While Crystal Dynamics didn’t specify which content it’s referring to, it’s speculated that it could be the animalistic depiction of Pacific Island natives in Tomb Raider 3, who are implied to be cannibals.

Yeah, this article is fucking shit. The support page at Steam literally clears the air on this.

Yes. You will still have access to your 32-bit Mac games in your Steam Library. We are not removing these games from your library and they will continue to work on macOS 10.14 Mojave and earlier, Windows and in many cases Linux as well.

I fucking hate people who write articles to stoke fear for clicks.

Or you can make multiple accounts. The app makes it super simple to swap accounts on the fly.

We don’t need to sail the seas when we can walk across the wreckage.

I think this might have more to do with the beating that Epic took from Apple in court. The 2021 decision in favor of Apple, of their lawsuit for anti-competitive behavior was upheld this year. That was not cheap to litigate that and was a major loss for Epic.

I think the Bandcamp sell off is a good indicator of all of this. Epic obtained Bandcamp in March 2022, to explicitly have their IAP system integrated into it. Google shut them down and told them they would start collecting the 30% usual due. Epic filed suit and Google gave them an exception for the time being with the agreement that 10% would be held in escrow until the conclusion of the trail. With many of the arguments in the Apple case similar to Google’s case, I’m pretty sure Epic sees the loss coming from a mile away.

All in all, what I think can be drawn from this. Epic made a big bet on “their store” and that’s fading away with mobile devices locking people into a marketplace that is “distinctly not Epic”. While putting such a bet wouldn’t normally kill a company, Epic sextupled down on it and I think how hard they went for “their marketplace” is what’s done them in.

Just remember, the current CEO was too greedy even for EA

John Riccitiello is his name. Dude has the anti-Midas touch. Everything he has ever touched turned to shit. How people keep hiring him is beyond me.

That said, the board of directors is also part to blame for this. One name stands out, Roelof Botha. Same guy from Sequoia Capital that backed the whole Elon Musk taking a loan out for Twitter and old buddy of Musk’s from PayPal days. He’s also been known for some “choice” selections on where to put VC money.

And of course you have Barry Schuler of “I made AOL popular” fame. So… Yeah, he’s a choice selection for the board as well.

But on the other side of it, you’ve got David Helgason one of the co-founders of Unity who has been pretty vocal about “We fucked up!”. But to me that is a tell-tell that Riccitiello et al. sold the rest of the board on the change.

Point being, the board is made up of hard going MFers who fuck up along the way and folks who are easily rolled over by promises of $$$. So while the CEO is indeed “a work of something”, the board is a perfect storm of “egos and pushovers”.

Either way, yeah, I think that since literally no leadership change is coming from this “you put the same chemicals in, you’re absolutely going to get the same reaction out.” The only thing they have likely taken from this whole thing is that they cannot be as obvious about changes as they were.

scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable

Helpful hint, it’s not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren’t because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it’s because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.

In pretty much every single technological failure, there’s usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.

but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox

Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.

Out of this whole thing, I just want to say something about this.

Some players’ reactions to the paywall have been unfavorable; they think that charging for mods is unethical and goes against the spirit of community modification

Everyone needs to make bread. Someone asking for money from their mod or map or whatever isn’t against any spirit. It’s just a human being asking to make bread. Now some don’t agree with the price tag and that’s fine.

But we all need to recognize humans asking for some dough for their hard work is in the spirit of existing. Some folk do it for free just for the feelings and we love ‘em for it. But those asking for some cash are no different.

This world is already full of dog eat dog. Let’s not hate on someone just trying to get through it. You don’t have to pay the ask, but let’s not go making enemies just cause we don’t agree on that number on the price tag.

In the end Samsung would owe Apple around $500 million in US courts and Apple lost (a value I’m not even going to sit here and add up) in international courts.

The whole US snafu was largely seen around the world as American protectionism. As for Apple and Google, Apple saw their case wasn’t as slam dunk internationally and decided to settle with Google in 2014.

Really though, once Steve Jobs died, the momentum for litigation dropped precipitously. Only Jobs was willing to go thermonuclear.

