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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • He never said that creating an emulator was illegal. He said that Nintendo is legally in the clear to do what they did. In Yuzu’s case, Nintendo sued and both parties settled, and they reached an “agreement” with Ryujinx to take down its emulator.

    As far as I’m aware, the Yuzu case isn’t settled law as it calls into question whether the use of dumped keys to “bypass” copy protections is legal under the DMCA. This question isn’t about emulation, even if it’s a step required for emulation to be possible.

    Since there are many issues with copyright law right now, corporations have a free pass to bully people in a multitude of ways, and the Yuzu lawsuit and Ryujinx “agreement” are just new ways of doing the same thing. All OP is saying is that lawmakers need to re-create copyright and IP laws to make them more fair and make sense so that content creators and/or homebrew devs and/or fangame creators and/or emulator devs can do their work with a far less shaky legal foundation.




  • I don’t think you fully understand right to repair.

    Companies (most egregiously Apple, but Samsung, Microsoft, and other tech, farming, and medical companies as well) have been actively introducing barriers to self or third-party repairs for decades. Apple serializes their displays on iPhones, so if you were to swap the screen on an iPhone without Apple’s authorization or without specific hardware, your iPhone disables specific features on your new screen, even if it’s a genuine Apple part. Apple also has incredibly unfair and invasive contracts with their authorized service providers such that they have to provide a slower return window than Apple’s own service centers. Furthermore, Apple et al. don’t sell every part needed to fix phones, and even when they do sell parts, they are often sold as packages or bundles that make the parts unnecessarily expensive.

    To be clear, it’s rare for companies to ban third-party repairs outright. However, the vast majority of device makers artificially limit who can buy spare parts and who can fix their devices via software, by tight supply chain control, lawsuits, or getting governments to seize the few parts that could be obtained. This means that most third-party stores can’t compete with manufacturers because they can’t get genuine parts without becoming “authorized”, and by becoming authorized, they can’t provide a quality service.





  • Police accountability is just the tip of the iceberg, though. A huge issue is the fact that a lot of minority history isn’t taught properly in US schools, and important events that define race relations are completely ignored. Using the term “master” to describe Git branches, for example, is just another way of staying ignorant and insensitive to those events.

    I can understand that there are some edge cases where master/slave should still be correct as it is accurate, but for every other case, it’s still better to use a term that is culturally aware and technically relevant, even if it’s a small difference that’s part of a larger cultural shift.






  • Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.

    Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.

    To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.