AnimalsDream

I am looking forward to playing the Remaster. It sounds like they've fixed pretty much everything I didn't like about the original Oblivion - like the awful level up system. Hopefully they rebalanced the "difficulty" in a good way too. Last time I played Oblivion I remember higher difficulties being boring because it mostly meant even the weakest enemies would take a billion hits to kill.

Skyblivion will be fun to play too.

Not free as in freedom, but gratis. Also only works for people who are on Discord - FreeStuff Bot will notify you every time a game on one of the popular PC platforms is available for free.

This will never happen.

15 or so years ago people were saying the same thing about decentralized social media. Yet here we are.

The problem with decentralized stuff is that anyone can put anything, so piracy will be omnipresent there

This isn't unique to decentralized platforms. Piracy is omnipresent. Yet people still buy stuff. But to address your question more concretely, imagine the store system is designed to be federated. Any instance owner can decide to what degree they would enforce anti-piracy measures. DMCA law requires a good faith effort on the part of a site owner to stop piracy, so any instance owner who wants to run a legitimate shop must properly vet game submissions to make sure they aren't infringing copyright, and aren't plagiarizing. They would also have to defederate from all pirate instances, but they would not be responsible for instances that have nothing to do with their own. People who choose to use the instances for piracy would be off on the margins of the internet, just like they are now.

why would you pay for a game when the seller next store is giving it away for free (or much cheaper)

Good question, since you already have that option for virtually all games, why do you pay for them? My reasons are because I generally do want to support the creators I like, as well as because a lot of pirated content is questionable in quality (ie., potential malware). Why do people pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when they can get the same OS for free, even legally? Continuing support in that case. Point is, people buy because they believe the value of buying is greater than what's available for free, whatever reasons those might be.

and how would you distinguish between “EA” selling the Sims 1 there and “TheRealEA” selling the Sims 1 there for the same price.

I dunno dude, how do we do this now? A stupid checkmark? There's gotta be better ways than a stupid checkmark. PGP signatures would probably be a good start. Maybe incorporate a web of trust implementation? How does Valve do it? I'm not an expert on the subject, here's a Wikipedia page about the topic.

Also decentralized card information is a bad idea, so you would either need a centralized paying hub, setup your card with every seller, or only be able to use crypto to pay, all of those are bad in their own way.

Yeah, let that be a problem for the person who wants to decentralize payment systems. A more practical solution? Just include the popular payment methods that already exist. Except crypto currencies, that shit can fuck off.

You gave all these explanations for why a decentralized game shop couldn't work, but all of them are not only not especially hard to solve for such a platform, but are also just common challenges for all of the internet. It's like the 90s all over again when people insisted that open-source software itself couldn't work. Yet, again, here we are.

Lol. All I'm trying to say is that Vi at least tries to adhere to the Unix philosophy, and knows it's a text editor. Emacs is more of an Eldritch creature.

I'd like to see an open-source decentralized game store, like a competitor to Steam, GOG, etc. However, I think it should also target emulators. There's still an unfounded stigma toward emulation even though emulators themselves are legal, and even though the big AAA game companies themselves are now using them as a lazy way to repackage and resell their old games on new platforms.

One of the biggest barriers to entry into emulation is the setup. Even with super user-friendly frontends like Emulation Station, people are still required to either go out of their way to either legally backup the games they already own, or told to "do some searches," because of legal issues. Nevermind how this exposes new users to potential malware.

But people still make new games for these old systems. It's entirely possible to make a store that can sell ROMs legally - one already exists, itch.io. But imagine a federated open-source game store, one where game makers can choose to legally sell their own games, and then create plugins for the emulation frontends to allow people to buy roms directly from those interfaces. It would turn emulation into a fully complete console-like experience, all while being available on more platforms than any console could ever hope to be (including those same consoles when they're jailbroken!)

I also think it would be the final puzzle piece that legitimizes emulation.

I get the joke, but does it really make sense to even begin comparing Emacs to Vi(m) anymore? It's almost like comparing a full Linux distro to nano.

I don't know how it compares, but I've been meaning to give Zettlr a try. The thing about notes apps is, to me at least, few digital tools are more personal. For some people it's their diaries. Because of that I would consider privacy to be such a critical feature that I would never even consider using a proprietary app no matter how many bells and whistles it has, or how many people swear by it.

I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.

If I remember correctly, Blender began it's life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.

I guess that would beg the question, how much is it worth to you pay extra to not have additional spyware in your home? Or as others have said in this thread, there is at least one brand of television that still sells dumb tvs.

Simple solution I use: Fuck television sets, get a computer monitor and basic speakers instead. A display should do only one thing and do it well.

Yeah, I'm sorry but none of this seems to add up. I read the book you linked, the entire thing, and I didn't really learn anything new from it. In my own searches I've found a number of competing image generation systems, most of them just use Stable Diffusion - including Horde, which makes sense as it is open-source and readily available. But others have their own solutions, and some even use their own datasets. I've also done other searches and found a variety of instructions on how people can put together their own datasets. Between all of the options, it seems pretty clear to me that even now it is entirely possible for people to use these AI tools without ever needing to come into any contact with "stolen" (ie., copyright infringed - it's not theft) artwork.

But I'm not going to link to any of these things because I don't want to endorse or promote anything without taking sufficient time to be really sure that they are in fact ethical, which honestly I'm probably not going to do at least for the time being, since I have no need to use any of these anyway. But yeah, ethical ai art is entirely possible, no copyright ever needs to be infringed, and this is something anyone can do today if they're inclined to make the searches and assemble free source images themselves.

When you say, "However what you’re hypothesizing cannot exist, due to the nature of a diffusion model. The source that the images are generated from, all of that was stolen in 2021. It was illegally scraped.", are you referring to Laion-5B?