browser. But if it’s actually possible to do it without any kind of money from any of those sources in a way that can be sustained, then it would make more sense to make a fork (or alternative, like Ladybird) and just use that.

Like I said, I think it’s too late for Mozilla to shift course, I don’t expect they’ll ever do that. At least not until they are forced by a competing project if it happens to become successful (or a similar huge wake up call that leaves them no alternative).

Where would the money come from then? donations?

Or do you mean they should shrink, fire people and downscale.

I think it’s too late for them to switch direction, not without a lot of people getting laid off. Though maybe that will ultimately happen if they finally end up bankrupt.

If you are into open source, give Remnants of the precursors a try, it’s a modern spiritual successor of the oldie Master of Orion.

To each their own. For me, a good lore and dialog is what makes a good RPG stand out.

If I want action and reflexes, I’d go play an action game. If I want strategy, I’d go for a puzzle game, or a 4X, deckbuilder, etc. But in a proper RPG what I look for is good lore, engaging story and some level of freedom that makes me feel I’m having an impact in that world. If AI can help with immersion and/or dynamic changes, I’m all for it. Of course, for that to happen they need to make sure it does stay in character and does not hallucinate something incoherent.

If there’s an AI chatbox that actually can stay coherent and be set up as a game without feeling like you have to input too many instructions to the AI to push the narrative (I think AI Dungeon gets close) then well, you could almost consider that being an RPG already. After all, the first RPGs were all text based. So I would already consider that the first iteration of AI-based RPG game. But translating that to a live 3D environment would be the next step.

Only if they use it the same way and within the same context. But isn’t that what always happens when a new gaming system/idea explodes and clones start poping up? I don’t think that matters much, in fact competition might actually be a good thing.

The article talks about how they are ok with using AI for things outside generating images, texts and so. For example, they are fine using the rudimentary AI of any typical enemy in one of their games. So I expect procedural generation that does not rely on trained bayesian network models is ok for them.

It looks like they just seem to be concerned about the legality of it… so they might just start using it as soon as the legal situation for AI models is made safe.

You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

The thing is that being “willfully ignorant” has served them well, so it makes it the smart move when the goal is “line go up”.

Give me money and call me stupid, why would I care what a few “smart” people think when millions of “stupid” people give me all I want?

I think it’s more that executives think the average consumer is stupid and cares too much about IP branding. And I feel they are not completelly wrong. Though I think the OGL fiasco showed the D&D fanbase might be smarter than that …hopefully.

It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.

In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.

Like, for example, there’s this function:

function vc() {
    var a = za.navigator;
    return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
}

Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.

It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.

That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {

    setTimeout(function() {
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    }, 5E3);

} else {

    c();
    a.resolve(1)

}

It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.

No it is not, this is a myth. As you also can use free software on closed OS, which happens to be the standard

Why does it “happen to be the standard”?

Because people use it. At the end of the day, usage is what determines what’s standard.

Whether a particular person can opt to go for something non-standard (eg. Linux) doesn’t make what I said any less true.

And the problem is that the non-standard person can’t expect the same level of support (eg. Linux drivers for obscure hardware)… because devs and companies won’t care so much for any deviations from what’s standard.

The point is that user generated or govt establish frameworks can b used as basis

That would be useless if people (both end users and web developers) don’t use it.

The Mozilla Foundation created their own browser. Yet they are dying since they are getting abandoned by both web devs and end users. Creating your own does not solve the problem.

If web devs design for Chrome and Chrome adds Chrome-specific deviations from the standard, it’s gonna be extremelly hard to keep up, which is what is happening with Firefox… they can’t keep up, they keep receiving reports of problems because websites are developed for Chrome.

This is already the case, you can choose not to use FLoC. Nothing changes here.

Yes, In there I was just describing how things work. As I see it.

Please learn the difference between Browser engine and web standards, nonsense you talk here

Web standards are just a set of rules that hipothetically Browser engines follow.

In practice, however, no browser engine actually follows the standard 100%, since they all have their very own extensions or try different optimizations that result in differences of implementation… Google keeps adding their own spin on things at a pace that is hard to keep up for any other browser.

If it were possible for web standards to be really, truly, and fully respected, then indeed it wouldn’t matter what browser you use. But that’s not what the reality is. There are websites that work and look different in Chrome than in Firefox.

Nonsense video, underlying problem is monopolies and private companies who develop the standards, not what browser you use.

It’s the other way around. Which browser you use is what directly determines whether monopoly and private companies develop the standard you use.

You could write a standard independently of those companies, but then if everyone chooses to use browser engines from companies that don’t follow it, what’s the point?

If everyone uses a particular browser then whatever that browser implements becomes the standard. It’s all about what browser you use.

If the standards are fully open, transparent and not concerning then it would make no difference if you use chrome and firefox because everyone would use same basis.

If what you want is everyone using the same basis, then what you need is to get everyone to use the same browser engine (which is what is happening already).

However, focusing on that is likely to not result in it being “fully open” as long as the popular browsers are not interested in openness (in particular with a MIT-licensed basis that is allowed to be privately altered, extended and corrupted in proprietary forks by those popular browsers who don’t have to be “transparent” on what exactly they changed).

If what you want is for it to be “fully open”, then you’d want people to be more careful and choose a browser with a “fully open” basis, instead of using whatever is more popular. It’s still all about what browser you use.