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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.

    When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.

    one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites

    That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?








  • Between EmuDeck and RetroDECK and having used both, I 100% prefer RetroDECK these days. It’s a single Flatpak install, it Just Works™ out of the box, and it doesn’t clutter my system with random crap sprawled everywhere. I also appreciate that it has a Steam Input template providing a way to do basically everything emulator-related that I could’ve ever wanted.

    Major props to the team behind RetroDECK and the excellent work they’re doing. The future is looking bright, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store!



  • You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.

    That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.

    To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.




  • Emulation is legal

    Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.

    With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.

    And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.

    This is my problem with your argument, you’re saying that because of piracy they’re entitled to crack down on emulation.

    My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.

    I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.

    Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.



  • I don’t normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.

    It’s one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That’s just called being poor or being someone who doesn’t believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they’re being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.

    It’s another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you’re profiting off of someone else’s work. Not only that, but you’re also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn’t a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.

    In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.


  • JavaScript was a mistake, but this is one of the few things they did correctly. Implicitly importing everything from a package into the current scope makes it difficult to follow where variables or functions come from, and it’s prone to cause problems when two packages export the same identifier.

    If you’re an absolute masochist, there’s always a workaround. Against all best practices, you can use the deprecated with statement. Or, you can Object.assign() the packages into the global object like a monster. Or if you’re using node, you can use the node:vm module to create a new V8 context with its own global object of your choosing.



  • You’re not thinking enough like a capitalist.

    The product is transformed enough to originate in some other country, but it costs about 15% of its unit price to go through that whole process. The tariffs would make it cost 145% more, so you raise the prices by 40% to get a nice increase to your profit margins using “increased manufacturing costs” as the justification. Consumers pay the price because all the other options are either still made in China or doing the exact same thing and increasing their profits just like you are.

    It’s a win/win situation for you and your investors! /s but it will happen anyways



  • I get that, but I also really don’t think it’s a good idea to underestimate the importance of having a leader who strongly pushes back against Trump.

    America is going downhill fast, and the current administration is highly imperial, expansionist, and corrupt. The “51st state” shit isn’t a joke. The government here said “if” they were to take Canada, it would be by economic force instead of military force, and then proceeded to leverage tariffs to create economic pressure on the rest of the continent. They undermine and belittle the Canadian government at almost every opportunity while riling up the conservatives down here by claiming yall are taking advantage of us and being welfare queens who are completely reliant on our handouts and protection. It’s an obvious attempt to tire people out and destroy national sympathy for you guys.

    Trust me, whatever shit you have going on there right now, it’s still a lot better than what’s happening down here. And as bad as we have it, you would get it even worse as a country compromising itself to appease America. By all means, vote for whoever you want, but at least wait until after the US has played its hand and made its intentions to extract wealth and resources from Canadians undeniably clear. Voting in an American-friendly candidate right now is a guarantee to have American corporations come in and destroy your country like they did ours.