For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.

The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.

Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.

IBM hawks new conversion tools all the time. None of them are amazing sliver bullets, all of them require humans to comb over the resulting output. And every single one I’ve ever used chokes on any weird case.

From the RPG fixed form to free form, DDS to DDL conversion, and so on all of them are usually more trouble to use than to not use.

IBM does this kind of stuff all the time. And for some folks it’ll work some of the times. But at this point, I just skip any WS tool they put out and have a snippet on RDi and RDz that does all the required plugging away to call web services from the COBOL module.

This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.

The problem isn’t a conversion of what may or may not be complex code, it’s taking the time to prove out a new solution.

I can take any old service program on one of our IBM i machines and convert it out to Java no problem. The issue arises if some other subsystem that relies on that gets stalled out because the activation group is transient and spin up of the JVM is the stalling part.

Now suddenly, I need named activation and that means I need to take lifetimes into account. Static values are now suddenly living between requests when procedures don’t initial them. And all of that is a great way to start leaking data all over the place. And when you suddenly start putting other people’s phone numbers on 15 year contracts that have serious legal ramifications, legal doesn’t tend to like that.

It isn’t just enough to convert COBOL 1:1 to Java. You have to have an understanding of what the program is trying to get done. And just looking at the code isn’t going to make that obvious. Another example, this module locks a data area down because we need this other module to hit an error condition. The restart condition for the module reloads it into a different mode that’s appropriate for the process which sends a message to the guest module to unlock the data area.

Yes, I shit you not. There is a program out there doing critical work where the expected execution path is to on purpose cause an error so that some part of code in the recovery gets ran. How many of you think an AI is going to pick up that context?

The tools back then were limited and so programmers did all kinds of hacky things to get particular things done. We’ve got tools now to fix that, just that so much has already been layered on top of the way things work right now. Pair with the whole, we cannot buy a second machine to build a new system and any new program must work 99.999% right out of the gate.

COBOL is just a language, it’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the expectation. These systems run absolutely critical functions that just simply cannot fail. Trying to foray into Java or whatever language means we have to build a system that doesn’t have 45 years worth of testing that runs perfectly. It’s just not a realistic expectation.

Anecdote: The local high school I see nearly no one using the built in text messaging system. WhatsApp is the thing I see most often. Quite a few use Signal.

I have even heard once that, “You use iMessage to text your parents or your FBI agent.”

So you may be on to something. But obvious YMMV in general.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Roblox Corporation, accusing the developer of facilitating “an illegal gambling ecosystem” and violating a federal law.

The complaint was signed by Chief Inspector Slowpoke

In July, Musk tweeted about Twitter / X’s financial situation, saying, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

Advertising could be up two fold for all it matters. You sack a company that last turned an annual profit in 2019 with $44B in debt, it won’t matter if Musk is shitting gold bricks. You can’t pay that size of debt off fast enough. To just get started on that debt Musk would need to make Twitter twenty times more profitable than their 2019 profit. And even then that debt is going to be a monkey on his back for forty years in ideal conditions.

That $44B isn’t chump change for Twitter, like maybe if Tencent took a sudden $44B debt they’d make good on it, but they’re wildly profitable. Twitter barely gets by and has only gone on this long because of the Tech Bro funding that all but dried up when the interest rates were going up.

If I built a social media mega hub that can be abused to brainwash humanity

Humanity is capricious as fuck. You can brainwash them, but then after a while, you just got to brainwash them again. Gets old.

I would like to think keeping it off the wrong hands is priceless

Yes, BUT have you ever considered that with enough money you can just not care?

Also, look at what’s his face that started Twitter. Now he’s got insane levels of Musk’s cash and started yet another social media company, Blueksy which a lot of people ran over to. I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.

It’s LaTeX mathbb{x}

The actual problem, binary labeling. If the category system is just “sexy” vs “non-sexy” you’re going to piss off a ton of in-between. However, you want to do it, IDK. It can be sexy+1 to sexy+10 or mildly suggestive to NSFW. But Twitch needs to acknowledge there’s a spectrum and ignoring that there is one is just going to piss people off.